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Research within IWP focuses on identifying work (and non-work) characteristics and processes that either detract from or enhance job related wellbeing, as well as the impact of interventions to improve employee wellbeing. In IWP, we define wellbeing broadly. In the broadest sense it concerns a context-free state in terms of life in general rather than restricted to a particular setting. Wellbeing can thus be construed as life satisfaction, global happiness etc. A slightly more narrow view on wellbeing relates to life-segments, e.g. financial wellbeing or health. Wellbeing can also be viewed as domain-specific, e.g. ”job-related” wellbeing such as job satisfaction, work engagement or job strain.

Predictors of wellbeing

Several streams of IWP research focus on the predictors of employee wellbeing. This extends from work and organisational characteristics (e.g., workplace safety, technology, organisational climate and culture, leadership, virtual/tele-work) that are related to employee wellbeing, through to behaviours (e.g., communications, silence and voice at work, incivility and bullying, bystander behaviours) that can affect wellbeing.

An area of particular interest concerns people’s emotional behaviours at work. We study how the attempts people make to enhance (and worsen) their and others’ feelings influence the wellbeing of individuals and the teams and organisations they work within, and seek to identify the specific behaviours that are most and least effective for managing others’ feelings. For example, we are developing new measures and paradigms to capture and study people’s ‘interpersonal emotion regulation’ behaviours and to explore their complex effects on wellbeing during dynamic interactions in the workplace. 

Outcomes of wellbeing

Creativity and innovation are key performance indicators for many organisations and our research is consistent with the notion that when individuals experience positive affect at work (so when employees feel, for example, enthusiastic, excited, or inspired) they are prone to think creatively and produce novel and useful ideas in the workplace. In general, we might expect that negative affect (feelings such as distress, anxiety or nervousness) should exert the opposite effect. Actually evidence suggests that, under specific conditions, negative affect can prompt creative outcomes and innovation. We are continuing to explore the range of conditions that shape the link between employee affect and creativity and innovation in the workplace.

The relationship between employee wellbeing and a range of performance indicators has also been a focus of our research in the health sector. For example, our analysis of large data sets in the English NHS has demonstrated that the well-being of NHS staff is positively linked to important outcomes, such as patient perceptions of treatment, to lower staff absence, and to lower patient mortality.

Wellbeing for those outside of work

Whilst much of IWP’s wellbeing research occurs within organisations, other streams of research focus on particular populations such as the unemployed, younger and older workers and also the self-employed and those involved in social ventures. For instance, the research on social venturing examines the extent to which involvement in such work enhances psychological wellbeing (e.g., reduced social isolation, reduced age-based discrimination).

Sustainable return to work for workers with common mental health problems is another key area of interest in IWP. While much attention has been paid to supporting individual workers returning to work, less attention has been paid to how organisations and societal players, e.g. general practitioners, can prevent relapse i.e. that workers who return to work remain and thrive at work despite any reduced work functioning.

Improving wellbeing

Another key question pertains to how such interventions can be integrated into the business side of the organisation, i.e. how such interventions can be integrated in to performance management systems so health and wellbeing is not seen as something separate to sustainable business but rather that employee wellbeing and organisational performance and innovation is seen as two sides of the same coin. Such considerations also include integrating wellbeing perspectives into times of restructuring. When organisations restructure to obtain organisational effectiveness, how can they integrate processes into the overall change process that promote employee health and wellbeing and manage uncertainties associated with change?

A key area of IWP’s research on work and wellbeing concerns participatory organisational interventions that aim to improve employee health and wellbeing through changing the way work is organised, designed and managed.

The participatory nature of organisational interventions to improve employee wellbeing means that the content of actions is agreed as part of the process and not predetermined. This calls for the development of methods that enable organisations to design and implement acceptable and sustainable intervention processes. Furthermore, the focus on process methods highlights the need to evaluate intervention processes and examine how they influence the intervention’s outcomes.

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Our approach to studying leadership builds on emerging academic and practitioner thinking by removing the spotlight from the leaders, and instead focusing on the processes and conditions conducive to effective leadership and followership. Our research is rooted in the premise that leaders, followers and contextual factors may act as either positive or negative multipliers in the relationship between resources and outcomes in organisational settings. We thus endeavour to explore and understand the complex dynamics that shape the outcomes of leadership efforts at the dyadic, team and organisational levels, and in the process develop a set of tools and resources to aid individuals and organisations in realising positive synergies among people and between people and processes. 

Welfare and wellbeing

In line with our IWP ethos, our leadership-related research projects place great value on promoting the welfare and wellbeing of employees, treating leadership not only as a factor in productivity and innovation, but as a facilitator for personal development and thriving. Our projects have explored the link between leadership and constructs such as work-family balance, wellbeing, burnout, emotional exhaustion and thriving, taking into account various contingency and boundary factors. We further endeavour to capture the dynamics of leadership processes by looking at individual, relational and team-based factors in shaping the nature and outcomes of positive leadership efforts.               

Leadership training and development

Another area of IWP’s research on leadership concerns leadership training and development, and its antecedents and outcomes.  In IWP we focus on how sustainable leadership behaviours can be trained to ensure employee health and wellbeing. A particular focus is on the contextual factors that may influence the extent to which leaders change behaviours as a result of training. For example, perceptual differences, such as the extent to which leaders and employees agree or disagree in their perceptions of the working climate and their leaders’ behaviours prior to training, are likely to influence leaders’ willingness to change as a result of training. We complement our intervention-based projects with research that explores leader development through an identity perspective, thus adding to the understanding of longer term processes that contribute to the emergence and advancement of leaders in teams and organisations. 

Teamworking

Our research on teams extends beyond the role and effects of leadership to include team development and investigate factors influencing team dynamics and outcomes at the individual team-member and the collective levels. One stream of work aims to provide students with a repertoire of verbal behaviours that they can use in teamworking situations. This is done by giving students feedback on how often they use specific verbal behaviours during teamworking situations, along with advice on how they can adopt new behaviours in the future. A short-cycle approach to providing feedback is adopted, involving the systematic collection of real-time data from the observation of dyadic or group interactions, and the use of that data as a feedback mechanism to guide the future behaviour of those observed.

Future themes

Looking ahead, we will continue to build our strengths in our core areas of interest in the leadership and teamworking domains and extend our reach through ambitious projects that build on expertise and values. We are developing projects to look at the role leaders and teams play in promoting and sustaining mental health, and how leader training for building awareness on mental health can promote early intervention and better outcomes for individuals with mental health problems. Other areas of interest include leadership self-efficacy, evaluation of leader development programs, the role of emotion and relationship motivations in leader-follower, leader-team and within-team interactions, attitudes toward followership and followership skills, and team diversity. 

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With increasing demands and less resources, organisations across all sectors are facing the challenge of enhancing their creativity, innovation and effectiveness in order to meet their goals. Creativity is defined as the generation of novel and potentially useful ideas while innovation is considered to also include the implementation of those ideas to create new products, services, processes or other valued changes. The extant literature is often fragmented in focusing only on certain parts of the innovation process therefore IWP research is involved in mapping and integrating the complex psychological underpinnings across all the various stages of the innovation process. We are also interested in studying creativity at multiple levels, from individual, group and organisational perspectives.

We are focusing in particular on four key topics:

Understanding the cognitive, affective and social processes impacting creativity

The creativity of groups and individuals involves an intricate interplay of factors and our research explores the roles that these factors can play. We use a wide range of methods including experiments, surveys, interviews and diary studies and these have already uncovered many interesting findings.  

Our research has found that forcing groups to multitask--alternating between problems--can enhance idea generation performance, most likely via overcoming fixation induced by group interaction. We also examined the key difficulties associated with the semantic search process in creative problem solving. The findings are allowing us to develop more effective interventions to enhance creative thinking. Furthermore, our studies have found that off-task breaks which facilitate collaboration between individuals, lead to an increase in the quality of creative outputs post-break and that creative performance changes over the course of the day (for instance, student groups are more creatively productive around the lunchtime period). In the workplace, we find that employees’ generation of new ideas is more influenced by individual factors but that implementing those ideas is more affected by social and organisational issues.  

Leadership

The importance of leadership is alluded to elsewhere in our IWP strategy but in this Theme we are particularly looking at identifying the mechanisms by which leader behaviours and relationships with followers can influence creativity and innovation in the workplace. Classical theories of leadership are being shown to be inadequate in dealing with the complexities of managing the extended innovation process. One particularly interesting area we are investigating is ambidextrous leadership, which proposes that alternate leadership styles are needed for different innovation stages. Investigations of how a person’s creative style relate to their leadership style are also being tackled.

Intra- and inter-organisational collaborations for innovation

Innovation is rarely conducted by the individual in isolation hence there is a need to understand the barriers to, and facilitators of, collaboration during the different stages of the innovation process. One explicit context we are investigating is the water sector, where we are examining cross-boundary collaborations between water utilities, supply-chain organisations, users and policy-makers. We have found that more successful collaborations come from situations where there is a shared vision, inclusion of different stakeholder voices, high trust and clear roles and responsibilities. Given the rise of remote working, we are further exploring the use of technology in promoting (or hindering) innovation in virtual teams and the influence of new ways of working.

Developing CLEAR IDEAS and other interventions to enhance creativity and innovation

Our passion for using research to help practice means our emergent evidence base is being used to create strategies and interventions for enhancing the creativity and innovation capabilities of organisations and the people who work in them.  

Despite research indicating that a fifth of UK organisations engage in some form of creativity or innovation training there is relatively little research evaluating the effectiveness of those activities in the workplace. IWP research on this topic has led to the creation of an innovation development model called which develops in trainees the knowledge and skills required to both generate and implement new ideas. We have produced two types of interventions based on this model in order to generate impact: training workshops and software apps. We are evaluating the impact of these different interventions in the workplace and identifying individual, social and environmental moderators of their impact. Another intervention we are working on in collaboration with the company Creative Creatures is developing a psychometric measure of creative style for use in organisational contexts.  

Example publications

In our research, we seek to develop theory that explains the phenomenon of organizing. We unpack the multi-level processes which explain how organizations manage dualities for stability and change, including organizational learning, organizational change, rule breaking, routines and path dependence. As well as exploring practices, dynamics and interactions within and between layers in organisations, we are also interested in detailing inter-organisational relationships. We study the complexity of organizations through a variety of methods, including surveys, interviews, longitudinal ethnographic approaches and agent-based modelling. The evidence we gather is also used to guide practice in enhancing organisational life and performance. Our key foci for inquiry include the following areas:

Management practices and organisational performance

Extensive efforts are put into Human Resource Management practices such as recruitment, training, appraisals and rewards. We are interested in exploring how these practices individually and in combination can relate to different aspects of organisational performance and under what conditions. For example, our studies of hundreds of UK organisations have shown that empowering employees leads to bottom-line improvements in financial productivity and that better team training practices are related to higher levels of financial and innovation performance.  

Organisational learning

We are interested in how organisations acquire, share, store and apply their learning and also the ways in which this is reflected in their routines. Our research has indicated that organisations with greater levels of organisational learning demonstrate better performance and we are unpacking the mechanisms by which this occurs. In studies of policing organisations in ten European countries, we found that cross-border sharing of knowledge was influenced by a complex mix of social, technological and political factors.  Using agent-based modelling, we are also investigating how learning can shape the evolution of organisations.   

Organisational change and development

Change is endemic to the lifecycle of an organisation and we are interested in how changes occur and impact on institutions and the people who work in them, both from a theory and practice perspective. Furthermore, we are exploring the role of Organisation Development in planning interventions to introduce and support change.  For example, our research has investigated inter-organisational development in complex systems in the healthcare context. Within this perspective, we are also interested in Social Constructionist approaches to understanding ‘organisation’ and the practices of organising and managing change.

Culture and Climate

An important lens through which we investigate organisations is through their culture (shared beliefs and values that shape employee perceptions, attitudes and behaviours). In the healthcare context, for instance, we have explored how culture influences safety protocols and care for the elderly. An allied topic is assessing and evaluating the impact of organisational climates (shared employee perceptions of various aspects of the organisation). Our research has developed a widely-used Organizational Climate Measure (OCM) which has shown that climate dimensions such as welfare, supervisory support, innovation and flexibility and performance feedback significantly relate to subsequent firm productivity.   

Voice and silence in organisations

Organisations rely on employees sharing information with managers so that decisions can be made in a timely manner.  However, the upward sharing of information can be problematic owing to organisational expectations about who has access to the best and most accurate information. The act of sharing information that may differ from or challenge information held by managers and leaders is known as voice, and underpins other organisational phenomena such as organisational learning, job satisfaction and employee wellbeing. As a result, it is important to understand the extent to which employees feel able to tell managers about things that could make a difference.  Where employees feel unwilling or are discouraged from sharing information with managers, it could be said that a culture of silence exists within the organisation. The topic of voice and silence can be viewed from an individual, group, organisational and contextual perspective and provides a useful and insightful perspective from which to consider a range of organisational situations.

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The Learning, Education and Development research theme focuses on the identification of learning needs, the design and delivery of learning interventions, and the evaluation of their impact. This learning cycle, combined with a quality improvement cycle process, can be applied to enhance performance at individual, organisational and national levels.

Researchers within LEAD have been involved with many successful projects across a wide range of sectors including: aerospace, automotive, construction, defence, education, energy, finance, health, international development, IT, media, pharmaceuticals, policing, retail, safety, and telecoms. These researchers have also published widely producing numerous commissioned reports, books and articles which are listed in the sections below.

If you would like to discuss any of these projects or explore how we might help and support your initiatives and interventions we would be delighted to speak with you.

Learning

Learning involves a relatively permanent change of knowledge, attitude or behaviour occurring as a result of formal education or training, or as a result of informal experiences. Individual learning is often an instinctive natural process which is particularly noticeable in the curiosity and excitement of young children when they explore something new. Similarly, adults recognise the benefits of learning to enhance their understanding and help them progress in the workplace and in their personal lives. Organisations also need to learn continuously to ensure that they do not become obsolete or be overtaken by competitors. Finally, nations need to learn and develop their human capital in order to be economically successful and provide the resources to support their care systems, hospitals, education institutions, infrastructure etc.

Below, we provide a short overview of the role of learning in: change and organisational development; education and training; human resource development and international development; and knowledge management.

Change and Organisational Development

Charles Handy (1990: p44) said: “If changing is as I have argued – only another word for learning, then the theories of learning will also be the theories of changing. Those who are always learning are those who can ride the waves of change and who see a changing world as full of opportunities – not dangers.”

Change and organisational development involve learning and practical application. Through detailed research, benchmarking, identification of best practice and carefully considered interventions, organisations can remain ahead of the curve and provide sustainable outcomes for all their stakeholders.

Education and Training

“In a global economy where the most valuable skill you can sell is your knowledge, a good education is no longer just a pathway to opportunity – it is a pre-requisite. The countries that out-teach us today will out-compete us tomorrow” (President Barack Obama, 24 February 2009). Education and training provide the main formal routes to the development of human capital and enable individuals, organisations and nations to operate more effectively and efficiently. Moreover, higher levels of education and training help individuals to have better life satisfaction, civic engagement and better perceived health (OECD, 2011). Full-time educational programmes and in-house training courses provided by IWP have contributed to many successful careers; improved organisational performance and are respected internationally.

Human Resource Development and International Development

People are the most important resource within organisations and where they are supported and encouraged to learn there is a strong correlation with successful organisational performance. By investing in human capital through learning, education and development strategies, organisations improve their competitive advantage and develop more engaged and motivated employees. In addition, the development of learning organisations enables a systematic approach to enhance the mechanisms for companies to be productive and profitable. 

Knowledge Management

Knowledge is the most important resource in modern economies and the process for creating and transmitting this knowledge is through learning. Successful learning organisations have developed their abilities to: create, capture, communicate and apply knowledge and ensure that this is delivered in a timely manner. In this way, they grow their know-how and constructively impact on the marketplace; as Francis Bacon (1597) maintained: “Action is power; and its highest manifestation is when it is directed by knowledge.”

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