On February 23, at the invitation of the Faculty of Business and Management (FBM), Professor Xu Huang delivered a lecture titled " Inner Circle ".

Professor Huang undertook a PhD in organizational psychology at University of Groningen (the Nethislands). He is a chair professor and associate dean in School of Business at Hong Kong Baptist University. And he is Deputy Editor of the Management and Organization Review, and a member of editorial board for Academy of Management Journal and Human Relations. His interests include leadership, power, proactive and abnormal work behaviors, employee well-being, cross-cultural psychology, and management issues in China. And he has published more than 70 professional papers in related fields.

Prof. Huang’s Lecture

Professor Huang first introduced the role of inner circle in a dominant alliance with the help of the organization structure of the microcode team of the Eagle project. Then, he presented two important structural features of the inner circle in a dominant alliance and the factors that affect the strength of the dominant alliance. Specifically, Professor Huang illustrated the different roles of the inner circle through the structure of dominant alliances with different influences. Thereafter, Professor Huang introduced a study related to the relation between inner circle and team performance. He indicated that the research contributions mainly include helping improve team coordination through a special leadership influence structure, developing theory and procedure of measuring dominant alliance in work teams, and exploring the role of leaders in information social hierarchy. Then, Professor Huang introduced the relevant literature, key hypotheses, sample data, experimental procedures and results in detail. Professor Huang also introduced a study on inner circle and leader–member exchange (LMX) differentiation. He indicated that this research offers explanations for why and when LMX differentiation undermines team functioning, and offers new insights into the “right members” of leaders’ inner circle. And Professor Huang exhibited two inspirations from the results of the research: No team leaders can function well without an inner circle of their own. Picking the right member into a leader’s inner circle increases members’ acceptance of LMX differentiation and reduce team conflicts.

Audience On-site

Professor Huang's wonderful lecture immersed the audience. In Q&A part, the audience had an in-depth discussion with Professor Huang on the generality of the research, the practical significance of the research conclusion and so on.