"The embeddedness of work design in occupational context", PhD completion for Georgia Hay

Georgia Hay has received the excellent news that her PhD thesis has been passed. Georgia completed her PhD at UWA and was been a member of CTWD throughout this time. She was supervised by Professor Sharon Parker, Associate Professor Alex Luksyte (UWA), and Associate Professor Anja Van den Broeck (KU Leuven, Belgium). She is now a Postdoctoral Associate at FOWI.

Georgia’s PhD project consisted of three case studies of work re-design, focusing on employee experiences, managerial attitudes, and a systemic perspective.

In her thesis entitled “The embeddedness of work design in occupational context”, Georgia aims to explore the interplay between occupations and work re-design.

The thesis includes three articles. Article 1, of a university re-structuring, explores the interplay between employees’ occupational, organisational, and/or work-group identity (Vough, 2012) and their retrospective narrations of the re-structuring – as well as their constructions of its failure. Article 2, the redesign of an operating theatre department, explores the embeddedness of work design in different occupational values (Dierdorff & Morgeson, 2013) – and investigates what happens when occupational values collide. The final study, Article 3, of the redesign of clinical diagnostic work, explores the occupational barriers to the redesign at the level of the work system, from a sociotechnical perspective (Holden et al., 2013).

Article 1 has been published in Human Relations; and Article 3 has been published in Applied Ergonomics.

During her time as a PhD student, Georgia also worked closely with Postdoc Florian Klonek and Professor Sharon Parker on the development of the Communication Analysis Tool. The team published a paper in Small Group Research on the value of ‘CAT’ for advancing research on social interactions in organisations.

Georgia says:

“In my experience, doing a PhD is difficult at the best of times. However, I will always be infinitely grateful for the seemingly unlimited opportunities, support, and encouragement provided to me by my supervisors and colleagues at FOWI. It’s been a long, winding, and challenging journey – but only because I have been fortunate enough to be in an environment where everyone wants, and supports me, to conduct high quality and impactful research. And, as a born and bred West Australian, I am so proud that this is happening here in Perth.”

Georgia will finish her Postdoctoral contract at FOWI in November and take some much-needed time off, following which she will (temporarily?) explore life outside of academia, starting as an Associate at the Boston Consulting Group in the Perth office in February.

To find out more about doing your PhD at FOWI, visit our PhD opportunities page.

Hay, G., Parker, S.K., & Luksyte, A. (2020). Making sense of organisational change failure: An identity lens. Human Relations. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726720906211

Hay, G., Klonek, F., & Parker, S. K. (2020). Diagnosing rare diseases: A sociotechnical approach to the design of complex work systems. Applied Ergonomics. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apergo.2020.103095

Klonek, F.E., Meinecke, A., Hay, G., & Parker, S. (2020). Capturing team dynamics in the wild: The communication analysis tool. Small Group Research. https://doi.org/10.1177/1046496420904126

Meet our visitor, Professor Fred Zijlstra

We miss our visitors here at the Centre!

Each year, we host a number of international scholars to collaborate with CTWD researchers and help advance work design research. This year, our visitors had to unexpectedly return to their home countries after their stay was cut short due to the pandemic.

It was sad to see our talented visitors leave and we can't wait for them to return. In the meantime, we have put together a "Meet our Visitors" series, where we interviewed our past visitors and get to know them better.

Meet Professor Fred Zijlstra. He is the Head of IO Psychology at Maastricht University and Director of the Centre of Expertise Inclusive Organisations.

We asked Fred on what he thinks about the following topics, and about himself:

⭐️Tell me a bit about yourself?

I am from the Netherlands, and work at Maastricht University, and am here in Perth for my sabbatical leave. In my free time I want to see a bit more of Australia than just Perth. So, after exploring the city I travelled around South, North, East, and even a bit to the West (Rottnest Island).

⭐️What will you do / are you doing at CTWD / FOWI?

At FOWI I’m working on a book, and probably one or two papers, describing how work design not only affects peoples motivation to work; but in fact, also relates to the social security system of a country. Work design determines who has access to the labour market and who has not.

⭐️What does the future of work look like to you?

Digitalisation of work will have even greater effects than it has now, and this will make work

more complex and (mentally) demanding, and even ‘absorbing’. So, we need to think about its countermeasures: how can we wear off the increasing demands of work, and ensure that in the future everybody will be able to participate, and that life is still worth living.

⭐️If you were a book or a movie, what would it be?

I don’t think of myself as a book or movie, but a movie that I would want everybody to see is: “Sorry we missed you” by Ken Loach. This movie shows us what kind of society we live in, and what it means when Amazon, Alibaba, and Uber are getting more powerful; because we buy everything on the internet.

⭐️One thing not many people know about you?

I love sailing, preferably sea sailing. I did a lot of dinghy sailing as well, even won prizes, when I was a bit younger.

We welcome visits from organisational psychology researchers from all around the world. If you are interested in collaborating with us, please visit https://www.transformativeworkdesign.com/our-visitors

The claws are out! Introducing the CAT (Communication Analysis Tool) – Part 1

by Georgia Hay

Hi! I’m Georgia, a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Transformative Work Design, and part of the team who have developed our very own CAT!

Not to worry, we don’t need to have the cats versus dogs debate (because we all know what the right answer is…). CAT stands for:

Communication Analysis Tool

Dr. Florian Klonek and I were inspired to develop CAT, alongside Professor Sharon Parker and software developer Ding Wang, when it became clear that we needed a better way to understand social interactions in the workplace.

We each had experienced trying to research teamwork in the healthcare sector, and being frustrated by the outdated and laborious methods available to us to document and analyse interactions within these teams.

• Are you a researcher? (especially in teamwork or leadership)? Have you ever tried to take detailed notes while observing teamwork or dyad interactions? Have you ever struggled to give feedback to organisations in a timely manner?

• Are you a consultant? Have you ever tried to give comprehensive feedback or advice based on self-report data that takes weeks to analyse and compile into a report?

• Are you a university lecturer? Have you ever struggled to give students accurate and comprehensive presentation feedback based on hasty handwritten notes?

CAT is a tool that researchers and consultants can use to document social interactions, quickly generate feedback reports at the end of the session, and export the raw data for further analysis. Users customise their own coding scheme based on what they want to measure.

CAT is a web-based application that can be used on a tablet, mobile, laptop, or desktop device to code interactions live or video-recorded.

For an in-depth introduction to CAT, check out Meredith Carr’s fantastic virtual lecture here:

Still not sure if you could use CAT in your work? Stay tuned for the upcoming posts in this series, where we will give some examples of how CAT can be used, including videos from our very own ‘CAT lovers!’

For further details on the functionality and history of CAT, and how to access it, click here.

For the Curtin University media release on CAT, click here.

Georgia Hay