Home

Jung Won Lee is an Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior at ESSEC Business School in Paris, France. Her research examines the psychological foundations of social network dynamics in organizations: how people form, maintain, and mobilize workplace relationships, and how these relational patterns shape individual and organizational outcomes.

Her work is organized around a central question: What cognitive, motivational, and affective processes shape how individuals build and use interpersonal networks at work? She pursues this question through three interconnected streams. First, she examines how psychological orientations, such as future time perspective and lay theories about relationships, influence whether and how individuals initiate new ties and reactivate dormant ones. Second, she studies how relational perceptions that develop outside direct interaction, through observation, reputation, and one-sided familiarity, generate social capital in organizations. Third, she investigates the psychological costs of network positions. Her work shows that occupying structurally advantageous positions, such as bridging structural holes, can carry unexpected costs, including burnout and negative interpersonal consequences.

Across these streams, she combines longitudinal field studies, experiments, and social network analyses to identify underlying mechanisms and organizational outcomes. Her research has received several recognitions, including Best Symposium and Best Paper Awards from the Academy of Management and the Andreas Al-Laham Best Paper Award from the European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS). 

Jung holds a Ph.D. in Management from UCL School of Management at University College London and was a Chazen Visiting Scholar at Columbia Business School. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Prior to her Ph.D., she studied Cognitive Studies at Columbia University (M.A.). and Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (B.A.). Jung is from Seoul, South Korea.