Professor and Director of Center of Business Education
“As the world becomes smaller, organizations need to know how to help people work with their differences in productive and meaningful ways. I want to help with this important task”
I am a Professor of Management at the School of Business at HKUST. I have worked at universities on three continents and have enjoyed the similarities and differences in them. I started my academic career in psychology and then slowly moved to a focused interest in the world of work. Specifically my research interests revolve around how individuals make sense of their everyday experiences at work, and how this affects the organization as a whole. For example, I want to know how individuals respond to working with people who are different from themselves on observable characteristics like gender and race, and also non-observable characteristics like personality and goal orientations. I also study people’s responses to nonstandard work arrangement like contract or temporary work and how this affects the organization. Part of my interest in individual differences and individuals’ responses to them is because I have often been the “different” one in my work life. I am an ethnic Indian, Australian citizen, born and raised in Iran, working in Hong Kong (and that’s just talking about ethnic and national differences!). I respond positively to being different in some situations and not in others, and I want to understand why this is so. I know that there are many people like me who are different in so many ways from others in their contexts and I want to understand and help this group of individuals. Also as the world becomes smaller, organizations need to know how to help people work with their differences in productive and meaningful ways. I want to help with this important task. I love my job but I have other aspects to my life that I enjoy tremendously. I love reading (especially murder mysteries), music (all kinds) and travelling (long road trips to places that are off the beaten track). I also try to sound knowledgeable (not very successfully) when talking about sports (cricket and soccer) with my son and husband. Prof. Elizabeth George is a also the Director of the Center of Business Education. She got her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin and her M.A from the Tala Institute of Social Sciences in Bombay, India, and her B.A. from Bombay University, India.
