From the get-go, Associate Professor of Management and Organizations Julia Hur was always interested in social psychology – specifically how it explores people’s motivations and goals. Over time, she became more interested in looking into the variety of ways incentives at work change the way people spend their time – from the way they choose their work arrangement to their ability to feel authentic around their coworkers.
Hur, who is also a Global Network Assistant Professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, leads a Goals, Incentives, and Meritocracy lab at NYU Shanghai exploring the two concepts.
What led you to NYU Shanghai?
NYU was a great choice for me when I first joined in 2018— and it has only become better since then. As a junior scholar, it offered exactly what I needed: academic freedom, strong research support, and excellent teaching resources. On top of that, I’ve had the privilege of working with outstanding colleagues and a supportive dean.
What are you currently working on?
One of my current lines of research is about incentives. The first project deals with incentives and workplace relationships. Once you get paid for work, you see your colleagues in a more instrumental way, and you spend more time with them. But are you happy doing that? Because you are seeing your colleagues as a kind of a means to an end– these are the people that you know will help you. We are interested in how it changes the quality of the relationship, are you genuinely satisfied by spending more time with them?
What we’re finding is it makes you engage in what we call strategic socialization. If you're all getting paid for performance, it's not just the feeling of, “I don't think I'm being myself.” But it’s also “I don't think these people are being themselves around me.”
The second project deals with work arrangement or remote work: Should I work in the office or at home? What we are interested in is not just about the instrumentality of the relationship, but also the instrumentality of interaction. So it's not, “how much is this employee going to be helpful for me in making more money?” It's also about “how much would it be helpful for me to see this employee in-person to maximize my incentives?”
What we found here is that when people are expected to be paid for performance, they are more willing to opt-out from remote work. They're more willing to go into the office, more likely to commute instead of working from home– because seeing people in person will help them make a good impression and eventually make more money.
How do you conduct your research?
I do experiments and surveys, sometimes with online participants, sometimes with company employees. Sometimes I use archival data of S&P 500 companies, or even Major League Baseball player salaries.
But here's my rule of thumb in any of the studies– to couple that experiment with real-world data. Because if I see a similar pattern, both in a controlled lab, and in a potentially messier, but real organization, then it gives me a sense of accomplishment that what I'm looking at might be something that's actually happening. So I try to do that as much as possible.
How has your experience been teaching at NYU Shanghai?
I LOVE working with NYUSH undergraduate students—they often come up with the most unexpected ideas and questions. Coming from different majors, home campuses, and backgrounds, they offer perspectives that are diverse, fresh, and creative. This makes class discussions—and the overall learning experience—more engaging for everyone.
What courses do you teach?
I will be teaching Management and Organizations to undergraduate students at NYU Shanghai in Spring 2026. It’s an introductory course that covers key topics in the field of Organizational Behavior. This is also a class I’ve personally tailored and refined over many years, and I’m proud of how it’s developed. In addition, I teach Collaboration, Conflict, and Negotiation to MBA students at NYU Stern.
What’s next for you?
One question I have is: when it comes to determining an incentive system and especially incentive system amount, how do people react to the involvement of technology?
I think there are different stages of determining people's performance incentives, for example,measuring your performance. More and more HR practices want to involve AI for interviews and screening resumes. But when it comes to pay decisions, which stage of the hiring process would people feel accepting or even excited to have AI determine? On one hand, you might think, “who would like that?” Some people would not trust AI at all in determining their salary. But at the same time, humans are not perfect.
Do you have any advice for students who want to go into academia?
At the end of the day, business is an applied science compared to some other social sciences. If you want to pursue an academic career in business or in organizational behavior specifically, then you have to intensely care about all three questions: is this research question new? Is this research question interesting and does it matter? And the last one is very specific for applied science, like, what's the implication? So it's not enough to be new and interesting. You want to think about the impact it has on organizations. If you are somebody who’s excited to think deeply, critically, about those three questions, I think you'll do just fine.