NOBEM dissertation award for business economist Dr Ben Kuipers

Dr Ben Kuipers of the Faculty of Management & Organization has won the Dissertation of the Year Award for his thesis on the practice of self-managing work teams. It is the fifth time that NOBEM (the Netherlands Organisation for Business Economics and Management) has awarded this annual prize. Kuipers’s thesis was chosen from seven dissertations nominated by seven NOBEM-affiliated Dutch universities.

The award will be presented to Kuipers on 13 March 2007 at the annual PhD conference of the SOM research school of the faculties of Economics and Management & Organization of the University of Groningen. During this conference around 60 PhD students of the SOM research school will present their papers. Dr Kuipers will hold a brief presentation at 4 p.m.

NOBEM
NOBEM is an organization that promotes research in Business Studies and Economics through educational courses, conferences and networks. The dissertation award comes with a prize of EUR 1000 to be spent by the winner at his discretion. The jury consisted of chairman Onno Omta (Professor of Business Economics, Wageningen University), Ton de Leeuw (Emeritus Professor of Business Studies, University of Groningen), Jan Bilderbeek (Professor, University of Twente), Paul Bagchus (Professor, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven) and secretary Pieter Terlouw (NOBEM Research Director).

Ben Kuipers’s thesis
Ben Kuipers was awarded his PhD in 2005, for research conducted within the department of Human Resource Management and Organization Behavior that culminated in his thesis Team development and team performance. Responsibilities, responsiveness and results: a longitudinal study of teamwork at Volvo Trucks Umeå. His main conclusion is that the self-managing work team is a successful formula, provided it is thoroughly developed. Kuipers studied development processes, performance, work perception and the management structure of the teams. For three years, he organized and followed more than 150 production and service teams at Volvo Trucks.

According to his thesis, there are three fundamental team processes, each of which has a clear positive impact on team performance. Kuipers sees a direct link between ‘soft’ team processes and ‘hard’ performance factors, for example production quality and absence due to illness. It appears possible to give an organization a management structure that provides teams with the necessary leeway to develop these processes to their best advantage. His research has led to a concept and several instruments that managers can use to considerably improve the performance of teams.

Previous awards
After completing his thesis, Kuipers went on to work as an independent organization consultant as well as conducting further research at the Faculty of Management & Organization. In 2005, he was presented with the Best Dissertation Award at the international Dutch HRM Network Conference. This prize for the best PhD thesis in the field of HRM written in the Netherlands or Belgium is awarded every two years. Earlier Kuipers had already received the Volvo Thesis Award and the annual MSc thesis award of BRUG, the alumni association of Management & Organization.