Our Centre
Innovative research. Informed leaders. Inspired workers.
About the CTWD
The Centre for Transformative Work Design is a Research Centre where passionate organisational psychology researchers and professionals are working together to transform work under the directorship of Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow, Professor Sharon K. Parker.
The Centre has five major research streams, focused on:
Our research focuses on “all things work design”.
By work design, we mean the nature and organisation of people’s tasks, responsibilities, relationships, and activities, such as whether people work in teams and how much decision-making responsibility people have.
From a practical perspective, we use the SMART work design model to capture the key aspects of work that research has shown profoundly affect outcomes like mental health and job performance.
Work design is an important influence on worker mental health, influencing the full spectrum of outcomes, from mental ill-health (such as anxiety and depression) to positive well-being (e.g., thriving).
In this stream, we focus on how work design can shape job performance (e.g., creativity, productivity), learning-related outcomes (e.g., cognition, active development), and other outcomes including moral development and identity change.
It is a striking observation that there continues to be much poorly designed work in the world, despite the evidence of negative effects for individuals, organisations, and society if work is lacking in autonomy and other positive work characteristics. An innovative focus of this Centre is that we seek to better understand why poor work design persists, and how this situation can be changed through work redesign and crafting interventions.
In this stream, we look at new and emerging forms of how work is changing in the 21st century. Increases in working-from-home (WFH), increased flexibility where and how work is performed and virtual workspaces are changing the very nature of work. This has important implications for health, wellbeing, and performance both for individual workers and for teams.
Change in technology, business, the economy, and society - such as cognitive computing, globalization, flexible work spaces, and an ageing population - all shape the ‘what/how’, ‘where/when, and ‘who’ of work. This research stream focuses on how work is changing, and in particular, addresses the question: ‘what is the role of work design in delivering the benefits (or mitigating against the detriments) of radical change occurring in work and society?' It also focuses on the “who” of work, and especially how the population is ageing creating a more mature workforce.