People.Processes.Networks

Strategic human resource workshops organized by EIASM provide a very friendly and constructive atmosphere to present your work in progress and get good feedback. This time we really wanted to get feedback because our papers were at a decisive stage when this was most needed. My colleagues Saša Batistič, Sachiko Yamao and I were lucky to get feedback from some eminent names that were present at the conference. We presented the cocitation paper “The development of HRM-firm performance debate domains: A co-citation analysis” and a social network, international HRM paper ” Interunit Ties and Social Networks of Expatriates in MNCs:Towards a Cross-Level Process Model”. The Reykjavik University, which was hosting the workshop, is instrumental for Iceland’s further development. The country that virtually bursts with geothermal energy is aware of its limited talent pool and tries to do everything to create the best conditions to attract global talent, even shaping the university building as our solar system.

One of my favourite students Saša Batistič has received the University of Ljubljana Prešeren Award for his thesis. This is the most prestigious award for student theses at the University in Ljubljana. He examined the development of academic debate on HRM-firm performance debate using the cocitation analysis. Congratulations Saša!

Saša now moved  to Reading, UK, where he works on his doctoral dissertation - looking at newcomers and their social networks while onboarding in organizations. I am sure we will hear more from Saša…

For the past year I have worked with a team of enthusiastic HR professionals on redesigning/restrucutring the Slovenian HR Association. Last week at the Autumn meeting of Slovenian HR Association we presented our plans & initaitves for the transformation and energized our members to go for it. There were a lot of areas that needed change (i.e., publich ralations, web communications, facilitating more engagement of the members, restructuring the formal bodies) and we hope that our proposals will help the SHRA to serve its members, grow and prosper. You can see the new logo – hope you like it!

A very interesting special issue in EJIM just came out: Knowledge and Learning Networks in Organisations. My colleague Miha Škerlavaj and I were guest editors. We aimed to bring researchers together from different disciplines that applied social networks theories, concepts and/or methodology to study learning and knowledge transfer in organisations. Read more about it in the introduction.

I just spent a great week at ISM University of Management and Economics in Vilnius and Kaunas, Lithuania. The occasion was regular Erasmus exchange – this time my intention was to see how management teaching unfolds in one of the best known schools in the Baltic region. Even though it was terribly cold (close to -20 C) I really enjoyed the hospitality of the school and my host Raimonda, interaction with students and faculty (I gave a lesson on Change Management and HRM and a did research seminar), and two very interesting cities. Raimonda and I also had a couple of very in-depth discussion about our countries, management development and teaching. Our counties seem to have much more in common than one would think.

Together with Miha Škerlavaj, my officemate and great researcher in social networks arena, and Sandra Ohly, a psychologist and colleague of ours from Germany, we published a very interesting paper Networks for generating and for validating ideas: The social side of creativity. It was published in Innovation: Management, Policy & Practice, 12(1), 2010.

Here is the abstract:

In recent years, research has recognized that creativity is a social process. By communicating with others, individuals get access to novel perspectives and unique knowledge, and they can get political support for their ideas by ensuring that they meet others’ standards. Based on the different function of idea-related communication, we expected the structure of idea-generation networks to differ from that of idea-validation networks. Specifically, we expected different effects of leadership status and tenure. Our results indicated some differences in the structure of the two networks. This leads to the recommendation that future research on idea-related communication and creativity needs to distinguish the different phases of the creative process.

Miha, Sanda and I met at the ERC workshop in Groningen a couple of years back, where we have learned have to use ERGM models. In this paper we show that this was very useful.

Being in Melbourne it would be a sin not to visit ACREW at the Monash University. Therefore, Helen de Cieri and I agreed on a research seminar for their doctoral students and faculty. Monash University is only an hour away from University of Melbourne, so I caught a tram and enojeyed the suburbs to Caulfield. It was nice to see Helen again after several years and exchange our views about where we think the fields of HRM and international HRM are going.

I strongly recommend this TED talk about work-life balance. Some of my favourites are: getting to work in jeans can not really be considered work-life balance, going to gym is not being more balanced but more fit, you can not have an ideally balanced day (you should elongate the timeframe upon which we judge the balance in our life). Enjoy.