[7] In 1978,[7] Tsui entered the University of California, Los Angeles where she earned a PhD in behavioral and organizational sciences in 1981.

[2][15][16] In 2017 an initial group of 28 international scholars published the position paper "A vision for responsible research in business and management: Striving for useful and credible knowledge", revised in 2020.

[8] Tsui has suggested that business and management should not treat the issues of rigor (credibility of evidence) and relevance (usefulness of knowledge) separately, as has often been done in the research literature, but recognize their inter-relatedness.

[13] In addition to comparative studies, she emphasizes the importance of scientific freedom,[7] ethical and credible behavior,[3] and responsible leadership in business.

[10] She is the co-author with Barbara Gutek of Demographic Differences in Organizations: Current Research and Future Direction (1999), which was a finalist for the Terry Book Award, of the Academy of Management in 2000.

[19] "Being different: Relational demography and organizational attachment" was published in the Administrative Science Quarterly (ASQ) in 1992.

In 1998, it received the ASQ Award for Scholarly Contribution, given to the paper in the preceding five years that had the greatest influence on theory and research.

[21] The paper was described as “an extremely ambitious study on a fundamental and important topic" and "an exemplar of high-risk, high payoff research.