Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Obituary: Kwok Leung

2016; Wiley; Volume: 19; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/ajsp.12135

1467-839X

Ramadhar Singh,

Global and Cross-Cultural Management

On May 25, 2015, Asia sadly lost an internationally prominent and influential cross-cultural and social psychologist Kwok Leung. Kwok authored two books, edited nine books, published over 200 academic articles, and mentored at least 12 doctoral students during his three decade academic career. He delivered keynote speeches and chaired symposia at many international conferences, and also presented invited colloquia at several major universities across the globe (e.g., Duke University, Peking University, Sabanzi University, Stanford University, University of Jena, University of Tokyo, etc.). He made substantial contributions to psychology as well as management. As of January 20, 2016, his publications had been cited 20,612 times. Kwok Leung was born on April 19, 1958 in Hong Kong. He obtained his bachelor's degree in biology from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (1981). Inspired by the lectures of social psychologist Michael Harris Bond, Kwok chose psychology instead of biology for his graduate study at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA (1981–1985). His doctoral dissertation was supervised by Harry C. Triandis, Allan Lind, and Sam Komorita. After completing his doctoral degree, Kwok returned Hong Kong to begin what indeed became an extremely successful career in terms of academic leadership, research, and teaching. He held various faculty and administrative positions, first at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (1985–1999) and then at the City University of Hong Kong (1999–2014). He rejoined the Chinese University of Hong Kong as Choh-Ming Li Professor of Management in 2014 and remained there until his death. Kwok suddenly became ill with an autoimmune disease and was courageous in battling this for two and half months. Through his ingenious research in cross-cultural and social psychology as well as in marketing management and organizational behaviour, Kwok enriched the extant literature on justice and conflict, creativity, international management, social axioms, and cross-cultural research methods. During his tenure at the City University of Hong Kong, he contributed substantially to the management literature on e-commerce, innovation, quality of life, and unemployment. He is most famous for his work on cross-cultural psychology and management. Using ideas from Chinese culture, he made important contributions to research on the cultural impact on personality, international business, fairness (i.e., distributive, procedural, and interactional justice), conflict management, harmony maintenance, negotiation, and social axioms. His approach to cross-cultural psychology was to understand both the universal and culture-specific variations. In fact, he brought to the fore the idea that culture affects overt allocation behaviour when North American developmental and social psychologists were arguing for differences in perception of merit or rules of allocation.1 Like several others, I was motivated by his joint publication with M. H. Bond and C. K. Wan and Kwok's later papers in organizational behavior to delve deeper into the intriguing cross-cultural and developmental differences in reward allocation. The outcome was splendid: I could publish several lead articles in American and Asian journals. Kwok's understanding of culture and how it affects covert feelings and perception as well as overt judgments and behaviours will act as a guidepost for more scholarly work in the future. Kwok also pioneered cross-cultural research on social axioms. Contrary to the widely held conception that cultures differ vis-a-vis values, Kwok and his early mentor Michael Harris Bond contended and showed that cross-cultural variations could be better explained by differences in cultural beliefs. People behave according to what they believe to be ‘true’ as well as by what they consider as ‘good’. His cross-cultural research can be concisely represented by the idea that cultural variation occurs due to differences in beliefs, norms, and values, and the perception of situational constraints determines which and how many of those beliefs, norms, and values would eventually determine the specific cultural behaviour. I have been fascinated by his theory because age and cultural differences in my research on prediction of performance from motivation and ability and outcome allocation between two claimants were also explained better by differences in belief systems than by the cognitive capacity of individual persons. Kwok was an authority on research design and data analysis. He wrote several articles and edited several books on research methods and designs in cross-cultural psychology. In fact, his Methods and Data Analysis for Cross-cultural Research has been cited over 2000 times. His enthusiasm to employ the most relevant and latest statistical methods in his research is worth emulating. Kwok Leung was an outstanding institution builder as well. He was one of the key players in the formation and continuity of the Asian Association of Social Psychology (AASP), International Association of Cross-Cultural Psychology, and Academy of International Business. Supporting the need for a pan-Asian association of social psychology, which was recognized by Uichol Kim of South Korea, Susumu Yamaguchi of Japan, and Yoshihisa Kashima of Australia, Kwok Leung organized the inaugural conference of AASP at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1995. The missions for this jointly founded association were to (i) promote research and application of social psychology in the Asia-Pacific region, (ii) provide opportunities for students to pursue education and careers in social psychology, and (iii) provide social psychologists in the Asia–Pacific region with a forum to disseminate their research. In 1998, Kwok, along with Uichol, Yoshi, and Susumu, launched the Asian Journal of Social Psychology (AJSP). While Uichol, Kwok, and Yoshi successively edited AJSP, Susumu is the current Chief Editor. Kwok also organized AASP Summer/Winter Schools for doctoral students, and served as the Principal of the schools held in Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia (2007) and New Delhi, India (2009). This invaluable contribution left AASP in a healthy state for younger Asian social psychologists to carry it forward. Kwok Leung held editorial positions in other journals and leadership roles in some other organizations. For example, he was Associate Editor of the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology (1994–1997), Asia Pacific Journal of Management (2001–2003), Journal of International Business Studies (2006–2010), and Management and Organization Review (2006–2013). He served as a Chair for the Research Methods Division of the Academy of Management, and the President of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology (2010–2012) and AASP (1999–2001). Kwok's paper in AJSP (‘Person perception in the heat of conflict: Negative trait attributions affect procedural preferences and account for situational and cultural differences) won the Misumi Award of AASP in 2005. Likewise, his paper in the International Journal of Conflict Management (Effects of task and relationship conflicts on individual work behaviours) won him another highly commended scholarly award from the Emerald Group Publishing Limited (2012). In recognition of his unusual and outstanding contributions, Kwok was elected as a Fellow of the Academy of International Business, Association for Psychological Science, International Academy of Intercultural Research, and Hong Kong Psychological Society. Kwok was an encouraging mentor to young scholars and a warm colleague who one would enjoy seeing at lunch just as much as a co-author of scholarly papers or contributor to professional organizations. He was instrumental in making me known in Southeast and East Asia, and for that support, I am most grateful. He invited me to a colloquium at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (1996), to serve as a Resource Person in AASP's Summer/Winter Schools (2007, 2009), and to participate in his symposia on leadership at the International Congress of Psychology held in Berlin, Germany (2008) and in Cape Town, South Africa (2012). He chaired my keynote address at the AASP Conference at Kunming, China (2011), and often drew the attention of the conference delegates to my findings of age and cultural differences in fairness. In recognition of what Kwok Leung contributed to my personal and professional growth, social psychology as a science, and social psychology as a profession in Asia, I spontaneously joined Uichol Kim in establishing the Kwok Leung Scholarship Fund at AASP (2015), and in serving as a member on the Scholarship Committee. In Asia, it is considered the heaviest burden in life for an older person to send off a younger one when the latter passes away. So it is with the heaviest of hearts, I write this obituary of Kwok, a man younger than me by 13 years. He was a man with a great mind – one who lived a full and accomplished life. I am sure I speak for his colleagues in AASP and many more followers in academia, when I say I am humbled and privileged to have known Kwok as a friend, scholar, profession-builder, and a superb human being. Like the co-founders and members of AASP, his mentors Michael Harris Bond and Harry C. Triandis, his wife Yumi, son Kirk, and daughter Eiki, I will also miss Kwok Leung dearly.