Work and Organisational Psychology section

Sustainable employability & Inclusion is one of the central research lines at WOP-Maastricht. The goal of this broad research line is to understand how to create accessible and valuable employment for everyone on the long-term. As such, we study how work and context it occurs in should be designed to prevent harm to people’s ability to function at work and on the labor market. Importantly, this ability encompasses the valued competences people have, their motivation to work, and their health and well-being. These aspects are all shaped by work and work environments that simultaneously determine the access of people with different functional capacities have to employment. 

Accordingly, this research line studies how work can be made inclusive. This means that work should be designed so that everyone – regardless of their demographic characteristics - gets access to employment that is worthwhile for them and society on the long term. WOP-Maastricht, and specifically the Centre of Expertise for Inclusive Organizations, seeks to constantly contribute to creating sustainable employment for all through innovative solutions. 

Check out work by Gemma, Bram, Rosine, Sjir, Ute, and Fred on these topics!

At the micro-level, it is important to know how employees are affected by their working conditions on a day-to-day basis. WOP-Maastricht is therefore greatly interested in studying how daily work demands interact with personal and work characteristics to shape daily recovery and well-being. When employees exert effort at work, it is important that they get a break from work to recover. A central question that we study is therefore what activities people can best engage in to recover optimally from work stress. Part of this is to adequately understand what stress is and what qualities of stressors play a role in how employees are affected.

 Additionally, the timeline over which recovery unfolds or stress and fatigue develop forms an important puzzle in the development of burnout or chronic strain. Here, resilience seems to play a central role as well, which we at WOP-Maastricht approach as the process of reacting to and recovering from negative events. As you can see there is much to be learned in the Work stress & Recovery space. 

Interested? Ute, Miriam, Sjir, Wilken, Bram, Rosine and Fred all work on these topics. 

The Leadership and Teams employees engage with throughout their career have considerable effects on them. Consequently, optimizing team and leader functioning are important topics to study within work and organizational psychology. WOP-Maastricht studies several elements of how teams function to achieve goals, adapt in face of adversity, and interact and coordinate in complex environments using both observational and experimental setups. As leadership plays an important part in team functioning, some studies focus on this component specifically. Especially now that much of the work is done virtually, questions that matter are how teams collaborate across time and place and how one should lead without frequent physical presence.

 Additionally, leadership is also studied as a more general topic to find out what behaviors make leaders effective and who emerges as a leader. One important part of the leadership puzzle is that demographic characteristics like gender may determine access to leadership positions as well as what people expect from a leader. Accordingly, the topic of female leadership is a big part of the Leadership & Teams research line. 

Check out the research by Sjir and Annika on these topics!

A common work demand for many employees is the requirement to regulate themselves at work. Many workplaces do not welcome the display of negative emotions, particularly in service work or customer interactions. This makes the topic of Emotional labor & Self-regulation and interesting specific puzzle in the context of work. In this research line, WOP-Maastricht seeks to unpack various components of the regulation process that employees engage in when experiencing negative emotions. We explicitly approach this as a dynamic phenomenon that cannot be understood separately from the work context it occurs in. Part of this is research on habits and how work and work context affect how well employees can stick to-, maintain, and develop habits they find valuable.

Interested in how emotional labor shapes employees experiences at work and how the environment plays a role in this? Check out the work by Ute, Philippe, and Wilken.

While the work context is crucial, individual employees’ characteristics also play an important role in employee behavior, health, and wellbeing. In the Personality & Mindfulness research line, WOP-Maastricht studies how personality characteristics and mindfulness shape how employees feel and act at and around work. Particularly noteworthy is the research on interventions that aim to promote employees’ mindfulness as it unpacks which interventions do and do not work and why. 

Additionally, WOP-Maastricht studies the conditions under which certain personality characteristics – also the less socially desirable ones – get activated at work. While personality can be thought of as having a relatively stable component, some situations bring out the best or the worst in people. 

Interested in this research? Check out work by Ute & Annika to find out more!

An important part of working is to learn. Especially with the pace of technological change, employees are required to keep updating their competency-set throughout their working lives. Under the research line Learning & Development, WOP-Maastricht studies how employees learn and how they can best be facilitated by organizations to do so. Within learning, informal and formal learning that meet both organizational and individual needs and feedback are crucial. 

By designing those aspects well, employees can be helped to deal with the demands of modern workplaces to prevent adverse outcomes on health and wellbeing. Learning in this sense can explain how employees become more or less sensitive to stress over time. 

Curious? Margje, Wilken, Miriam, and Bram all do research in these areas.