Speaker: Professor Nina Granqvist (Aalto University School of Business)
Hosted by: University of Liverpool Management School's Work, Organisation and Management Group
Open to: WOM Group staff and students, with no sign up needed
Date: Wednesday 14 February 2024
Time: 1:30-3pm
In person: Rendall Building - Lecture Theatre 8
Abstract
Experiences of group engagement have a significant influence on performance and members’ satisfaction with work. In temporally uncertain settings however, unpredictable transitions between idle and busy periods disrupt members’ immersion.
Through an ethnographic study of storm chasing teams in Tornado Alley, we investigate how groups foster engagement with temporally uncertain work.
We found that while efficiently structuring and coordinating time helped groups get to storms, it could exacerbate the difficulty of engaging and disengaging across transitions.
We develop a process model showing how groups switch between forms of temporal work to facilitate transitions – enabling experiences of temporal control through broadening focus and compressing duration in idle-to-busy transitions, and immersive durations through extending duration and narrowing focus in busy-to-idle transitions.
This permits engagement across episodes of uncertain work where anticipated encounters are brief, unpredictable, and interrupted.
We contribute by developing a temporal perspective to engagement at work, showing how groups set and experience the temporal context within which they encounter tasks and how this permits or constrains engagement.
We also advance a durational perspective on uncertain work in organizational temporality, founding how experiences of duration represent a key concern and a core aspect to be accounted for and managed in organizations.
Speaker
Nina Granqvist is Professor at the Aalto University School of Business. Her research focuses on how new markets emerge and develop in contexts such as quantum computing, nanotechnology, food trends and impact investing.
She explores the forms of agency and collective action included in such transitions of ideas, trends and technologies from margins to mainstream.
Theoretically, her work draws on and contributes to our understanding of institutions, market categorization, temporality, valuation, and language in organizations and markets.
Her research has been published in Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Organization Studies, and Journal of Management Studies, among others.
She has received Organization Studies Best Paper Award also known as Roland Calori Prize and EGOS Best Paper Award for the studies that examine the emergence of nanotechnology. She was chosen as the Scholar of the Year at Aalto University School of Business in 2017.
In terms of academic service, she is a senior editor for Organization Studies and a member of the editorial board of Academy of Management Journal, Organization Theory, and the Research in the Sociology of Organizations.
She acts as a group leader of market activities in the Finnish Quantum Flagship and is a member of the OECD Global Forum on Technology expert focus group on quantum technologies.
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