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About CEI-OB
Co-directed and co-founded by GEC Academy and Cambridge Judge Business School in October 2021, the CEI-OB Initiative (Collaborative Experimentation Initiative for Organizational Behavior) was established to provide a fundamental research platform to support the scientific development of Organizational Behavior (OB) studies. With a mutual interest in research, development, education, and technology transfer, GEC Academy and the Cambridge Judge Business School made an MoU last July to undertake a collaboration in the area of behavioral research on a non-commercial basis, including joint experimental/behavioral research projects, participation pool establishment, experiment debrief zoom meeting, etc., and to seek solutions for global business, industrial and social problems.
For students (at least eighteen years old) interested in participating in research, please CLICK HERE to seek more information.
Background
The enterprise reformation of China has created its unique forms of entrepreneurship, corporate governance, and labor management. The new idiosyncratic system has not only attracted practitioners and investors but also academic researchers. Among the fields these researchers specialize in, Organizational Behavior (OB) stands as the one investigating the ways of management and human resource management in China.
Launched to connect students with top researchers across the world, this initiative allows students to participate in research projects with a variety of front-edge topics. So far, GEC has conducted three collaborative experiments - A leadership preference study near the end of 2021, and a survey about daily work structure in early 2022, and a social experiment on feedback in early 2023. These joint experiment projects have provided student researchers with additional learning experiences and networking opportunities. With the diverse participant pool provided by GEC, CEI-OB aspires to further contribute to the understanding of human psychology and behaviors at the workplace.
Past Projects
CEI-OB will conduct experiments to understand human psychology and behavior.
In the first phase, the lab will have the following research projects*,
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Task Transition Study: The goal of this study is to examine the performance of different individuals on different type of tasks (e.g., problem-solving task, decryption task) as well as when and why they are motivated to switch to a different type of task. Participants will be asked to work on several tasks and answer some questions about themselves.
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Mock Job Application Study: In this study, we explore how different people describe their leadership styles when applying for a job. To make it more realistic and engaging, we will present participants with a real job posting of a leader position (e.g., project manager at Microsoft), and participants will be asked to prepare a resume and a cover letter for that position.
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Leadership Preference Study: What we aim to understand in this project is individual’s preference for leaders. What are some characteristics and behaviors individuals would like to see in a leader? Participants will be randomly asked to do one of the following tasks: 1) express their preferences for leadership styles by answering a questionnaire, 2) write a short paragraph to describe the leaders they find effective, and 3) select from a pool of words or phrases that depict effective leaders.
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* These projects involve multiple research methods, largely (but not exclusively) experimental, survey, and qualitative. Participation from the student pool is completely voluntary, and there will be no negative or positive influence on their marks or performance rating if they choose not to participate. Because each project adopts different research agendas and methods, participants are expected to engage in various experimental activities across different experimental studies, such as working on experiment tasks and/or answering questionnaires. The length of the experiments also varies; some can be finished in an hour while others may last weeks and involve multiple waves of data collection. The data generated from the experiments will be stored confidentially and safely on a device or a folder with encryption. The data can only be accessed by researchers from GEC Advanced Study Institute (GEC-ASI) and the researcher from CJBS and his/her colleagues.