Hello!
I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Missouri – St. Louis College of Business. My research explores how workplace resources—such as time, money, and technology—shape employees’ ability to thrive at work by investigating the psychological mechanisms underlying these effects and testing theoretically driven interventions.
In my dissertation, I demonstrated that time-based rewards can enhance psychological wellbeing by fostering a sense of humanization in employees. Conversely, performance-based monetary rewards may inadvertently diminish wellbeing, leading employees to prioritize work-related contacts over personal relationships in pursuit of financial goals.
My most recent work investigates the impact of generative AI on employees’ interpersonal and psychological wellbeing. Specifically, I examine how integrating AI tools into collaborative settings may undermine relationship quality among human team members, shifting social dynamics in ways that affect trust, cohesion, and perceived support. By studying the social and psychological consequences of AI adoption in the workplace, I aim to identify strategies that promote more effective and human-centered integration of AI technologies.
Publications
Lee-Yoon, Alice, Sherry Wu, Jason Chin, Heather Caruso, and Eugene Caruso (2025). “Pluralistic ignorance of stigma impedes take-up of welfare benefits.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Lee-Yoon, Alice and Sanford DeVoe (2025). “A humanizing separation from work: Benefits of rewarding people with time over money.” Journal of Managerial Psychology.
Hur, Julia D., Alice Lee-Yoon, and Ashley V. Whillans (2021). “Who is more useful? The impact of performance incentives on work and personal relationships.” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes
Lee-Yoon, Alice, Grant E.Donnelley, and Ashley V. Whillans (2020). “Overcoming resource scarcity: Consumers’ response to gifts intending to save time and money.” Journal of the Association for Consumer Research.
Whillans, Ashley. V., Alice Lee-Yoon, and Elizabeth W. Dunn (2020). “Service provider salience: When guilt undermines consumer willingness to buy time.” Collabra: Psychology, 6(1), 28
Lee-Yoon, Alice and Ashley V. Whillans (2019). “Making seconds count: When valuing time promotes subjective well-being.” Current Opinion in Psychology, 26, 54-57.
Whillans, Ashley V. and Alice Lee-Yoon (2018). “Counting seconds and cents: The development of a short scale to examine how people think about trade-offs between time and money,” In SAGE Research Methods Cases (pp. 1-10). London, OH: SAGE Publications Ltd.
Select Work in Progress
Lee-Yoon, Alice (in prep). “Generative AI and Employee Task Engagement: The Moderating Role of Task Complexity.”
Lee-Yoon, Alice, Julia Hur, and Ashley Whillans (in prep). “Performance Incentives Undermine Perceived Authenticity Through Objectification.”
Lee-Yoon, Alice, Necdet Gurkan (in prep). “The impact of artificial intelligence tools on employees relationship quality and quantity of social interaction.”
Lee-Yoon, Alice, Joyce He, and Vanessa Conzon (in prep). “Misperceived controllability of social class background prevents it from being a diversity dimension.”
Alice Lee-Yoon 