Jing Zhou is Deputy Dean of Academic Affairs and Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of Management. Previously, she served as Organizational Behavior Area Coordinator, Director for Asian Management Research & Education, and Director of Ph.D. Program.

She has been elected to Fellow of Academy of Management, Fellow of American Psychological Association, Fellow of Association for Psychological Sciences, and Fellow of Society for I-O Psychology. A recent study ranked her among the top 1% influential researchers in business and management.

Jing has taught leading innovation, negotiation, leadership, global leadership, micro foundations of managing the global firm, and organizational behavior at undergraduate, MBA, Executive MBA, and Ph.D. levels. Prior to joining the Jones School, she was an associate professor and Mays Faculty Fellow in the Management Department at the Mays Business School of Texas A&M University. She has received awards for her excellence in teaching.

Her research interests are leading innovation; contextual and personal factors that facilitate or inhibit creativity and innovation; creativity receiving; consequences of creativity; cross-cultural differences in antecedents and consequences of creativity; and creativity in entrepreneurship. Using the interactional perspective as an overarching lens, her research uses motivational, affective, and cognitive theories for an understanding of individual and team creativity in organizations. Her systematic program of research has addressed central questions such as how organizational and contextual factors (e.g., leadership, supervisory behaviors, coworker behaviors, feedback, and human resource management practices) interact with personal factors (e.g., personality, values, goal orientation) to enhance or restrict individual and team creativity.

Her collaboration with Jennifer George has indicated that job dissatisfaction and negative mood serve to trigger creative endeavor and sustain creative effort (George & Zhou, 2002; Zhou & George, 2001). This research stream resulted in their formulating the dual-tuning theory, which posits that negative and positive mood facilitate different aspects of the creative idea generation process (George & Zhou, 2007).

Professor Zhou has broken new conceptual ground and theorized about managers’ recognition of employees’ creative ideas (Zhou & Woodman, 2003). Working with coauthors, she has formulated new theory and conducted empirical investigation on new idea perception and recognition in a programmatic manner (e.g., Zhou, Wang, Bavato, Tasselli, & Wu, 2019; Zhou, Wang, Song, & Wu, 2017). Her work also revealed conditions under which employee creativity positively or negatively affected organizational performance (Gong, Zhou, & Chang, 2013), and effects of employee creativity on firm innovation (Liu, Gong, Zhou, & Huang, 2017).

Her research has been published in top journals such as Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and Personnel Psychology. Books she co-edited are Handbook of Organizational Creativity (with Chris Shalley), The Oxford handbook of creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship (with Chris Shalley and Mike Hitt), and Handbook of research on creativity and innovation (with Bess Rouse, 2021). Professor Zhou has received research awards for her excellence in research. Her work has received a large number of citations (e.g., approximately 31,446 per Google Scholar), and has received Journal of Management’s Best Paper Award twice (2009, 2019), indicating that her systematic research program is impactful.

Striving to inform management practice of research-based and scientifically-proven knowledge, she has served as a consultant to organizations on issues related to her research interests and expertise, especially on leading innovation and negotiation.

Professor Zhou’s service to profession and leadership in professional associations include:

Journal Article

Zhou, J., Oldham, G. R., Chuang, A., & Hsu, R. Enhancing employee creativity: Effects of choice, rewards and personality, Journal of Applied Psychology, forthcoming.

Journal Article

Zhou, J. (2021). Building a systematic program of research into employee creativity and innovation. In X. Chen and H. K. Steensma (eds), A journey toward influential scholarship: Insights from leading management scholars. Oxford University Press.

Journal Article

Zhou, J., Wang, X., Bavato, D., Tasselli, S., & Wu, J. (2019). Understanding the receiving side of creativity: A multidisciplinary review and implications for management research. Journal of Management, 45, 2570-2595.

Journal Article

Hoever, I. J., Zhou, J., & van Knippenberg, D. (2018). Different strokes for different teams: The contingent effects of positive and negative feedback on the creativity of informationally homogeneous and diverse teams. Academy of Management Journal, 61, 2159-2181. 

Journal Article

Zhou, J., Wang, X., Song, J., & Wu, J. (2017). Is it new? Personal and contextual influences on perceptions of novelty and creativity. Journal of Applied Psychology, 102(2),180-202.

Journal Article

Liu, D., Gong, Y., Zhou, J., & Huang, J. (2017). Human resource systems, employee creativity, and firm innovation: The moderating role of firm ownership. Academy of Management Journal. 60, 1164-1188.

Journal Article

Lin, B., Law, K., & Zhou, J. (2017). Why is underemployment related to creativity and OCB? A task crafting explanation of the curvilinear moderated relations. Academy of Management Journal, 60(1), 156-177.

Journal Article

Dong, Y., Liao, H., Chuang, A., Zhou, J., & Campbell-Bush, E. (2015). Fostering employee service creativity: Joint effects of customer empowering behaviors and supervisory empowering leadership. Journal of Applied Psychology, 100(5), 1364-1380. doi: 10.1037/a0038969

Journal Article

Hirst, G., van Knippenberg, D., Zhou, J., Quintane, E., & Zhu, C. (2015). Heard it through the grapevine: Indirect networks and employee creativity. Journal of Applied Psychology, 100(2), 567-574. doi: 10.1037/a0038333

Journal Article

Zhou, J., Shin, S. J., Brass, D. J., Choi, J., & Zhang, Z. (2009). Social networks, personal values, and creativity: Evidence for curvilinear and interaction effects. Journal of Applied Psychology, 94, 1544-1552

Journal Article

Shin, S., & Zhou, J. (equal contribution; order of authorship alphabetical). (2003). Transformational leadership, conservation, and creativity: Evidence from Korea. Academy of Management Journal, 46, 703-714 

Journal Article

Zhou, J. (2003). When the presence of creative coworkers is related to creativity: Role of supervisor close monitoring, developmental feedback, and creative personality. Journal of Applied Psychology, 88, 413-422

Journal Article

Zhou, J., & George, J. M. (2001). When job dissatisfaction leads to creativity: Encouraging the expression of voice. Academy of Management Journal, 44, 682-696

Journal Article

Zhou, J. (1998). Feedback valence, feedback style, task autonomy, and achievement orientation: Interactive effects on creative performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 83, 261-276

Jing Zhou named Rice Business’ deputy dean of academic affairs

June 23, 2022

Study: Use your team’s emotions to boost creativity

August 17, 2021

Rice Business professor elected fellow of Academy of Management

May 19, 2021

Hardship presents opportunity for creativity, Rice Business experts say

April 08, 2020

Rice U. study: Creativity is a two-way street

August 14, 2019

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