Faculty Spotlight: Shinjae Won, Assistant Professor, MHRIR 

Shinjae joined LER after receiving her Ph.D. in Management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to her graduate studies, she worked at Korea Development Institute, a government-based think-tank, where she worked with labor economists to evaluate labor market policies. At LER, she is continuing to pursue her passion for understanding labor market phenomena and human resource management. She currently teaches HR & Strategy and High Performance Work Systems.

Shinjae’s main research area is in strategic human capital and employee mobility; specifically, she’s interested in how firms’ motivation to generate and capture value from people and individuals’ interests to maximize their career outcomes interact with each other in contemporary labor markets where external hiring is prevalent and people build careers across (rather than solely within) organizations. She hopes that her research will be useful for both researchers and practitioners alike and provide career advice for individuals.

In both of her HR & Strategy and High Performance Work Systems classes, Shinjae emphasizes the importance of empowering employees and involving them in many aspects of operations and decision-making in organizations. She says she experiences how that mindset proves to be valuable in the classroom as well. In her class, students have opportunities to bring and share their research reports, discussion questions and even class activities, and she believes that students can learn a lot from those experiences while also having fun.

If you’d like to learn about the fundamentals of strategy and the importance of HR in implementing and executing strategy, you’ll enjoy taking one of Shinjae’s courses.