Roy Chua
Biography
Roy Y. J. Chua is a Professor in the Organizational Behavior unit at the Harvard Business School.
He teaches the first-year Leadership and Organizational Behavior (LEAD) course in the MBA program.
The primary focus of his research examines how multicultural interactions impact innovation and creativity.
A second area of his research aims to unpack trust dynamics in the American and Chinese networks.
He has published in leading periodicals such as the Academy of Management Journal, Journal of International Business Studies, and Research in Organizational Behavior.
Prior to his academic career, he was a Management Associate at PSA Corporation, working on strategic human resources issues such as talent development, recruitment, compensation, and training.
Video
Collaborating across Cultures
How multicultural interactions impact innovation and creativity?
What makes sharing new ideas and collaborating across cultures difficult?
How to build successful intercultural business relations?
Roy Chua, professor of Harvard Business School shares with us the results of his research.
Roy Chua about YWEA
Discover why YWEA contributes to the improvement of your business performance and business relations.
Articles
Innovating at the World’s Crossroads: How Multicultural Networks Promote Creativity
This research examines the effects of multicultural social networks on individuals’ creative performance.
Cultivating a culturally diverse social network helps improve creative problem solving in a multicultural context because it promotes a flow of novel ideas and concepts from cultures other than one’s own.
This finding sheds light on the mechanisms that underlie multicultural networks’ effects on creativity.
Collaborating across Cultures: Cultural Metacognition & Affect-Based Trust in Creative Collaboration
Creative solutions often are born when two unrelated ideas come together for the first time. That’s more likely to happen when the collaborators come from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, thus diminishing the likelihood of redundant ideas.
The authors examine the factors that make intercultural creative collaboration happen.
In order to further intercultural creative collaboration, managers need to do more than simply passively learn about other cultures. Managers’ awareness of their own and others’ cultural assumptions (cultural metacognition) enables them to develop affect-based trust with associates from different cultures, promoting creative collaboration.
Guanxi versus Networking: Distinctive Configurations of Affect- and Cognition-based Trust in the Networks of Chinese and American Managers
While American managers prefer to separate work and personal relationships, Chinese counterparts are much more likely to intermingle the two.
That means that doing business in China takes lots of time and it generally takes much longer to build trusting business relationships in China than in the United States.
Negotiation Excellence: Successful Deal Making
Roy Chua is co-author of the book chapter “Building Intercultural Trust at the Negotiating Table”.
This chapter examines the challenges of intercultural negotiation with a focus on the critical role of trust. Building trust is crucial for successful negotiations between cultures, yet intercultural negotiations are often characterized by a lack of trust.
Why it is so difficult to establish trust in intercultural negotiations?
The authors offer guidelines for building trust in intercultural negotiations with an emphasis on cultural intelligence - the capacity to adapt effectively across cultures