To develop a sustainable competitive advantage, companies need to offer products and/or services that keep attracting customers. Focusing on operational excellence is one of the strategies companies can adopt in order to do so.
How might compatibility between cognitive style and cognitive climate influence individual job satisfaction and loyalty to employers? A study by researchers at Vlerick Gent Management School shows that employees with a creating-oriented cognitive style (typically intuitive and receptive to change or new ideas) are more likely to want to change jobs if they find the predominantly cognitive climate not to their liking. But those with a knowing-oriented style (logical and objective) or planning-oriented style (structured and orderly) are less likely to make a dash for it. However, cognitive style and cognitive climate appear to have separate influences on people’s attitudes to their work – which means that, regardless of the predominance of one climate over another, understanding those relationships is essential for job design, selection, assessment, training and workforce planning.
Cognitive Styles in Leadership Professor Herman Van Den Broeck talks about cognitive styles to discover strenghts in different leadership styles.
Inspiring a team to go forth and conquer demands more than just forging a common purpose – effective leaders must motivate members at a personal level, too. Teamwork propels competitiveness in today’s companies and teams have become an increasingly popular model for organizing the workplace. But teams are made up of individuals - and this can pose a significant challenge for managers eager to optimize performance by getting the very best out of all their staff. A new study explores how best to manage individuals and the whole team at the same time.
Globalisation, the explosion of technology, rapidly changing laws that keep piling up, increasing consumer demands, takeovers and mergers, periods of crisis… what all these things have in common is that processes of change are becoming increasingly frequent and intense. We have no doubt that organisations are continually subject to change. The question remains how we can best deal with change to obtain a committed change process.
Professor Karlien Vanderheyden, post-doctoral research associate Eva Cools and researcher Ben Lommelen finished a study on cognitive styles in teams, which was funded by the Academic Research Fund. This project investigated the effect of cognitive diversity on team processes and outcomes through two successive studies with experimental team tasks involving 57 teams of management students.
Eva Cools, post-doctoral research associate at Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School, edited a book on cognitive styles, together with Steve Rayner from Oxford Brookes University (UK). This book aims to mark fifteen years of contributions to the field of style research in cognition and learning presented at the annual conference of the European Learning Styles Information Network (ELSIN). The style field is a multidisciplinary, global community made up of researchers in several domains of knowledge including education, psychology, business, computer science, information systems, management, human resources and other related fields.
The Flemish non-profit organisation Arteconomy has developed a method to embed more creativity, more innovative potential and more entrepreneurship into the everyday running of their businesses by bringing businesspeople and artists together in a series of particularly unique projects. This case study, and more specifically arteconomy’s approach, provides relevant material for discussion on change as an organisational process and how to stimulate employees’ creative skills.
The third edition of Organisational Behaviour continues to offer a comprehensive introduction to the theories of Organisational Behaviour within a contemporary European context. This revised edition accommodates new chapters that successfully integrate the latest research and theoretical developments in the field of OB.