Traveling to different places, specifically attending conferences, is one of the highlights of academic lives.

Doing conferencing right, in my view, is never mainly about your specific presentations. Of course those are also important. It's about having an open mind, listening, learning, embracing different ways, cultures, customs.
And most importantly - meeting people, reconnecting with friends and collaborators, making or deepening meaningful connections, sparking ideas and most definitely: having fun together!

This year's hashtag#CarCon2024 - Academy of Management Careers Division Community Conference, organized by Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU Amsterdam), delivered on all aspects. It was a platform for talking about our #Humanizing Digital Work e-Wanderlust cross-country data collection project on digital nomads: https://lnkd.in/dHm9eAtm, and for my amazing University of Ljubljana, School of Economics and Business PhD students Amadeja Lamovsek, Maša Košak, Jure Andolšek, Blaz Abe to present their work - for the latter three, this was their first international academic conference ever!

Special thanks to Dr. Evgenia Lysova for making us aware of the conference in the first place a while ago, but even more for keeping us very happy and entertained

Happy to take place in one of the largest digital marketing conferences in Slovenia, aimed at practitioners. Speaking about technostress, human sustainability, remote and hybrid work, among other things. 

I'm delighted to let the world know that our #HDW channels on the website: https://humanizingdigitalwork.com/, LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/73449943 and Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/humanizingdigitalwork/ are live and active.

The purpose of #HDW is three-fold:

1) Disseminating knowledge and academic research focused on #HDW in general.
We are strong believers in science and the fact that evidence-based research can improve businesses, how people feel and interact with each other, and ultimately result in a better society. With #HDW, we are aiming to bring this research closer to practitioners and the general public.

2) Diffusing our own research that #HDW from academia to practitioners.
With important content decks, we are contributing to the co-creation of better business, management and organizational behavior in the digitized world.

3) Representing our consultancy
Consultancy related to designing digital jobs and work, organizing for digital, management and leadership in the digitized society.

Happy to announce that the Slovenian Research Agency (ARRS) confirmed our project financing for the next three years. Below is the summary of our project. #organizingdigital #humanizingdigital #organizationaldesign

Digitalization has radically changed the nature and structure of new products and services. The business value of the information technology (IT) literature has regularly highlighted the importance of digitalization aspects of IT capability. However, the backbone of enabling these performance benefits are ‘soft’ factors related to management and organization, which are often neglected in the IT literature. Organizations are essentially designed as multi-level social systems, infused by organizational rules and principles that cover job, unit, organizational and process design.

Organizations have implemented information systems (IS) to introduce innovative work management processes, replace or augment existing human labor, change work procedures, and challenge traditional management practices. Algorithmic management represents oversight, governance and control methods conducted by software algorithms over many remote workers. Initial insights into digitally-mediated labor indicate that algorithmically managed work tends to become granular, temporary, and de-contextualized, thus limiting the creation of permanent ties to employers, organizations, or co-workers. The weakening
of social ties due to algorithmic management is associated with micro- and macro-level challenges, such as alienation and exclusion, which may lead to a wide range of individual, organizational and social repercussions. It is thus imperative to identify working conditions related to design in organizations at multiple levels that would prevent these occurrences, and help enable positive effects of digitalization for individuals and organizations. The objective of the proposed project is to investigate how we can design organizations at multiple levels to develop appropriate digital and managerial capabilities and set up the work context to fully leverage the functionality of technologies in supporting the digitalization process.

The project will be executed through four working packages (WPs) that will ultimately contribute to building a classifying framework of designing for digital that is theoretically rich and application-relevant. We will reveal how individuals can adapt their mindset from digital resistance to digital encroachment when facing the digitized work changes, within the appropriate design setting. As the current digital infrastructures are becoming more complex and technologies are encroaching upon employees, we will focus our research efforts towards understanding the responsiveness of digital and IT infrastructures, how they interact with organizational, unit and job design, and how managers can design jobs and work processes in order to overcome digital encroachment. 

We will propose a novel multi-level and interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological framework for the study of organization and business process design in light of digital transformation. The primary contribution of the project will be transforming the field of research by engaging in novel knowledge production on the topic of algorithmic accountability in order to generate actionable and targeted recommendations and best practices for the managers in how to create, adopt, and adapt IT management systems, with a specific focus on organizational, unit, job and business process design. The ambition of the project resides in its highly multi-disciplinary approach that leverages insights from business/management, psychological, and IT/technological perspectives to address how digitalization can be leveraged for sustainable growth of individuals and organizations.

Our special issue on working in the digitized economy is out. In our introduction to this special issue on the gig economy, we provide some context to how and why this phenomenon should be studied, with a particular emphasis on Human Resource Management. We then describe the four articles that comprise the special issue, and we note some common themes. Our introduction concludes with some suggestions for future research on the gig economy.
KeywordsGig economy
Gig work
Digitized economy
Crowdsourcing
Crowdwork
Independent work
Platform work
Algorithmic control

Summary: In our introduction to this special issue on understanding knowledge hiding in organizations, we provide some context to how and why this phenomenon should be studied. We then describe the five articles that comprise the special issue, and we note some common themes and divergences in this collection. Our introduction concludes with some suggestions for future research on knowledge hiding in organizations.

We got our 'strudel' ready and baked, and published in the latest issue of the Human Resource Management Review. I'm especially happy to be reporting about this publication for two reasons; 1) it's my first real theory paper that got published, and 2) it was published with my two dear friends, Renata Kenda and Saša Batistič from Tilburg University.

Available with free open access here.

Available with free open access here.

As a new approach of promoting our research (the FELU video vault of research projects), initiated by my school, here's a video briefly describing my ongoing research on humanizing innovation. Enjoy!

The only thing better than the contents of the latest issue of the Dynamic Relationships Management Journal, which I'm Editor-in-Chief of, is its fresh new look. Check out all the open access papers here (covering a wide variety of topics ranging from leadership, innovation, entrepreneurship, culture and ethics, risk and trust) and the cover below. Special thanks to our new graphic designer, Patrick Erjavec - Eklipsa. And be sure to submit your paper - next issue is scheduled for November!

Our paper on knowledge hiding, cultural intelligence and individual and team creativity, co-authored by Sabina Bogilović, myself and Miha Škerlavaj was just published in the latest issue of the European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology. Special congrats to the first author, Sabina, on driving the project forward! You can find the abstract below: 

Culturally diverse colleagues can be valuable sources for stimulating creativity at work, yet only if they decide to share their knowledge. Drawing on the social exchange theory, we propose that cross-cultural interactions among individuals from different national backgrounds can act as a salient contingency in the relationship between knowledge hiding and creativity (individual and team). We further suggest, based on the social categorization theory (e.g., the categorization process of “us” against “them” based on national differences), that cultural intelligence enhances the likelihood of high-quality social exchanges between culturally diverse individuals and, therefore, remedies the otherwise negative relationship between individual knowledge hiding and individual creativity. Two studies using field and experimental data offer consistent support for this argument. First, a field study of 621 employees nested among 70 teams revealed that individual knowledge hiding is negatively related to individual creativity and that cultural intelligence moderates the relationship between knowledge hiding and creativity at an individual level. A quasi-experimental study of 104 international students nested in 24 teams replicated and extended these findings by implying that individual knowledge hiding is also negatively related to team creativity. We discuss the implications for practice and future research.

As part of a yearly review issue, our quantitative review paper that looks into how multi-level is leadership research was published in LQ. The paper is co-authored by Saša Batistič from University of Tilburg and Bernd Vogel from Henley Business School, Univ. of Reading. Abstract below and link to summary in Slovene here.

The use of multi-level theories and methodologies in leadership has gained momentum in recent years. However, the leadership field still suffers from a fragmented and unclear evolution and practice of multi-level approaches. The questions of how and to what extent multi-level research has evolved in both leadership phenomena and leadership outcomes, and which informal research networks drove this evolution, remain vastly unexplored. In this study, the extent of literature published between 1980 and 2013 is analyzed using a document co-citation analysis and invisible colleges' framework. This allows us to map the evolution of the multi-level intellectual structure of the leadership field. Specifically, we identify a number of distinct colleges – their conceptualization of leadership and outcomes – and trace their evolution paths over thirty years. We find a considerable fragmentation of the field, with the usage of multi-level leadership conceptualization mostly embraced by more peripheral clusters. Finally we discuss implications for further research with regard to a set of distinct trajectories for the future evolution of multi-level approaches in the leadership domain.

As part of a special issue on HRM and innovation (guest edited by Helen Shipton, Pawan Budhwar, Paul Sparrow and Alan Brown), our paper that looks into the cross-level interplay among knowledge hiding, team mastery climate and job design in stimulating employees' innovative work behavior was just published in HRMJ. This paper also marks the first common publication (hopefully, of many more to come) with Tomislav Hernaus, colleague from University of Zagreb. Abstract below:

This study investigates the multilevel interplay among team-level, job-related, and individual characteristics in stimulating employees' innovative work behavior (IWB) based on the theoretical frameworks of achievement goal theory (AGT) and job characteristics theory (JCT). A multilevel two-source study of 240 employees and their 34 direct supervisors in two medium-sized Slovenian companies revealed significant two- and three-way interactions, where a mastery climate, task interdependence, and decision autonomy moderated the relationship between knowledge hiding and IWB. When employees hide knowledge, a team mastery climate only facilitates high levels of IWB if accompanied by either high task interdependence or high decision autonomy. In the absence of one of these job characteristics, knowledge hiding prevents higher levels of IWB even in the case of strong team mastery climate. The results suggest that multiple job design antecedents are necessary to neutralize the negative influence of knowledge hiding on micro-innovation processes within organizations.

Along with colleagues Saša Batistič (Tillburg University) and Robert Kaše and Ivan Župič from FELU, we've published a paper on the interactive role of HR systems and relational climates in stimulating employee proactivity. Here's the abstract:

​Emphasizing the role of the organizational context and adopting a multilevel approach, we propose that the interplay between HR system configurations and relational climates has a cross-level effect on employee proactive behavior. Using a sample of 211 employees in 25 companies, we show that the laissez-faire context – featuring a combination of a weak compliance HR configuration and a strong market-pricing relational climate – is better suited for fostering employee proactive behavior than the nurturing context, which is characterized by a strong HR commitment configuration and a strong communal-sharing relational climate. We also found that combining a strong HR commitment configuration with a weak communal-sharing climate is associated with more employee proactivity. We discuss what our findings suggest about the interaction between HR system configurations and organizational climate dimensions and about their role in influencing individual-level outcomes.

With colleagues Sut I Wong and Miha Škerlavaj from BI Norwegian Business School, we've published a paper on the antecedents of job crafting in Human Resource Management. Here's the abstract:

Job crafting offers several beneficial organizational outcomes, yet little is known about what makes employees engage in it. In particular, the role of leaders in influencing their subordinates to engage in job crafting has been insufficiently studied. Drawing on role theory, we suggest that the congruence of leader-subordinate autonomy expectations nurtures subordinates’ experiences of having their competences adequately utilized in their jobs. This experience, which involves the competence mobilization of their work roles, subsequently fosters subordinates’ engagement in job-crafting behavior. A two-stage field study of 145 leader-subordinate dyads using cross-level polynomial regression and response surface analysis supported the (in)congruence hypotheses. The results also demonstrated that subordinates’ perceived competence mobilization mediates the relationship between autonomy expectation (in)congruence and job crafting. In addition, leader coalition as a moderator strengthens the effect of perceived competence mobilization as a psychological condition for job crafting. Implications for practice and future research are discussed. ​