Research

We prioritise research that has impact and public benefit through collaboration with students, academics, business and local community leaders to tackle social and economic challenges, both regionally and internationally.

As well as partnering with external organisations, many of our projects are with researchers from other disciplines in the University of Suffolk’s other schools and research institutes.

Our research specialisms lie in the following areas:

  • Future of leadership
  • Entrepreneurship
  • HRM / employee relations
  • Individual / institutional behaviour & policy making
  • Work identity: institutional / organisational
  • Consumer behaviour; non-profit organisation marketing
  • Methodologies for organisation research and evaluation

Current research projects and PhD students

Future of leadership     

  • Health leadership
  • Collective leadership.
    • Inter-relations between human and non-human entities in the achievement of collective leadership
    • Unknowingness and distributed leadership
  • Ethics of care and its application in leadership and management
  • Leadership of wicked (complex) problems

Entrepreneurship           

  • Digital legitimation practices. Ways in which digital entrepreneurs build legitimacy at the intersection of digital and non-digital contexts
  • Entrepreneurship, digitalisation and its social impact including digital gendering and digital sustainability, digital ecosystems and entrepreneurial practices in non-occidental contexts
  • Leveraging facilitated training practices in SMEs

HRM / employee relations         

  • Well-being implications of agile working in SMEs – agile working (flexibility in time and place of working) has become increasingly popular. It is often portrayed as having benefits to both employers and employees, but the research has been based on larger organisations.  Our study works with smaller organisations to investigate the implications of agile working for the health and well-being of employees and managers.  [collaboration with the Suffolk Institute of Health & Well-Being]
  • Women growing older in the Workplace – This study explores the experiences of post-menopausal women in the workplace and considers HR implications. The rationale is that this is the first generation of women who, in large numbers, have continued in employment into their 60’s.  It is only just being recognised by organisations that menopause can be a very difficult episode to get through, whereas as previously is was seen as the end of women’s working or public lives.  We are interested in the HR implications of ensuring women’s talents are not lost during the last quarter of their working lives. There are two strands to this:
    • ‘Accelerating Out’ – women who take promotions in the last few years of their working lives, thereby taking on bigger roles
    • ‘Trudging On’ – women who are financially obliged to keep working in their 60’s.
  • The Rainbow Talk: The changing reflective colour of Covid-19 pandemic’s impact on women work-life balance
  • Leveraging facilitated training practices in SMEs

Individual / institutional behaviour & policy making      

  • Organisational and management implications of sustainability
  • Decarbonising the supply chain – implications for management of change [collaboration with the Suffolk Institute of Sustainability]

Consumer behaviour; non-profit organisation marketing             

  • Stakeholder co-creation in branding in non-profits

Methodologies for organisation research and evaluation            

  • Evaluation of Small ‘n’ Cohorts: project funded by TASO (Centre for Transforming Access and Student Outcomes)- using Realist Evaluation to evaluate the outcomes of micro-placements
  • Ethnographic story-telling
  • Paradox: towards a meta theory

Future of leadership     

  • Leadership Styles and their effectiveness in the NHS. A study of Chief Executives in Acute Trusts
  • The Psychology of ESG Leadership
  • What does a decision-making environment that would encourage solutions to wicked problems look like?
  • The impact of the decision-making environment on resolving wicked problems in healthcare

Entrepreneurship           

  • Success factors and Business Sustainability: Experiences of First Generation Black African Immigrant Entrepreneurs in Professional Services in London and East Anglia
  • Assessment of managerial competencies in the survival of micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in developing countries
  • An investigation into the factors that drive the sustainable entrepreneurial practices in the context of innovative technologies in the Bangladeshi Ready-Made Garments (RMG) sector

HRM / employee relations         

  • Recruitment & retention in schools [co-supervised with SSH]

Individual / institutional behaviour & policy making      

  • Sustainable Futures: Sustainability Consciousness [co-supervised with EAST]
  • Post-cyclonic migration in coastal Bangladesh: An unexplored adaptation strategy [co-supervised with EAST]
  • Examining how culture shapes and constrains individual financial investment decisions
  • Mitigation and Adaptation to Climate Change using Noosa (Queensland, Australia) as a case study [co-supervised with EAST]

Work identity: institutional / organisational      

  • Crafting an Academic Identity - experiences of academic managers in UK Higher Education Institutions
  • Cultural challenges facing veterans when transitioning from the military to a civilian working environment
  • How does storytelling influence organisational culture in the higher educational sector?

Consumer behaviour; non-profit organisation marketing

  • Investigating the factors underlying fairness in economic behaviours of consumers is an uncertainty or crisis time. A cross-cultural study [co-supervised with SSH]

Research in leadership and management is supervised by the following staff:

  • Dr Adetola Adekunle
  • Dr Efe Imiren
  • Dr Diane Keeble-Ramsey
  • Dr Ross Kemble
  • Robert Price
  • Dr Laura Reeves
  • Professor Clare Rigg
  • Dr Will Thomas
  • Dr Tom Vine