Professor Leong’s scientific contributions from his program of research on career psychology, cross-cultural psychotherapy, and Chinese psychology have led to numerous awards and recognition (see list of awards above). For his program of research on cultural and personality factors in career psychology, the American Psychological Association invited him to serve as the Editor-in-Chief of their APA Handbook of Multicultural Psychology (https://www.apa.org/pubs/books/4311511 ). For his significant contributions to psychotherapy research, the American Psychological Association invited him to serve as the Editor-in-Chief of their APA Handbook of Psychotherapy ( https://www.apa.org/pubs/books/apa-handbook-psychotherapy). He is the only psychologist in the Association to have been invited to serve as editor-in-chief of two APA Handbooks. For his contributions to Chinese Psychology, he was appointed as Honorary Chair Professor at Shanghai Normal University where they are developing indigenous Chinese approaches to careers. More recently, he has been selected to organize the 14^th Conference of Chinese Psychologists which will be held at CUHK Shenzhen in March 2026.

Additional recognition of his pioneering scientific contributions includes his appointment as Founding Editor of the Asian American Journal of Psychology as well as Associate Editor of the American Psychologist and the Archives of Scientific Psychology (two of the top journals in the field). Recently, he has been appointed to serve as the Associate Editor of Current Directions in Psychological Science. He has also been elected as Fellow of the American Psychological Association (APA), Association for Psychological Science, International Association for Applied Psychology, International Academy for Intercultural Research, and the Asian American Psychological Association. Within APA, he has been elected as Fellow in 9 Divisions (General, Teaching, Measurement, Clinical, Counseling, Psychotherapy, History, Cultural Diversity, and International Psychology). Election as Fellow represents unusual and outstanding contributions to the association.

In addition to presenting 185 scientific papers at association conferences (based on peer review submissions), Professor Leong has also been invited to present 107 scientific papers at various universities and international congresses. These universities include UCLA, Harvard Law School, Columbia University, Laval University, Indian School of Business, Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shatin), Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, City University of Hong Kong, Fudan University, Nanjing Normal University, and Shanghai Normal University.  The international congresses include the Pacific Science Congress in Beijing, International Test Commission Conference, World Congress of Psychotherapy, European Congress of Psychology, International Congress of Psychology, International Congress of Cross-Cultural Psychology, and International Congress of Applied Psychology.

At CUHK Shenzhen, Professor Leong has been pursuing two streams of research. The first involves career adaptability with the concept of Adaptability being a key organizing construct in Psychology. With colleagues, he has initiated the International Career Adaptability Study (see Leong and Walsh, 2012) in Berlin which helped launch a new program of studies on that topic. Career adaptability has often been measured using the Career Adapt-Abilities Scale (CAAS) and conceptualized as consisting of four factors (Concern, Control, Curiosity, and Confidence). What has not been widely known is that the measure as originally conceptualized in Berlin (Leong & Walsh, 2012) included a fifth dimension, known as Cooperation (Nye, Leong, Prasad, Gardner, and Tien, 2018). He has argued that the four factor CAAS exhibits as a cultural bias toward individualistic conceptualizations of career constructs such that relational or interpersonal dimensions are often ignored.

His recent research has produced evidence in support of the inclusion of a fifth factor, Cooperation. In a psychometric study (Nye, et al. 2018), they found evidence in support of the five-factor career adaptability scale (CAAS-5), which included the Cooperation dimension, in terms of structural validity. In another study (Prasad, Gardner, Leong, Zhang, and Nye, 2021) based on a sample of Chinese workers, they examined the criterion validity of the Cooperation dimension which supported the inclusion of cooperation into the career adaptability construct and expanding the nomological network of career adaptability (Nye et al., 2018; Savickas and Porfeli, 2012). The results demonstrated the added value of the Cooperation dimension across several work outcomes and highlighted Cooperation in predicting interpersonal outcomes. In the latest study (Leong, et al 2023), they examined how the CAAS-5 predicts a number of work and life-relevant outcomes. Results showed that the CAAS-5 is uniquely predictive of a number of outcomes over and above theoretically related constructs in both a sample of students with work experience and working adults. The combination of such results provides evidence for the validity and utility of the CAAS-5 for career interventions.

In continuing this program, Professor Leong is also planning to expand the career adaptability paradigm by adding the relational dimension to the model. He and his team are developing a Bifactor Model of Career Adaptability which will include the original Autonomous factor and the addition of the new Relational factor which will include the Cooperation, Communication, Citizenship and Collective Efficacy dimensions.

Professor Leong’s second stream of research is on the Implicit Theory of Diversity (ITD), which is similar to Dweck’s Implicit Theory of Intelligence. Like Dweck’s Growth Mindset and Fixed Mindset, the Implicit Theory of Diversity consists of Diversity Mindset and Homogeneity Mindset. This began with his collaboration with an economist that resulted in the Diversified Portfolio Model (DPM) of Adaptability (Chandra and Leong, 2016). The DPM is an extension of Markowitz’s model of financial portfolio which demonstrated that investors could optimize the ratio of risk and return on their portfolios through risk diversification. The DPM draws on the concept of portfolio diversification and posits that diversified investment in multiple life experiences, life roles, and relationships promotes positive adaptation to life’s challenges. The ITD is an extension of the DPM using the construct of beliefs.

To operationalize the ITD, Professor Leong and his team have developed the Diversity Mindset Measure (DMM) and the Homogeneity Mindset Measure (HMM). They built these measures to be similar to Carol Dweck’s Growth-Fixed Mindset measure (Dweck, 2008) which is directly related to motivation. Individuals with a growth mindset believe that intelligence and ability can grow and are therefore motivated to improve via effort, learning, and persistence. Individuals with a fixed mindset believe that intelligence and ability are innate/fixed and are motivated to avoid failures and do not exert much effort or persistence. They also give up easily in the face of challenges and have difficulty learning from criticisms. The team in the process of evaluating the construct and predictive validity of these measures. Leong, Chandra, and Scott (under review) discuss the development and initial validation of the Diversity Mindset Measure (DMM), the first instrument to capture the construct of diversity mindset.

A Diversity Mindset (DM) consists of a set of beliefs regarding the positive nature and consequences of diversity in adaptation to life. In Study 1, they established the initial reliability and factor structure of the DMM, finding that the DMM is a two-factor and reliable measure. Study 2 established that the two-factor model is the best-fitting model for the DMM through confirmatory factor analysis, and a total of 11 items were retained for the final measure. Study 2 also established the concurrent validity of the DMM, as it was found that the DMM correlated positively with adaptability, need for cognition, and openness to experience and was indirectly related to subjective well-being among college students. They have just completed analyses in the next study with adult workers, which demonstrated the predictive validity of the DMM. At the same time, they have been developing the Homogeneity Mindset Measure (HMM) which is similar to Dweck’s Fixed Mindset Measure. A Homogeneity Mindset consists of a set of beliefs regarding the positive nature and consequences of homogeneity (non-diversity) in the biological, psychological and social aspects of life. This ongoing program of research on the ITD will provide an important set of meta-cognitive measures to advance cultural diversity science in Psychology.