Centre for Leadership and Followership Seminar with Prof Fabiola Gerpott (WHU, Germany)

Capturing behavior to understand emergent phenomena: A useful approach?!

Abstract

Many recent conference debates and published papers have called for bringing behavior back into organizational behavior research. In the leadership domain, scholars increasingly conceptualize leadership as a mutual influence process in which leadership is not static but socially constructed through interactions. In this talk, I present insights about task-, relations-, and change-oriented behaviors as predictors of emergent leadership in self-managed teams over the course of their project-related lifespan. More generally, I elaborate on how coding behavior can be used to develop new theoretical and empirical insights in the management field and present further application examples from projects utilizing a range of different behavior coding and measurement approaches.

About the speaker

Dr. Fabiola H. Gerpott holds the Chair of Leadership at the WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management, a leading German business school ranked number 1 in the national Financial Times Ranking for its Master in Finance and Executive MBA programs. She is also an adjunct fellow at Trinity College Dublin and won several teaching awards for delivering her Strategic HRM course in the Master's program. 

Fabiola graduated from a Double PhD program in 2017 with a PhD in Organizational Psychology (VU Amsterdam) and a PhD in Business Administration (Jacobs University Bremen). After working as an assistant professor in Amsterdam and Berlin, she became a tenured full professor in 2019. Fabiola is interested in studying contemporary challenges of leadership (e.g., diversity management, collaboration with AI, emergent leadership), interaction dynamics in organizations, and meta-science research. Her work has been published in leading academic outlets such as the Academy of Management Journal, the Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management Studies, and the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. She currently serves as an Associate Editor for The Leadership Quarterly and is also highly passionate about making her research accessible to practice. As such, she is a regular guest in podcasts, writes for practitioner-oriented journals, and has been recognized as a Top 40 HR Professional by a well-established German HR magazine.