Assistant Professor, Organizational Behaviour
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Lynn Imai is an Assistant Professor of Organizational Behaviour at the Richard Ivey School of Business. Prior to being appointed at Ivey, she did her doctoral and masters degree work in Industrial and Organizational Psychology at the University of Maryland, as well as her undergraduate work in Psychology at the University of Toronto.
Professor Imai's research primarily focuses on cross-cultural organizational behaviour with an emphasis on negotiation. Given that many theories and prescribed practice in organizational behaviour are implicitly laden with Western cultural assumptions, her research seeks to uncover the degree to which such theories are generalizable beyond a Western context. Accordingly, Professor Imai's research asks (1) the comparative question of how organizational processes such as negotiation vary across different societal cultures and (2) the intercultural question of how organizations can facilitate the effectiveness of their employees and managers when they are required to work directly with people from different cultures.
Apart from cross-cultural issues, Professor Imai also researches motivation in the workplace, or more specifically regulatory focus - the different strategies individuals and groups use in pursuing goals. Given that this aspect of motivation has received relatively little attention in organizational behaviour, Professor Imai's research seeks to integrate the study of regulatory focus with organizational behaviour across the individual, team, organizational, and sociocultural levels of analysis.
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