With a BA in psychology and statistics, an MA and PhD in Industrial/Organizational Psychology and as a faculty member in the Division of Public Administration and Policy at the University of Haifa since 2007, I have spent my academic career investigating organizational behavior issues within public and private organizations using rigorous quantitative methodologies. My main research focus has been on learning, performance, creativity and well-being of individuals and teams.

 

Individual (micro) level studies

At the individual level, my very first research projects examined factors relating to drinking habits of employees and their stress after dealing with traumatic events. Later I conducted studies on the stress related effects of the firefighters in NYC after 9/11.  Over the years, and thanks to the surrounding environment of the School of Political Science, I have extended this initial research interest to understanding stress of civilians after traumatic events and lately I have been investigated stress related with cyber threats.

 

My interest in the individual's well-being has extended to the examination of employees' creativity and its implications. While a vast amount of the creativity literature focuses on the antecedents of employee creativity, much less is known on the long-term implications employee creativity and innovation have, and regarding how the knowledge employees gain through the creativity process affects them and the organization. In addition, this research on creativity trajectories has led me to investigate additional individual level trajectories such as the factors predicting leadership success trajectories over long periods of time.

 

Team (meso) level studies

At the team level, following my PhD research on team learning processes, such as the briefing-debriefing process, I have been examining the manner in which such processes affect team performance and members’ well-being in both public and private organizations. In addition, as research has found that shared team mental models are the basis for more productive teams I have a number of studies examining the antecedents of such shared mental models such as team leadership, team diversity, team dispersion and team communication.

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Organization/network (macro) level studies

Taking the idea of leading teams to a higher level of analysis, I have recently been involved in a number of network studies, as the conceptual leap done in the past when aggregating individuals into teams has a lot in common with the conceptual leap of aggregating organizations into networks. In these studies, I have been examining the impact of network leadership as well as network characteristics and processes on the network's outcomes and its structure.