The Chair for Research and Science Management congratulates Dr. Regina Dutz and Dr. Selina Stracke for successsfully defending their dissertations! In what ended up being a premiere event in our chair's history, we had the privilege to listen to two exciting PhD defenses one after another on the same day and, thus, experience the excellence of our colleagues and the breadth of topics at our chair directly.
Dr. Regina Dutz' dissertation contributes crucial insights on the role of gender and gender stereotypes in human resources management (HRM), specifically regarding how organizations attract, select, and develop employees. Integrating the gender and HRM literature in an innovative way, she was able to provide completely new perspectives which allow for a more comprehensive understanding of the role of gender and gender stereotypes in HRM. Her impressive research program builds on a large number of experiments which she conducted in a most rigorous way. Her studies show, for example, how gender stereotyped signals in recruitment material (such as family friendliness) shape applicants’ perceptions of the organization and its employees, how gender stereotyped descriptions of the job or the organization strengthen stereotyped perceptions of applicants, and in what way effects of destructive leadership are gendered. The new insights following from her studies and findings have important implications for researchers as well as practitioners striving for gender equality. To make her findings applicable, Regina has also worked on publications, recommendations, and tools for practitioners. She can be particularly proud that one of her papers is already published in an outstanding journal, i.e., Personnel Psychology, and additional papers are on their best way to being published.
Dr. Selina Stracke defended her dissertation entititled "Teams in the (New) World of Work: How Teams (In)effectively Handle Adversity in the Dynamic World of Work". Her dissertation significantly contributes to team research by providing a more holistic insight of team effectiveness in adverse situations, a dynamic and multilevel phenomenon critical for today's organizational success. The overarching goal of her dissertation was to facilitate a more in-depth understanding of the dynamic nature of both functional (team adaptation) and dysfuntional (collective rumination) team processes that shape team success. In doing so, Dr. Stracke conducted a series of experimental and field studies that (1) provided evidence about how the team adaptation process impacts team performance and how it is impacted by previous adaptation experience, (2) introduced collective rumination, which refers to repetitive and prolonged discussions of shared adversity that center on the negative and uncontrollable aspects of the problematic situation, (3) developed and validated a reliable instrument to capture collective rumination, (4) presented first empirical insight towards the inputs and outcomes of collective rumination, and that (4) offered a first overview of organizational events events that trigger collective rumination. With her work, she has contributed substantially to the international community of team researchers, by presenting her studies at different international conferences, successfully publishing her work, and collaborating with her co-authors on important papers.
We congratulate our outstanding colleagues for their well-deserved achievements!