Biography

Yingli Deng is an Assistant Professor in Leadership and Organisational Behaviour at Durham University Business School. She holds a M.S. in Accounting from University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (2016) and Ph.D in Management from the Spears School of Business at Oklahoma State University (2021). She was the visiting student in Management & Organisations Department at Northwestern University from 2019 to 2021.

Her research interests fall within two overarching topic areas: emotions and behavioural ethics. She uses multi-level methods to examine her theories in both topics. Her research within the emotions stream examines the antecedents and consequences of emotions. For example, in her dissertation, she explores how one’s team affects one’s emotional responses and behaviours. Her dissertation challenges the assumptions of emotional contagion theory that group emotions exaggerate individual emotional responses. Contrary to the existing literature of emotional contagion, she posits that high team envy actually buffers the negative effects of an employee’s envy toward the leader on work outcomes. Her research within the behavioural ethics stream focuses on understanding the impact of situational factors on individuals’ behaviours. For example, her work examines how employees follow team members’ unethical pro-organizational behaviours through normative pressures. She publishes in top research outlets such as Journal of Applied Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin and Personnel Psychology.