Jay Ray: Growing up in Taiwan, Min-Hsuan Tu wanted to be a teacher but ultimately took her parents' advice and studied business. It was while getting her master's degree at the University of Florida that she had a serendipitous meeting with a friend.

Min-Hsuan Tu: She was about to leave Florida to start a PhD in management at Michigan, and I went over to pick up some free things she didn't want to move with. While we're chatting, she starts telling me about what doing a PhD in management was like.

Jay Ray: Now an associate professor of organization and human resources in the School of Management, Tu has tapped into a range of overlapping topics that anyone who has ever had a job can relate to. Her research has delved into abusive bosses and toxic work cultures. She has examined the psyche of workaholics, and she has studied the frustrations of the daily to-do list and why good-looking people always seem to get good jobs. In each case, she offers some practical advice on how to survive our ever-changing workplace.

Welcome to Driven to Discover, a University at Buffalo podcast that explores what inspires today's innovators. My name is Jay Ray, and in this episode, I'll be speaking with Professor Tu about workplace challenges and how to overcome them.

Professor Tu, thank you for being here.

Min-Hsuan Tu: Thank you, Jay.

Jay Ray: So you took your parents' advice to not go into teaching. Why did you study business?

Min-Hsuan Tu: Yeah, that's a really interesting question. So, when I grow up, I always want to be a teacher. So at about the time to apply for college, that was the time when my mom and dad told me to think about it more carefully. That was because the birth rate in Taiwan has dramatically declined, and even now we probably have the lowest birth rate around the different countries. So my parents was like, if you want to be a teacher, there's no student for you to teach. It will be very hard to find a teaching job. So at that time, I was like, what else can I do? But then I just looked at my college entrance exam score, and I got pretty high. For that score, I probably could be let into a business major, which is pretty popular in college in Taiwan. So that's how I ended up with choosing business.

Jay Ray: So what drew you to this field of human resources and workplace behavior?

Min-Hsuan Tu: That's a good question. So, even though I choose to study business at first, I still keep in mind about like “I want to be a teacher.” So that's actually what I always have in mind, even when I moved to Florida to study my master’s. But the second day, when I arrived Florida, I met with Joanna Lin, who later become my very good friend in academia. She's now a professor at University of Georgia. When I arrived Florida, she was about to leave for her PhD in management at Michigan State, and I went to her house to grab some free stuff that she didn't want to move with. During that time, we chatted, and I was very curious about what is a PhD in management like, and she told me a lot about how is it like, what's the topic, what are they doing, and that really inspired me.

So at that time, she encouraged me to learn more about research by contacting some faculty at Florida. And that's how I started my journey. I reached out to the faculty there, I’d been their RA, running some labs, and that's how I explore this area. And given that I'm always interested in interacting with people, learning how people think, human resources and organizational behavior are actually very fascinating, because all those topics are surrounded by human beings at work.

Jay Ray: So I want to ask you about your research in a few specific areas. In each case, if you could briefly describe your research, what you found and your takeaway for workers. Let's start with your research on coping with unfinished daily tasks.

Min-Hsuan Tu: Yeah, as a professor, and many other jobs nowadays, I have a lot of things that I haven't finished on my to-do list when I leave work around 5 or 6 to pick up my son. And that was pretty common nowadays, because a lot of things that come in at last minute, there are research deadlines, student dissertations that cannot wait. So there's always a lot of things that I just could not finish within a day. And that's, like, a lot of employees also experience this. So, what we're interested in, how do employees psychologically react to their unfinished goal?

So, our research and what we propose and what we're finding was, people have really like a dual reaction to this. So, on one hand, people may keep thinking about, “What went wrong. Why I did not finish it? It's because I got interrupted. It's because of that meeting that went over time.” And then when we start to think about what happened before, what we call rumination, it’s actually creating a lot of stress and negative mood and also impacting your next day’s productivity. But then, on the other hand, we can also react to it in a more positive way. So people may be thinking about, “I haven't finished this yet, but well, how can I plan for tomorrow? What should I do tomorrow first? How can I rearrange my work for the following days?” That's what we call anticipatory thinking, and when people engage in that, they are more likely to have a better and more productive day tomorrow. We also found that people who tend to think more about the past, they're more likely to go into that rumination route, thinking about what haven't been done and feeling really bad about it. But, for people who always focusing more on the future, what we call future-oriented mindset, they're more likely to be like, “Oh, let's think about what I need to do tomorrow.”

So that really leads us to some of the more practical implications. So, for example, for leaders, instead of telling your team member, like, “Why you didn't finish this?” or checking the to-do list about what is not done, maybe a better way is to encourage everybody to think through about, “What should we do next?” The other thing I also like is, in addition to having a to-do list, maybe what we should have is a done list. So it's like listing everything that you finished today, which probably will make you feel a lot better than having a to-do list. And seeing what you have accomplished today, it encourage yourself to think through about, like, “What should I do tomorrow?” And not really thinking about what's already done.

Jay Ray: I like the done list.

Min-Hsuan Tu: Yeah. Thank you.

Jay Ray: I’m going to take that, yes. Talk to us about your research on how attractive people get hired more often.

Min-Hsuan Tu: So that project, we were very interested about why attractive people always get ahead in their career. So, this is also like related to decades of evidence showing attractive people are more likely to get hired, to get promoted. Attractive professors also got higher ratings in their classrooms. So that's a really robust finding throughout 40 years, and this is a topic that's also personally really relevant to myself, not because I'm attractive or because I'm not good-looking, but I was very fascinated by this topic because I do have a lot of friends who are very good-looking, and they're very successful—accountant, lawyer, in different area. But I also have friends who are not traditionally attractive, but they are equally successful, and then they do really well in their job. So I was like, what exactly is this phenomenon? So, our research trying to answer this question by looking at whether there's something about attractive people that they think differently, they do differently, that’s leading to their success. Rather than just biases, “because people like attractive people, people want to give them better treatment.”

So what we found is basing on an idea called self-fulfilling prophecy. The self-fulfilling prophecy was describing that when people receive some other people's expectation, they internalize those expectation, taking the action that align with that expectation, and ultimately, they become that kind of a person. So, for attractive people, because they receive a lot of attention, even in their childhood, like teacher more likely to call on those attractive kids to answer questions, to help out. So, they have a lot of those exposure to better treatment to help them, more resources. So, they develop those sense of power and also confidence throughout their life. And that is really shown when they are presenting themselves. So, what we found in our study is when they're doing an elevator pitch, they are more likely to be more enthusiastic, more confident, and those kinds of things really help them to get the job.

But of course, that's not the end of the story. We also want to know, then, what can people do if they are not that attractive? Our follow-up study asked our participants to practice something we call power posing. So, before they enter their job interview, they just kind of like open their posture, standing tall, and by practicing that for a few minutes, when they enter the interview, they reported to have better confidence and sense of power, also leading them to perform better, and they got a job. So what we found was, for less attractive people, if they practice power posing, they're actually going to perform equally well as attractive people normally will do. So that kind of like, leveling the playing field and then reducing those biases. And that was a study that I personally felt like really practically important, because there's a lot of things that we cannot change about ourself—attractiveness, or maybe like our education background, our social background, where we grow up—but then, there's something we can do to still achieve this success.

And power posing is just a suggestion. I think everybody can find their own ways to practice and be more confident. For example, maybe a positive self-talk, writing about your glory moment before you enter a new environment, talking to your friends or family, who can actually give you those affirmations to make you feel better. I think those are good tactics to use before we entering that nerve-wracking situation. And I know Jay, you told me you just practiced power posing before our podcast.

Jay Ray: I did. I was thinking about this interview, and I said, “Well, I'm going to try it.”

Min-Hsuan Tu: Yeah.

Jay Ray: And it worked.

Min-Hsuan Tu: That's great!

Jay Ray: Lastly, tell me about disengaging from work after hours.

Min-Hsuan Tu: So that project was very related to the first one I described. It's basing on the idea that people just have so many things to do every day, and then when we leave the work, we don't just leave it behind. We actually still keep thinking about it. We think about the email we forgot to send. We’re thinking about the meetings that we're going to do tomorrow. So when people could not detach from work, and in fact, about three out of four employees reported that they could not detach from work, so that's a big issue. Because not detaching from work actually make people more likely to feel exhausted, impacting our physical health and also our relationships at work. So, because of that, we're very interested in how to help people to detach.

And here is the simple trick that we found in our study, and we're trying to propose this. Instead of like telling people not thinking about your work, we're asking people to think about what they want to do after work. So a lot of people are actually writing things very simple, like cooking dinner for my family, watch a movie with my wife which I promised her I'm going to watch with her, taking kids to bed. Some people also write like trying to finish up their MBA program. So those are simple goals that they are trying to accomplish, and we asked them to write it down. And after writing it down, we also capturing how they feel afterward. And what we found is just by simply doing that trick, actually make people less likely to think about their work, and then, of course, that’s leading to better well-being, and also better relationships at home as well.

A very interesting thing that we also found was these tactics, unfortunately, did not really work for workaholics. So workaholics are too attached to work, so unfortunately, asking them to think about a not-work goal did not really help them to detach.

Jay Ray: So do you have a study on workaholics going on right now?

Min-Hsuan Tu: So currently, we haven't had any very concrete example or, like, idea about what we want to do with this. We just found this is very interesting, and want to learn more about workaholics, why they cannot detach from work. So, this is still work in progress, but we're thinking about different ways that we can do next to help develop an intervention to help workaholics to cope.

Jay Ray: So how much of the research that you do is because you can personally relate to a particular issue in the workplace?

Min-Hsuan Tu: So, I will say most of my projects are driven by my personal experiences, and there's always a story to tell. For example, the detachment and workaholic paper that I just describing to you, that one was actually developed because my coworker and I both are workaholics.

To give you an example, in 2023 I was in hospital and I was about to deliver my son, and at that time, I was actually texting my coworker because he was trying to help us to move forward this project. So, we're texting, but I was telling him, like, “Hey, I cannot giving you the file for a few days because I don't have my laptop with me.” And then he was like, “Wait, where are you?” And I was like, “I'm in a hospital waiting to give labor.”

Now in retrospect, of course, it's kind of hilarious. It's kind of like really proving we're the workaholics, and we're just trying to help ourselves when we're digging into those research questions about how to help people like us to really detach from work, to manage those unfinished goals, and also to, of course, to be more productive. Yeah.

Jay Ray: How do you see the workplace changing, and what does that mean for employees?

Min-Hsuan Tu: So, of course, a lot of us have heard about all these topics before, but like AI, Gen Z, flexible work schedule, those are a lot of, like, big topics that people are talking about nowadays, and that, of course, impacting people's lives a lot.

So, for example, for AI, in addition to knowing how to prevent AI from taking our jobs, or even trying to figure out how to remain competitive in this AI generation, some of the things that we are particularly interested in as organizational behavior scholars are about how AI impacting how employees working with each other. So, for example, there's already studies trying to explore how AI, being a team member, and how you actually interacting with your AI team member versus your real human being team member may be different. How people reacting to AI customer services versus a real human being. We are also interested in how employees may perceive when their leaders are using AI to make some decision-making, or like daily communications. Do they trust their leader more just because maybe they feel like AI is more rational and having more information, and their leader work really hard to get more information before sharing. Or do they actually not trusting their leader because maybe that was signaling the leader was being lazy, did not do the job, so they're just outsourcing to AI?

The other thing I personally are interested in, especially when I work closely with my undergrad students, is about this Gen Z generation getting into the workforce. You probably read the news. A lot of employers are complaining about Gen Z students bring their parents to interview, quit their job without telling them, and a lot of, like, really crazy stories going on there. But of course, this generation also have some of their strengths. They value more work-life balance. They are having more growth mindset. They want to learn. They are just different than us. So, what we are being interested in is how to help this generation to still learn those professional skills, and then having the right mindset when they’re entering into the business world. So, this is the other thing I'm trying to work on right now.

Jay Ray: That one resonates with me, because I have two in that age group, so I deal with that as well.

Min-Hsuan Tu: Yeah.

Jay Ray: So, what's next for you and your research?

Min-Hsuan Tu: Yeah, that's a good question. So, kind of like basing on what I just telling you, there's a lot of other topics that I'm interested in related to this. Like, for example, how to help this Gen Z generation, how to see how AI impacting work. And most of those kind of the topics still surrounded by my personal experiences and how I want to help people to manage those new challenges at work. So a lot of my studies focus on intervention, some strategy or some tactics that people can use to help them to, like, have a better work life.

Jay Ray: Professor Tu, it's been a pleasure. Thank you for joining us.

Min-Hsuan Tu: Yeah, thank you so much, Jay. I really appreciate this conversation.