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