Recently, Associate Professor Yulan Han’s paper, named “Paradoxical Leader Behaviors in People Management: Antecedents and Consequences” has been published in the Academy of Management Journal.
   
The paper takes Chinese organizations as background and develops a measure of paradoxical leader behavior with five dimensions: (1) combining self-centeredness with other-centeredness; (2) maintaining both distance and closeness; (3) treating subordinates uniformly, while allowing individualization; (4) enforcing work requirements, while allowing flexibility; and (5) maintaining decision control, while allowing autonomy.

The paper also examines antecedents and consequence variables, and finds that the extent to which supervisors engage in holistic thinking and have integrative complexity is positively related to their paradoxical behavior in managing people, which, in turn, is associated with increased proficiency, adaptivity, and proactivity among subordinates.

Professor Han’s research interest is mainly in management awareness, leader behavior, conflict management and negotiation and team building process. She has had many paper publications in Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management, Group Decision and Negotiation, Acta Psychologica Sinica, Management World and other important journals in China and overseas. She is also engaged in projects funded by natural science foundations in several countries.