Vlerick Expertise in People Management & Leadership

Would you prefer your staff to go ice fishing or cast their nets on the high seas? It all depends on what you want to achieve as an organisation. In his doctoral thesis, Bart Verwaeren researched which fishing method leads to more radical innovation and how you can stimulate people to do things the way you want them to. Should you give your people bait or a boat?

This case gives an overview of the diversity evolution that Coca-Cola Enterprises has gone through, and the different phases that the organization knew before reaching an inclusive organizational culture. This gives us the opportunity to encourage a debate regarding inclusive leadership and professional gender equality, specifically meant for women who have the ambition to obtain a middle to senior management position.

We all have to work. However, the key to finding happiness on the job is to feel good at work. There are countless benefits to happiness at work, both for the employee and the company, as scientific research has repeatedly shown. According to "The Happiness Advantage” by the American researcher Shawn Achor, happy employees are up to 31% more productive and their creativity is three times higher. With the support of ESF Flanders, Vlerick Business School and HR service provider Attentia have therefore developed a new tool which wants to promote happiness at work.

Creativity is all about generating as much ground-breaking ideas as possible. You put up idea boxes in the canteen, organise regular brainstorming sessions and your organisation will be brimming with creativity, on the forefront of innovation in no time. Right? Not quite. “Statistics show that only few ideas actually get implemented. Granted, not all ideas are feasible, but implementation often fails because organisations lack a proper innovation process,” explains Professor Katleen De Stobbeleir.

Creative thinking can boost the ability of negotiators to secure the most favourable outcomes when bargaining. Especially when that creativity is linked to their specific skills it may give negotiators a winning edge. But companies need to provide the right mood music to bring out the best in them.

Most mergers, acquisitions or reorganisations continue to fail due to a lack of attention to the human aspect. Getting newly formed teams to work together in an efficient and congenial manner, that is the big challenge. Because these teams face what is known in psychology as a social dilemma: an area of tension between working together to serve the interests of the new group and competition – acting in one’s own interests or those of the old team one used to belong to. As part of her doctorate, Ann-Sophie De Pauw investigated which factors affect cooperation in newly formed teams.

More and more businesses are opting for an open innovation strategy, where they decide to look outside their own organisation and cooperate with research centres, companies or other partners. So far, the human aspect is often overlooked. Promoting open innovation actually requires specific people management practices and an adapted business culture. So how can organisations promote open innovation with the right human elements?

Is there such a thing as ‘the average Belgian CEO’? Apparently, yes. It is somebody who brings people together, who has an international outlook, who is not afraid of hard work and who keeps his promises. Belgian top managers are also valued for their strong ability to compromise. Yet often they are still too modest. This was revealed by a study conducted by Vlerick Business School on behalf of Galaxis and Norman Broadbent.

We know much about organisations when it comes to science. And yet we seem to know almost nothing when it comes to our daily experience. To Change Or Not To Change is an attempt to re-establish the lost link. The book To Change or Not To Change offers a social sciences approach to organisations, building upon the complexity and irrationality of every day practice. It reveals the hidden traps of change management and offers an ironic way for better survival.

This study indicates that emotion regulation can benefit group effectiveness by directly reducing relationship conflict as well as by reducing the chance that task conflict escalates into relationship conflict. Although conflict is closely connected with the emotional life of groups, until now no empirical tests have been conducted on the moderating role that emotion regulation plays between task conflict and relationship conflict.