Professor Hyun-Jung Lee

Hyun-Jung Lee is a Professor of Organisational Behaviour and Cross-Cultural Management in the Department of Management at LSE. Trained as a psychologist, she studies culture and the psychological foundations of social integration in culturally diverse workplaces.

Professor Lee holds Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Psychology from Seoul National University and a PhD in Organisational Behaviour from LSE. After her doctorate, she travelled extensively — Russia and Siberia, Mongolia, China, India, East Africa, the Levant — observing how people in different cultures think, feel, and live. Those journeys reoriented her research decisively towards cross-cultural management. She also studied the History of Western Fine Arts at the Royal Academy of Arts and writes opera reviews for music magazines — pursuits integral to her scholarship. Her research examines cosmopolitan capital, migration and acculturation, and intercultural collaboration.

She is an active member of the Academy of International Business and the Academy of Management, and her work has received several awards, including the 2024 Carolyn Dexter Award. She selectively engages with industry and executive education on culture and cultural change.

Before joining LSE, she was Assistant Professor of Organisational Behaviour at KAIST Business School in South Korea.

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3386-4959

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=b4Wx3T4AAAAJ&hl=en

Research Gate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Hyun-Jung-Lee-14

Professor Lee is a member of Organisational Behaviour Faculty Research Group.

Expertise

Cross-cultural management, cosmopolitan cultural capital, migration and acculturation, intercultural collaboration

Hyun-Jung Lee is a psychologist studying culture and the psychological foundations of social integration in culturally diverse workplaces.

Her research is phenomenon-driven: she begins from puzzles thrown up by a changing world of work, choosing methods to fit the question.

Cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitan capital

Professor Lee's work re-specifies cosmopolitanism as an individual-level construct, and examines cosmopolitan capital as an emerging status characteristic in contemporary organisations — a basis of standing that cuts across ascribed categories such as nationality and ethnicity, and can reorder established hierarchies.

Migration and acculturation

Global migration is reshaping the future of work, yet its demographic dimension remains understudied. Professor Lee examines social dynamics between domestic and migrant employees, including how linguistic and cultural diversity shape integration in multinational workforces.

New-era workplace relationships

Professor Lee investigates generalised social exchange — collective rather than dyadic reciprocity — as an account of collaboration in remote, virtual, and networked work, alongside research on organisational identification.

Methodologically, she works across traditions: qualitative and mixed-methods longitudinal fieldwork; psychometric scale development; social network analysis; large-scale systematic review; and set-theoretic configurational analysis (fsQCA).

Courses:

• MG4D4: Cross-Cultural Management

Featured publication video resource

Conventional wisdom says that when colleagues do not share a first language, workplaces fragment along linguistic lines. This study finds the relationship is not so straightforward. Where native language diversity is high enough that no single language is spoken by the majority, social integration across ethnic, linguistic and cultural lines improves.