10th Industrial and Organisational Psychology Conference (IOP)

Pre-Conference Workshops will be held on Wednesday 3 July 2013 at the Perth Convention & Exhibition Centre.  All workshops run for 3.5 hours which includes a 30 minute refreshment break.  Attendance at Pre-Conference Workshops is not included in your registration fee, bookings should be made through the main registration form.

Registration fees for each pre-conference workshop are as follows:

Workshop 1: Leading value creation - organisational science, bioinspiration and the Cue See model

Dr Matt Barney (Founder & CEO, Leaderamp, USA)
9am – 12:30pm

Psychology and other organisational science-related disciplines have important implications for improving the creation of value for a variety of stakeholders. Value creation is central to every species’ ability to survive and reproduce, and for homo-sapiens, we create value collaboratively in organisations. Consequently, models of value creation have an especially important role to play as organisations strive to realise their purposes.

The workshop will review the Cue See model that combines theory from Psychology, Strategy, Engineering, Marketing and Finance to support value creation. The workshop will begin by underscoring the importance of value creation from prehistoric times to the present before introducing the Cue See Model. Participants are encouraged to come to the session with a specific application in mind, and will work on applying the Cue See model to their specific business challenge.

Once the Cue See model is understood and applied to participant’s organisations, bioinspiration will be introduced as one resource for innovative ideas that, when directed at the bottlenecks and constraints, may be a source of competitive advantage. Participants will leave with a better understanding of value chains, and an action plan to make improvements in their organisation.

Workshop 2: Helping employees to recover from job stress: A workshop linking research and organisational practice

Prof Sabine Sonnentag (University of Mannheim, Germany)
9am – 12:30pm

Many employees are facing increased job stress leading to elevated strain levels. To stay well and healthy in such a situation, it is important to reduce elevated strain levels through recovery processes during off-job time. This workshop aims at familiarising participants with the recovery concept and to elaborate on ways how this concept can be applied to organisational practice. Specifically, in the workshop I will give a short overview on recovery research. Based on the research evidence, workshop participants will be invited to reflect briefly about their own approach to recovery and to develop personalised intentions about how to improve their own recovery processes. The main part of the workshop will focus on the question of how organisations can support their employees’ recovery processes. We will discuss several entry points for such organisational action. During the workshop, a particular emphasis will be put on working-away-from-home settings where recovery is particularly important but may be also particularly difficult.

Workshop 3: Methods and designs for cross-cultural research

Prof Kwok Leung (City University of Hong Kong)
9am – 12:30pm
 
As the world is globalising, cross-cultural research is becoming important, but this type of research is confronted with a number of methodological challenges not commonly encountered in conducting single-nation studies. This workshop provides a systematic review of such methodological challenges and proposes effective strategies to overcome them. I will begin with an overview of the single most important validity threat of cross-cultural research: Inequivalence. For empirical results of a comparative study to be meaningful, constructs, research methods, and participants have to be equivalent across cultures. Many factors give rise to inequivalence in constructs, methods, and participants across nations. These causes as well as the solutions for ensuring equivalence will be discussed, including the relevant statistical procedures. In addition, a major weakness of cross-cultural research is its correlational nature, which makes it hard to assess causal claims. A number of strategies for strengthening causal inferences in cross-cultural research will be presented, including statistical, design, and quasi-experimental approaches. The method and design issues that are particularly important for cross-cultural research in an applied setting will be discussed. The workshop will also cover some key issues in intercultural interaction, and how research can shed light on facilitating effective intercultural interaction.

Workshop 4: Applying what we know to create healthy workplaces

Dr Cristina Banks (President, Lamorinda Consulting LLC, USA)
1:30pm – 5pm

Much is already known about factors that have a positive effect on employee health and well-being, but very little of this knowledge is organised and integrated into a coherent strategy for creating healthy workplaces. Researchers and practitioners from a vast array of fields have contributed to this knowledge, and only now are we beginning to integrate the research literature and compile proven applications which organisations can use to redesign and reconceptualise work settings and worker behaviour. This workshop gives participants first-hand experience with 20 compelling research findings and 10 of the strongest evidence-based practices in health-promoting organisations. Participants will be briefed on this state-of-the-art knowledge, and then work in teams through a structured exercise which will enable them to practice integrating what is known into a coherent strategy. Once a strategy is formulated, each team will identify obstacles to the implementation of their strategy, and then detail ways to gather evidence for demonstrating its impact in target organisations.

Workshop 5: Understanding the relation of leadership to individual, team, or organisational performance: Effects of time perspective, implicit leadership theories, and levels of analysis.

E/Prof Robert Lord (Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of Akron, USA)
1:30pm – 5pm

This workshop addresses several reasons (time lags, diffusion of effects, team and bottom-up processes, and analysis at the person rather than the event level) that make it difficult to understand the effects of leadership actions on performance. Time perspective will also be emphasised, and it will be argued that most leadership measures look backwards at past leadership behaviour; whereas, leadership effects on performance involve processes that move towards the future. Qualitative differences between enacting future behaviour and remembering past behavior will be analysed in terms of entropy related and entropy reducing processes. Looking backwards will be analysed in terms of the operation of semantic memory and episodic memory. Level of analysis issues will also be considered. Attendees will gain experience in developing forward-oriented leadership theory, implicit leadership theory measurement, understanding the role of affect on encoding and remembering behaviours, and assessing differences among events.

Workshop 6: Power and influence within organisations

Prof Talya N. Bauer (Cameron Professor of Management, Portland State University, USA)
1:30pm – 5pm

The purpose of this workshop is to expose participants to skills needed to stimulate, influence, and lead others to achieve both personal and organisation goals. Organisations were once designed with the underlying assumption of centralised decision making: Bureaucratic structures, jobs simplified to remove decision making from workers, and managers who saw their roles as telling workers what to do. The complexity of modern organisational environments makes such an approach obsolete. To survive, organisations must be flexible and decentralised and thus, by definition, must rely more on employee input in decision making and work processes. In other words, managers need to learn new skills to be able to accomplish organisational goals through employees as well as employees’ needs to influence upward. Participants will engage in self-assessments, exercises, role plays, and discussions.