Director: Prof. Gerben van der Vegt
Our research deals with organizational development and change and the role of HRM. More specific we deal with the following themes:
The main research theme of the programme is the cooperation among employees in general and teamwork in particular. Working in teams has widely been regarded as a way to enhance an organization’s capability to deal with changing circumstances, to generate more complex products and services and to handle difficult work processes more adequately. Consequently, the concept of team-based work has become increasingly popular, and has been adopted by a growing number of organizations.
We study the relationship between the design, the functioning, the development and the performance of work teams. With respect to the design of teams we deal with the characteristics of the work to be done as well as the characteristics of the team members. Work characteristics that we consider are, for example, task interdependence, task autonomy and the complexity of tasks. With respect to worker attributes we encompass a wide range of features, such as demographic characteristics, skills, knowledge, personality traits and attitudes. We study these worker characteristic also in terms of their distribution within a team, e.g. team composition, diversity in teams and the distribution of knowledge, accountability or power.
We also highlight how diversity is perceived and valued. The functioning of teams refers to the behavior of team members, such as, helping behavior, conflicts, communication patterns, feedback processes, creative behavior and leadership. Developmental issues are, for example, the socialization of new team members, the emergence of interpersonal trust or learning which team members are good in what. Performance may pertain to output variables such as productivity or innovativeness, but also to the satisfaction of team members.
Another stream of research is explicitly focused on organizational change and the role of leadership. Projects within this stream focus on, for example, ‘the power bases of consultants’, ‘participation in organizational change’, and ‘responses of leaders to the creative ideas of employees’
A third line of research deals with labor market dynamics such as ‘the relationship
between education and labor market’, ‘reward systems and inequity’ and ‘work-time preferences’.
