Asst. Professor Pisitta Vongswasdi

Short biography:
Dr. Pisitta Vongswasdi obtained a Bachelor (BA)’s degree in Economics from Chulalongkorn University (Thailand), and later received a Master of Science (MSc)’s degree in Sociology from University of Oxford (UK). She then worked as a strategy analyst in Bangkok, and returned to the world of research by serving as a research associate in Organizational behavior at INSEAD business school based in Singapore. Before joining WHU, she received a PhD in Management at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University (the Netherlands) in 2020. During her PhD, she was a visiting researcher at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business’s Experiential Leadership Development Lab in the US. She now lives in Düsseldorf, Germany.

Research interests:
Dr. Pisitta’s research program is in the field of Organizational Behavior, with a focus on the following areas: First, in the area of leadership development, her research looks at how challenging experiences contribute to the development of leadership awareness, identity, and skills. Second, in the area of diversity management, she explores the challenges and opportunities of diversity. Her work demonstrates how leaders can leverage diversity for team and collective performance. Additionally, she examines how to foster inclusivity from an identity perspective and identifying ways to mitigate discrimination and reduce inequality in different contexts. Finally, her work on the topic of mindfulness in the workplace goes beyond the well-proven impact of mindfulness on well-being outcomes to demonstrating its effects on learning, performance, and both productive and counterproductive behaviors in organizations. For these different areas of research, she looks for insights into these phenomena in different contexts (e.g., teamwork, leadership, entrepreneurship, education), using both quantitative (experiments, surveys, archival, interventions) and qualitative (interviews, observations) methods.