CTWD moves to its new home

This week the Centre for Transformative Work Design officially moved to its new "wing" in the UWA Business School. There are nine offices, a meeting room, desks for 12 PhD students, and a spacious foyer for informal conversations. The space is filled with light, with lovely glimpses of the Swan River.

To celebrate our move, and our first real coming together as a team, we had a spontaneous cake for morning tea, attended by several staff from the Business School and the centre.

Next week, we look forward to the full team working collectively to engage in research planning. Caroline, Yukun, and MK will be visiting from the UK, Singapore, and the USA, respectively, to meet with existing staff (Sharon, Abbe, Karina, Florian, and Daniela).

First Post-doc in!

Dr Daniela Andrei has officially joined our team starting this month. Daniela is originally from Romania, where she completed her Doctorate in 2010, but she is not new to UWA or to our team. For the past 4 years, Daniela has worked as a Research Fellow within the School of Psychology and has been involved in applied research projects on team leadership in extreme action teams, antecedents and consequences of safety culture and work design. In her new role, she will share her time between CTWD and the Centre for Safety (C4S).

Daniela’s interest in work design was sparked in early 2012 when she first came to UWA as a GO8 European Fellow. She started her collaboration with Prof. Sharon Parker on a review of work design in the context of time (see chapter here). She continued by taking a closer look at how work design affects different types of employee performance (see chapter here) and then joined Sharon in her endeavor to find who/what is to blame for the persistence of poor work designs in contemporary jobs (Parker, Andrei, & Van den Broeck, in prep - Poor Work Design Begets Poor Work Design: How Work Experiences and Life Values Shape Work Design Choices ). As you might already guess, Daniela’s main interest will revolve around Stream 4, but she is also excited to extend her work on extreme action teams and safety and well-being by using a work design perspective.

New "go to handbook" on proactivity released!

Sharon Parker and Uta Bindl are excited to announce that their new Routlege book on proactivity at work has recently been released. Proactivity is basically about 'making things happen', or (more formally) self-initiating change to bring about a better future.

Adam Grant, the author of Originals and Give & Take, and a professor at The Wharton School described the book at the "go to handbook for research on proactivity", and Gilad Chen, University of Maryland Professor and Editor of the Journal of Applied Psychology, asserts that the book "provides a thoughtful and useful organization of a topic that is of theoretical importance ... as well as practical relevance".

The book features 20 up-to-date chapters written by world-leading scholars. As Parker & Bindl assert in their opening chapter, proactivity is "a big picture perspective on a construct that matters".

For information on how to order the book, please click here