About

Sunkee Lee is an Associate Professor of Organizational Theory and Strategy at the Tepper School of Business. His role involves research and teaching in the areas of organizational behavior, management science, and strategic leadership. As a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University, he contributes to the school's focus on integrating business, technology, and analytics, aligning with the school's strategic plan to lead at the intersection of these fields.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Political Science
• Business
• Computer Science
• Medicine
• Social psychology
• Economics
• Management
• Knowledge management
• Finance

Selected publications

• Learning from Repeated Internal Versus External Failures: A Dynamic Attributional Perspective

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Persuading Academics to Engage with Industry: A Linguistic Approach Utilizing Machine Learning

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2025-07-01

  article

  Academic-industry engagement, crucial for facilitating the development of university-centered entrepreneurial ecosystems (UCEEs), hinges on the persuading language used in contract research proposals submitted by firms. Successful contract research proposals, when accepted by academics, can drive academic entrepreneurship. Yet, the role of proposal narratives remains undertheorized and understudied. To understand the persuasive power of language and its influence on academic-industry engagement activities, we employ Machine Learning (ML). This study discovers key linguistic features related to successful proposals and predicts engagement success with 83% accuracy. These findings offer new linguistic insights into academic-industry engagement, informing theory, practice, and policy in UCEEs. Additionally, our ML techniques enrich discussions on ML implementation in academic entrepreneurship, and pave the way for future research to leverage ML’s potential for pattern recognition and outcome prediction in large volumes of data.

  PublisherDOI

• Flipping the Curve: How Internal and External Failures Causes Shape Organizational Learning

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2025-07-01

  articleSenior author

  Whether organizations learn from own failure depends on the cause (internal cause vs. external cause) and the level of accumulated failure experience. Drawing from the motivation, opportunity, and ability framework, this study argues that internal failures initially motivate learning but diminish it as failures mount, whereas external failures exhibit the reverse pattern. Using flight delay data from 33 U.S. airlines covering 51.2 million flights (2003–2017), we find that external failures lead to an inverted U-shaped relationship between delays and customer complaints, while the shape flips toward a U-shape with an increasing share of internal failures. These effects are more pronounced in specialist airlines with higher learning ability. The findings highlight that failure-induced learning hinges on the interplay between failure causes and experience, advancing our understanding of organizational learning, an important basis of firm performance.

  PublisherDOI

• Mitigating ingroup bias in regulatory firms: The role of inspector professionalism

  Strategic Management Journal · 2025-04-29 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  Abstract This article adopts the lens of ingroup bias to study why regulatory firms tasked with enforcing regulatory compliance may underperform in their duties. We theorize that ingroup bias can lead regulatory agents to grant unwarranted trust to ingroup clients with whom they share salient characteristics, resulting in less stringent inspections for these clients compared to outgroup clients. We further examine how this effect is moderated by inspectors' professionalism, a human capital dimension reflecting an individual's engagement with their profession and internalization of its norms and standards. Using a difference‐in‐differences approach on micro‐data tracking 86 inspectors across 24,650 inspections of 462 vessels at a marine inspection firm, we find compelling evidence of ingroup bias and show that inspectors' professionalism mitigates its impact on regulatory enforcement stringency.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Reframing Failures: How Repeated Internally Versus Externally Caused Failures Shape Distinct Learning Trajectories

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• The double-edged sword of failure experiences

  2025-06-24

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter presents a novel finding from our research that highlights the dual nature of failure experiences. On one hand, failures provide opportunities to learn and improve future performance. However, on the other hand, failures can diminish one’s motivation to learn. We therefore propose an inverted-U-shaped relationship between accumulated failure experiences and subsequent performance, where individuals learn from their failures up to a certain threshold but then discontinue learning thereafter. An analysis of data on 307 cardiothoracic surgeons in California supports our theory. We also find that individuals with high perceived ability to learn—specifically surgeons with elite education, certified expertise, and specialization in patient care—give up learning from their own failures at a later point, displaying a more resilient response to the negative impact of failure experiences. We conclude by discussing managerial implications for leaders aiming to promote continuous learning and performance improvement among members of their organization.

  PublisherDOI

• Physical Work Environments: An Integrative Review and Agenda for Future Research

  Journal of Management · 2025-02-28 · 16 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This review examines the effect of physical work environments—the dedicated, tangible spaces where employees carry out their professional tasks—on organizational processes and outcomes. We synthesize decades of research across various disciplines using a conceptual framework that defines physical work environments along three key dimensions: ambience, spatial configuration, and aesthetics. These dimensions are analyzed for their effects on both internal stakeholders, such as employees, and external stakeholders, including clients, suppliers, and investors. Our analysis reveals two major themes in prior research: (1) task accomplishment, which focuses on how physical work environments influence physical and mental health, motivation and attitudes, as well as work processes; and (2) resource position, which explores how these environments impact a firm’s tangible resource position, its ability to attract and retain human resources, as well as shape intangible assets such as organizational culture and reputation. The study also highlights contradictory findings and methodological limitations in existing research and proposes future research agendas. By providing theoretical insights and practical guidelines, this work seeks to guide both scholars and managers in understanding how physical workspaces can be designed to improve organizational outcomes, particularly as firms adapt to evolving work arrangements following the COVID-19 pandemic.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Spaces for Creativity: Unconventional Workspaces and Divergent Thinking

  Management Science · 2025-05-23 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Companies are adopting unconventional workspaces—often characterized by bright or oddly colored walls, unique light fixtures, unusual office furniture, vibrant artwork, the display of atypical non–work-related objects, and casual and playful atmospheres—to foster creativity. Yet empirical evidence on the causal effect of such unconventional workspaces on creativity has been lacking. Across four experiments involving a total sample of 1,133 participants, we tested the effect of unconventional workspaces on individuals’ divergent thinking: the process of generating many and distinct ideas to solve a given task. Contrary to our initial expectations, we found that unconventional workspaces did not always boost divergent thinking and even hindered it. Specifically, unconventional workspaces were harmful when solutions for a divergent task could be readily inspired by the workspace’s features because of cognitive anchoring. Hence, the positive effect of unconventional workspaces was significant only when the potential solutions for the divergent-thinking task were unrelated to features of the workspace. These findings provide important evidence of the causal effects of unconventional workspaces on the process of creativity and highlight crucial boundary conditions for such effects. This paper was accepted by Elena Katok, operations management. Funding: This research was supported by the Heinrich and Esther Baumann–Steiner Fund for Creativity and Business at INSEAD and the Center for Organizational Learning, Innovation, and Knowledge at the Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.02052 .

  PublisherDOI

• Reimagining Organizational Space: New Frontiers in the Modern Workplace

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2025-07-01

  articleSenior author

  The COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally transformed how organizations approach workspace design and work arrangements, with approximately 27% of U.S. workers and 22% of U.K. workers now operating in hybrid formats. This panel symposium brings together leading scholars to explore three critical dimensions of this transformation: corporate spatial strategies for flexible workforces, team dynamics across different work arrangements, and the role of technology in enabling organizational relationships. While extensive research exists on traditional office designs and their impact on employee behavior, the current landscape of multiple work arrangements presents new theoretical challenges and opportunities that remain understudied. Our distinguished panelists—Ethan Bernstein, Jen Rhymer, Leroy Gonsalves, Maria Roche, and Sunkee Lee—will draw from their diverse research portfolios to examine how traditional theories of organizational space and behavior apply across different work arrangements and where theoretical extensions are needed. The symposium will also explore how advances in technology affect employee relationships, organizational culture, and team identity, while creating new methodological possibilities for organizational research. Through structured presentations and interactive discussions, this 90-minute session aims to advance theoretical understanding of the evolving nature of organizational space while identifying promising avenues for future scholarly inquiry in this rapidly changing domain.

  PublisherDOI

• Physical Work Environments: A Strategic Resource or Not. Implications for the Future

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2024-07-09

  article

  Whether physical work environments (PWEs) are a strategic resource for firms or not has become increasingly pertinent given the pervasive shift to remote and hybrid work models. This symposium aims to critically examine this question by bringing together leading scholars who investigate PWEs varied impact on desirable outcomes in firms from different theoretical lenses. In doing so we aim to (1) discuss and consolidate current knowledge on how physical work environments contribute to productivity and profitability in firms, (2) debate these current beliefs, theoretical explanations, and empirical evidence to determine the extent to which they help attain and sustain competitive advantage, (3) identify gaps and inconsistencies in the literature regarding the nature and impact of this firm resource to stimulate future research, and (4) provide some managerial guidance on when and how they may matter to firm outcomes.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Philipp Meyer‐Doyle

  INSEAD

  9 shared

• Constance E. Helfat

  5 shared

• J.K. Park

  Seoul National University

  4 shared

• Jisoo Park

  Clark University

  3 shared

• Alex James Wilson

  3 shared

• Jillian Chown

  Kellogg's (Canada)

  3 shared

• Phanish Puranam

  2 shared

• Florian Rittiner

  ETH Zurich

  2 shared

Education

• PhD, Strategy

  INSEAD

  2017

• M.S. in Business Adminstration, Graduate School of Business

  Seoul National University

  2012

• B.A. in Business Administration, Business School

  Korea University

  2010