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Vivian L. Xiao, Ph.D.

Postdoctoral Fellow, Vanderbilt University

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About

About

BACKGROUND

Vivian L. Xiao is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University in the Organization Studies Area.

 

Prior to her appointment at Vanderbilt, Vivian received her Ph.D. in Business Administration with a focus on Organizational Behavior from Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2022. She received her B.A. in Psychology (with Honors) and English, magna cum laude, from Rice University in 2016.​

RESEARCH OVERVIEW

Vivian’s work explores how race and gender interact to impact a wide range of social and organizational outcomes, including leader evaluation and selection, politics, and gender-norm formation, at multiple levels of analysis.

 

In one line of work, she investigates how perceivers’ and targets’ racial group memberships impact gender perception and the formation and enforcement of gender norms. Her work finds that people largely construct and enforce gender and gender norms within racial groups. Responses to gender-norm violation and gender-norm conformity alike are most pronounced within racial groups, which may reflect a fundamental association people have between gender and racial in-group members. Her work suggests that who we see and engage with as “men” and “women” are largely racial in-group members.

In a second line of work, she focuses on how workers with minoritized identities engage with their work and their organizations. She is interested in how workers from different racial groups may engage in different workplace behaviors that are more or less rewarded in the American organizational context and the implications these behaviors have for career outcomes, as well as how remote work may change the amount and degree of discrimination that racial minority workers perceive and how this affects wellbeing and belonging in organizations.

In a third line of work, she examines the micro-, meso-, and macro-level factors that influence diversity in the upper echelons of organizations. At the micro-level, she focuses on how gender and its intersection with age influence appearance-based double standards between men and women and outcomes such as compensation, firm performance, and media attention among Fortune 1500 CEOs. At the meso-level, she examines how the demographic composition and political ideology of corporate boards influence the selection of women CEOs, as well as organization-level downstream consequences, such as pay equity and environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) outcomes. At the macro-level, she examines how societal-level factors such as mega-threats and diversity-related policies influence the nomination of women and racial minorities to boards, as well as the centrality and importance of their positions on boards.

Research

Research

PEER-REVIEWED PUBLICATIONS

Xiao, V.L. & Lowery, B.S. Who are You to Me?: A Relational Approach to Examining Race-Gender Associations. Revise & resubmit, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

Xiao, V.L., Lowery, B.S., & Stillwell, A. (2023). Gender Backlash and the Moderating Role of Shared Racial Group Membership. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 49(4), 554–570. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672221074543

BOOK CHAPTERS

Xiao, V.L. (2022). Deliberate Inclusion: Considering Underrepresented Perspectives in Psychology. In King, E., Roberson, Q.M., & Hebl, M.R. (Eds.), Research on Social Issues in Management (Vol. The Future of Diversity & Inclusion). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. 

 

Xiao, V.L. (2022). Gender, Race, and Intersectionality in the Workplace. In Gurung, R.A.R. (Ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Psychology in the Real World. Cambridge, UK: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367198459-REPRW208-1

MANUSCRIPTS IN PREP

Xiao, V.L., Corrington, A.R., Kinias, Z. & Hebl, M.R. Knowing Your Worth: Race and Gender Differences in Personal Entitlement. Preparing for submission; target journal: Academy of Management Discoveries.

Xiao, V.L. & Lowery, B.S. Gendered Helping, Hierarchy Maintenance, and Race.

Xiao, V.L., Triana, M., & Upadhyay, A. Trump's Election and Selection of Women as Board Directors.

SELECTED WORKS IN PROGRESS

(* denotes shared first authorship, authors listed in alphabetical order)

Xiao, V.L., Wiwad, D., Talaifar, S., Chu. C., Puente, L., Lagaron, A. & Lowery, B.S. Remote Work and Perceived Discrimination. 

Xiao, V.L. & Lowery, B.S. Motivated Evaluations of White and Black Male Leaders’ Effectiveness. 


Stillwell, A.*, Xiao, V.L.*, & Martin, A.E. A Comparative Study of Masculinity and Femininity Beliefs Across Racial Groups.

Contact

Contact me

Vivian L. Xiao

Vanderbilt University
Owen Graduate School of Management
401 21st Avenue S., Nashville, TN 37203

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