P. Matthijs Bal- PhD
- Professor (Full) at University of Lincoln
P. Matthijs Bal
- PhD
- Professor (Full) at University of Lincoln
About
209
Publications
195,469
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
8,390
Citations
Introduction
Current institution
Publications
Publications (209)
This conceptual paper discusses the impact of neoliberal ideology on Human Resource
Development (HRD). We explain the ways through which neoliberalism, as a politicaleconomic ideology, has influenced the HRD literature. We postulate a particular focus on
instrumentality and individualistic self-reliance. Through a methodical review of the
literatur...
This article presents a fictional narrative about Professor Sackker, the solitary researcher in the field of Sackker Studies, once known as Management and Organizational Studies. Despite its absurdity, the story portrays Sackker’s dominance, marked by his inevitable rise with recordbreaking publications and citations, stifling competition, and leav...
This chapter discusses the impact of automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI) within the workplace. To understand the psychological impact of technology at work, we describe and analyze four fantasies of robotization and AI. According to these fantasies, AI will replace human employees, technology and AI will save humanity, robotization, and AI...
This paper introduces the concept of fictional science to the field of Organizational Behavior. We outline its necessity and the intended benefits for the field. Organizational Behavior is a scientific discipline which has limited experience with imaginative reasoning in the field and, thus, the envisioning of what could be, and how workplaces coul...
Ideally, the academic publication process should be meritocratic, fair, and open to diverse groups of researchers. Yet, many scholarly disciplines are far from this ideal. To investigate the extent and nature of overrepresentation in management and organizational research, we examined 60-year publication trends in three closely related subfields: M...
This article presents a fictional narrative about Professor Sackker, the solitary researcher in the field of Sackker Studies, once known as Management and Organizational Studies. Despite its absurdity, the story portrays Sackker’s dominance, marked by his inevitable rise with record-breaking publications and citations, stifling competition, and lea...
This article presents a fictional narrative about Professor Sackker, the solitary researcher in the field of Sackker Studies, once known as Management and Organizational Studies. Despite its absurdity, the story portrays Sackker’s dominance, marked by his inevitable rise with record-breaking publications and citations, stifling competition, and lea...
This entry describes the notion of ideology in Organizational Psychology. It discusses the strange absence of the term in the field, and provides seven ways through which ideology can be studied in the field. The entry continues to discuss ideology as fantasy construction as introduced by the philosopher Slavoj Žižek, which presents the most 'psych...
This entry discusses Organizational Citizenship Behaviors (OCB), which is usually defined as employee voluntary and self-initiated behaviors that benefit organizational functioning. The entry discusses the ways through which OCB has emerged in the literature, how it has been conceptualized and used, and how neoliberal ideology has infiltrated the c...
This paper investigated elite maintenance in the field of management and how early career researchers are taught to behave to become part of the elite. We develop insights into how the elite reproduces itself through socializing subsequent generations of scholars into the norms and hegemonic practices of the elite. Through analysis of sessions for...
Sustainable career development is a great priority for organizations, governments and individuals alike. Facing the grand challenges of our global world, careers and their development have to be re-designed to incorporate more sustainable ways of living and working. However, most work around sustainable careers is centered around neoliberal modes o...
This Encyclopedia of Organizational Psychology brings together 144 entries written bij 190 authors on a wide variety of established concepts in the field, but also upcoming, underrecognized and undervalued topics, theories and scholars in the field.
Ideally, the academic publication process should be meritocratic, fair, and accessible to diverse groups of researchers. Yet, many scholarly disciplines are far from this ideal state. To investigate the extent and nature of authorship inequality in management and organizational research, we compared the 60-year publication trends of three closely r...
In this article, we critique and extend Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital to develop
the new concept of total diaspora cultural capital. We build on the limitations of cultural capital, which in the Bourdieu theory centre on materiality and class perpetuation. The article builds on an extensive review of the literature, using the PRISMA framewo...
This article provides a compilation or, rather, composition of the position statements by the participants of the panel discussion at the first International Conference on Critical and Radical Humanist Work and Organizational Psychology, held from the 11 th to the 13 th of July 2022 at the University of Innsbruck. Unlike the loosely sewn together "...
This paper examines absurdities in contemporary society and workplaces. Absurdity arises from the absence of rationality, where observed human practices paradoxically veer away from official discourse and institutional rhetoric. Absurdity does not exist in a vacuum but is penetrated by and hypernormalized through internalized societal ideologies. H...
In this piece we respond to a contentious piece of Donald Siegel in the Journal of Management Studies in 2022 on Responsible Management.
Rapid political‐economic changes in recent decades have led to increasingly insecure youth labour markets and the weakening of state protections, resulting in growing precarisation for young people. This article examines how student‐workers from post‐1992 UK universities on zero‐hour contracts in hospitality experience insecuritisation and societal...
In this editorial, we tell the story of how the Special Issue on Critical Perspectives in Work and Organizational Psychology (CWOP) came about, how it fits within the broader agenda of building a critical community within Work and Organizational Psychology, and how future research and thought may be inspired by the collection of critical papers rel...
In this chapter, the ideological underpinnings of absurdity and its normalization are explored. First, the chapter discusses a psychology of absurdity in order to understand the functioning of absurdity within the individual psyche. Furthermore, the chapter discusses how the fantasmatic investment in and internalization of absurdity enable individu...
Workplace inequality is an ongoing employment and social problem. Attempts in human resource management (HRM)-related fields to explain the contributory factors to inequality have stabilized, legitimized, and perpetuated the unquestioning adoption of equality, diversity, and inclusion practices in staff hiring, training and development, pay, and re...
The final chapter brings the chapters together and discusses the red threads and lessons learned from the various chapters and case studies. In particular, it summarizes the observations and findings from the various empirical contributions in the book and synthesizes these contributions into new understandings of absurdity, the abnormal, and its n...
This chapter fuses critical institutionalism and literary analysis, along with autobiographical autoethnographic anecdotes, to formulate an account of absurdity in the English public sector. The lesser-known work of the renowned Polish satirist Sławomir Mrożek ‘Chocolates for the Director’ (original: Czekoladki dla Prezesa) is explored and utilized...
This chapter discusses the theoretical foundations of absurdity in contemporary society and workplaces. Absurdity arises from the absence of rationality, where observed practices paradoxically veer away from official discourse and institutional rhetoric. We discuss the definitions, dimensions, and foundations of absurdity and integrate it into an u...
Numerous scandals and miscarriages of justice in the UK illustrate how, despite catastrophic failures, organizational and political leaders are rarely held to account for the harms they have caused. This chapter will use the lens of hypernormalization to theorize this problem of impunity. It will explore how compelling narratives and complex bureau...
This chapter presents four steps through which resistance to hypernormalization emerges: problematizing, resisting, imagining, and transforming. We contribute to the literature by showing how these four steps may offer a way out of hypernormalization in society and workplaces. First, problematization is needed in society and workplaces to expose ab...
This chapter discusses the way in which race relations and discrimination have been hypernormalized in contemporary society. With globalization and overwhelming evidence of increased productivity when a diverse workforce is in place, it is paradoxical to notice the difficulties in linking practices and rhetoric in organizations with such evidence....
This chapter introduces the book and discusses the main background, literature, and theories that the authors draw upon. It highlights the various domains in contemporary life, in society, and in workplaces that can be described as absurd. Moreover, the chapter lays out the case for the need to write about absurdity and understand how absurdities a...
This chapter discusses the absurdity of the climate transition that never happened. After briefly reviewing the history of awareness of climate change and the historical movements that have emerged and raised attention to the necessity of climate action (e.g., Club of Rome), the chapter follows with a more recent overview of the various societal dy...
Critical Theory (CT) has recently become one of a growing number of important areas attracting worldwide academic attention. Its primary focus has been/is the liberation of people from conditions and technologies of enslavement in contemporary work and society. Given Future of Work and Organizational Psychology's (FoWOP's) identification with simil...
This chapter explores the role of workplace dignity in individualization of work arrangements. It does so by problematizing some aspects of ideals which have not yet been discussed before, including the differences from its 'competitor' job crafting, the mythical properties underpinning the ideal as ideal, and the role of ideology underpinning idea...
Research goals and why the work was worth doing: The aim of this contribution is twofold: First, we will present several networks, and initiatives deriving therefrom, concerned with researcher mental health that members of the EAOHP community may be interested in learning about, joining, and/or collaborating with. Specifically, we will briefly pres...
Research goals and why the work was worth doing: Academia is in crisis. Numerous studies show that academics worldwide suffer from enormous workloads, health problems, stress, and burnout. However, there is still a dearth of knowledge on how academic workplaces can be designed and organized to sustainably protect academics’ well-being. The current...
People in contemporary society are increasingly being addressed as agentic individuals who are held responsible for personal aspects of their life and beyond. These personal aspects contain the design and organization of one’s life path in terms of, e.g., (lifelong) education, work and retirement planning, health care, work-life balance, and happin...
The current study investigated employees' weekly responses to experienced job insecurity. Based on appraisal theory, it was postulated that employees may adopt three coping strategies in response to job insecurity (i.e., remaining silent, adapting, or being proactive) in order to maintain or improve their weekly well-being. We introduced a multilev...
Sustainability has become an increasingly popular concept in relation to contemporary organizational life. The current paper reviews the concept of sustainability in relation to Human Resource Management [HRM] and poses the question whether HRM can become truly sustainable. Analyzing the notion of sustainability as an empty concept, this paper sear...
In their timely piece, Rogelberg, King and Alonso (2022) eloquently elaborated the reasons why I-O science experiences difficulties in reaching the public and presented the tactics of how I-O psychologists could elevate scientific findings to the broader masses. Undoubtedly, there is a growing need for advancing the overall communication and repres...
Due to the demographic change in age, societies, firms, and individuals struggle with the need to postpone retirement while keeping up motivation, performance, and health throughout employees’ working life. Organizations, and specifically the Human Resource Management (HRM) practices they design and implement, take a central role in this process. B...
In dit artikel analyseer ik absurditeit op de werkvloer, en met specifieke aandacht voor de absurditeiten die zich manifesteren in werk sinds het uitbreken van de Covid-19 pandemie. Absurditeit ontstaat in de afwezigheid van het rationele, en waarbij geobserveerde praktijken fundamenteel haaks staan op de retoriek en officieel discours ten opzichte...
This paper introduces a socio-economic perspective on the relationships of idiosyncratic deals (i.e. i-deals) with motivation to continue working beyond retirement. On the basis of work adjustment theory, we expected that i-deals enable employees to engage in innovative behavior and professional development, through which they experience more work...
Orientation: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has caused a ‘coronafication’ of research and academia, including the instrumentalisation of academic research towards the demands of society and governments. Whilst an enormous number of special issues and articles are devoted on the topic, there are few fundamental reflections on how t...
The study explains the goals’ based formation of relational PC (objective-1) differently for younger
and older workers at shorter and longer tenures (objective-2). Hypotheses were developed lensing
through SPF and PC theories. Moderated moderation of tenure by age on association between
workers’ goals and relational contract were tested using multi...
Purpose
This paper contains a meta-analysis of the psychological contract literature published in the last two decades. The aim of this paper was to investigate the moderating role of national culture in the individual-level relationships between psychological contract breach (PCB) and two important work outcomes, namely job performance (in-role an...
Stress, anxiety, depression, and similar emotional and psychological inhibitors may negatively impact employee well-being and dignity (Bal, 2017), quality of work-life (Morris & Madsen, 2007) and overall organizational performance. These inhibitors may be produced through events such as structural or procedural changes, tensions emanating from dimi...
In psychological contract research, the side of the supervisor is strongly underexposed. However, supervisors are responsible for maintaining relationships with both their subordinates and senior management and are likely to be influenced by events unfolding in these relationships. In this study, we state that supervisor well-being may be affected...
In this piece, I want to address a relatively controversial and sensitive topic, which may seem to be somewhat farfetched, and deals with the question whether eminent (and often older, senior or retired) academics should stop publishing in academic journals. While this question may seem to be somewhat ludicrous to those who never reflected on the i...
This paper discusses the relationships between fiction and working lives by exploring the roles of empathy and sustainability in how people read and perceive fiction in relation to their own private and working lives. The paper problematizes some notions manifesting within these relationships by discussing how ideology infiltrates both the understa...
• Purpose: Scholarly and general interest in sustainable careers is flourishing. Sustainable careers are focused on the long-term opportunities and experiences of workers across dynamic employment situations, and are characterized by flexibility, meaning, and individual agency. The current paper analyzes and challenges the underlying ideological as...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore the macroeconomic factors that may moderate the psychological contract breach (PCB) and work outcome relationship.
Design/methodology/approach
This study conducted a meta-analysis based on data from 134 studies.
Findings
The study revealed that the inflation rate and the unemployment rate of a count...
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the macroeconomic factors that may moderate the psychological contract breach and work outcome relationship.
Design/methodology/ approach This study conducted a meta-analysis based-on data from 95 studies.
Findings The study revealed that the inflation rate and the unemployment rate of a country mod...
This chapter explores the role of aging and lifelong learning. It introduces the concept of aged heterogeneity, or the notion that older workers tend to be more heterogeneous than younger workers and therefore have more variation in needs when it comes to development and learning, to explain how and why older workers have different learning strateg...
On 19 August 2020, we published our webinar on the hypernormalization of absurdity in times of Covid-19 on Youtube, as part of the Research Showcase of our Business School, University of Lincoln. In this webinar, we talk about how absurdity in contemporary society is normalized, and maintained.
The video can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/w...
The Problem
Stress, anxiety, depression, and similar emotional and psychological inhibitors may negatively impact employee well-being and dignity, quality of work-life, and overall organizational performance. These inhibitors may be produced through events such as structural or procedural changes, tensions emanating from diminished work relationshi...
As flexibility has become a sine-qua-non of the contemporary workplace, we performed a critical review of its different uses and understandings in business and management research. Analyzing the literature on workplace flexibility in the period 1970-2018, using a four-part conceptual framework, and on the basis of subsequent content analysis of 262...
Problem
Resilience discourses in society and the contemporary workplace tend to emphasize the self-directed nature of resilience and the imposed demand for resilience for survival in the contemporary labor market.
Solution
In this article, the anchoring point of resilience is analyzed when conceptualized within a neoliberal and self-directed ideol...
This paper introduces the concept of fictional science to the field of work and organizational psychology. It describes the necessity of such introduction, and the intended benefits for the field of work psychology. Work psychology is a scientific discipline dominated by a positivistic paradigm, which stifles the possibilities of abductive reasonin...
What is the response of work psychologists to the current Covid-19 crisis? What do work psychologists have to offer in these times of uncertainty? The Future of Work and Organizational Psychology (FoWOP) Movement calls for academics worldwide to contribute to sustainable solutions for workplaces, the economy, and individuals. The current crisis off...
In this essay, I argue that work and organizational psychology needs to move beyond measuring performance and well-being as the only outcomes relevant to our research. I outline the main difficulties with a narrow focus on performance and well-being, and argue that we need to broaden our scope of outcomes to stay relevant in a rapidly changing soci...
This study examines how employees assess demands-abilities and needs-supplies across their work lifespan, and how they better adjust to their work. Based on person-environment fit theory, the job design and the lifespan literatures, and using interviews with a sample of 40 professional ballet dancers, our research shows how the interplay between de...
The number of workers with a chronic disease is steadily growing in industrialized countries. To cope with and to give meaning to their illness, patients construct illness narratives, which are widely shared across patient societies, personal networks and the media. This study investigates the influence of these shared illness narratives on patient...
The way this study has used the ‘best fit’ approach has facilitated the study of how three hypothesised constructs of political, economic and social barriers can deepen our knowledge of their impacts on SMEs’ internationalisation within a small developing country context. Based on a quantitative analysis of the three hypothesised barriers, we used...
The pressures associated with the speed of competition, including the digitalization of workspaces, are increasing the need for modern organizations to drive employee satisfaction and engagement. Integrating gamification into the workplace has been identified as a possible strategy to promote employee participation, engagement, and loyalty. Gamific...
This paper discusses the relationships between fiction and working lives through exploring the role of empathy in how people read and perceive fiction in relation to their own private and working lives. It discusses how experience of fiction may cause an empathic reaction in the reader, subsequently leading to behaviors contributing to greater empa...
This article examines the extent to which socioeconomic background affects the chances of promotion to senior ranks within the Royal Navy and how the upwardly mobile often faces a "class ceiling". The researchers collected quantitative data within the Royal Navy. The research found a disproportionate over-representation of officers from socioeconom...
Since workforces are aging rapidly worldwide, older workers need to work longer. Therefore, this study investigated active ways through which older workers shape their job to age successfully at work. We build on the lifespan psychology literature and the activation hypothesis to argue that activating workdays, characterized by high work pressure a...
The way this study has used the ‘best fit’ approach has facilitated the study of how three hypothesised constructs of political, economic and social barriers can deepen our knowledge of their impacts on SMEs’ internationalisation within a small developing country context. Based on a quantitative analysis of the three hypothesised barriers, we used...
Inleiding De term 'Human Resource Management' is vanaf het ontstaan ervan een controversiële term geweest, en met name betreffende de betekenis van 'Human' in HRM. Er is regelmatig de vraag gesteld of HRM mensen werkelijk als 'Human' beschouwt, of toch voornamelijk als 'Human Resource' (zie bv. Delbridge & Keenoy, 2010). Deze vraag betreft de kern...
For anyone interested in becoming a more critical researcher, or conducting research from a more critical perspective, we have now made a Checklist for Critical Work and Organizational Psychology. In this checklist you will find some background as well as many questions that stimulate thinking about critical issues in our work.
It was not long ago that technology and robotization were not of any interest to work psychologists or organizational scholars. The impact of technology on people and organizations was not something worth researching, and there were more pressing issues, such as the aging workforce, engagement, or work-life balance. However, this has changed dramat...
Today, we face a burnout crisis in universities. More than half of UK academics experience high or very high levels of work related stress. Early career academics are at least 6 times more likely to develop mental illness than people working outside academia. Universities and governments typically address these problems by using psychological inter...
In this short reflection piece, I summarize the main inspirations, outcomes and impressions of the Future of WOP Day held preceding the EAWOP Conference, taking place on 29 May 2019 in Torino, Italy.
During this day around 70 people got together to talk about the future of our field, including the need for better methods, more critical research,...
This manifesto presents 10 recommendations for a sustainable future for the field of Work and Organizational Psychology. The manifesto is the result of an emerging movement around the Future of WOP (see www. futureofwop.com), which aims to bring together WOP-scholars committed to actively contribute to building a better future for our field. Our re...
The proposal for a Special Issue of Advances in Developing Human Resources centres on papers that seek to address research into and on management and staff adaptation from workplace adversity (e.g. stress, anxiety, depression as a result of large-scale organisational change or restructuring, career breaks, sabbaticals or redundancy) into more resil...
Despite the wealth of research showing that psychological contract breach (PCB) has negative outcomes for individuals, knowledge about the influence of the social context in which breaches are experienced is still scarce. This is surprising, as scholars have argued that work climates, such as when unit members are generally highly committed, could...
In this short piece I make the observation that the field of Work and Organizational Psychology (and/or OB) is primarily white and dominated by white people. As a white WOP-scholar myself, I ask myself three questions: why is WOP so white?, what are the effects of WOP being so white?, and what can we do to enhance diversity in WOP?
I explore the qu...
This proposal for a Special Issue of Advances in Developing Human Resources centres on papers that seek to address research into and on management and staff adaptation from incidents of stress, anxiety, depression and such like into resilient human beings. Initial abstracts on resilience and critical HRD-related topics of not more than three hundre...
This chapter discusses the links between psychological contracts and idiosyncratic deals. While both concepts have been theoretically developed by the same scholar, they are also indicative of emerging societal trends that influence the topics under study by researchers in the field of Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management. This cha...
Fictional narratives have the potential to influence people who read, view or listen to them. A body of studies has found that stories can change people's identity or sense of self. This chapter proposes a theoretical model conceptualizing the impact of fictional narrative experiences on the dialogical self. Three pathways are proposed through whic...
The literature on psychological contract formation and evaluation is extremely rich, yet the role of social context has thus far been under researched. Studying the role of social context, however, is important as psychological contract formation, fulfillment, and breach are likely to be influenced by social contextual factors such as supervisors,...
In this piece, I make the argument that we should stop measuring performance and well-being in Organizational Behavior, Work and Organizational Psychology and HRM. I bring forward various arguments why so, and in particular explain why well-being is not a valid substitute for performance.
I would like to thank Edina Doci for her comments on an ear...
This paper introduces three new dimensions to the idiosyncratic deals (i.e., ideals) literature, and develops measures for these dimensions to broaden the scope of research on ideals beyond ideal timing and content. Based on four studies, the paper proposes and validates three new scales for measurement of ideals motivations as well as management o...
This paper conceptualises “human resource (HR) differentiation” as a set of deliberate and differentiating HR practices across individuals within the organisation to address employees' unique work needs and preferences as well as reward them for their input. Despite the importance of HR differentiation, research has mainly focused on the recipients...
In dit artikel wordt het begrip waardigheid (Engels: dignity) in HRM beschreven. Op basis van de vraag welke rol HRM in de huidige en toekomstige wereld kan spelen, wordt een nieuw paradigma afgezet tegenover het huidige dominante instrumentele paradigma in mainstream HRM onderzoek. Dit nieuwe paradigma is geformuleerd op basis van waardigheid. Dit...
This is a rejoinder to the commentaries on our paper on neoliberalism in work and organizational psychology. In this rejoinder, we provide a summarized response to the commentaries, thereby highlighting three main points: (1) when, where and how does neoliberalism manifest in society and our work as Work and Organizational Psychologists, (2) what i...
This chapter discusses the role of psychological contracts along the lifespan and careers of workers. It explains the meaning of the psychological contract, and discusses lifespan theories in relation to how psychological contracts may change with age. In particular, there are three ways through which psychological contracts evolve over time. First...
The goal of this study was to examine changes in newcomers’ psychological contract over time. Based on schema theory and the post-violation model of the psychological contract, we theorized that psychological contract fulfillment is strengthening the psychological contract over time, while changes in the psychological contract are most likely to oc...
High-performance work system (HPWS) research is mainly drawn from theories of social exchange and human capital to unlock the underlying mechanisms in relation to employee performance. In addition to both theories, a personal resources perspective can also be used to explain the effects of HPWS. In this cross-level research, we tested the mediating...
This chapter discusses the role of psychological contracts along the lifespan and careers of
workers. It explains the meaning of the psychological contract, and discusses lifespan
theories in relation to how psychological contracts may change with age. In particular, there
are three ways through which psychological contracts evolve over time. First...
5.1 Inleiding Dit hoofdstuk gaat over de rol van waardigheid in inclusief HRM. Ten eerste wordt beschreven wat de rol is van de moderne HR-manager in organisaties en in welke rol de HR-manager opereert. Vervolgens wordt een breder perspectief geboden op basis van waardigheid waardoor inclusief HRM inhoud krijgt en kan bijdragen aan een meer circula...
Research on high-performance work systems (HPWS) has suggested that a potential disconnection may exist between organizational-level HPWS and employee experienced HPWS. However, few studies have identified factors that are implied within such a relationship. Using a sample of 397 employees, 84 line managers, and 21 HR executives in China, we examin...
Questions
Question (1)
I have had enough paper rejections throughout my career so far, so I am used to receiving rejections on papers. However, on 2 August 2018, my colleagues John Mendy and I submitted a paper to Human Resource Development Review. On 28 November 2018, we received an R&R, which we resubmitted on 25 January 2019. (see the attachment). We waited for almost 8 months, and received a rejection, with not much explanation why our paper was rejected. I emailed the editor, but editors never change their minds, so an apology for the long waiting time was all we could get.
So my question: do people have had similar experiences with rejections after such a long time?
And would people be interested in building up a database with average waiting times for journals in the field of Management and Psychology? It would be good for people to know average waiting times for journal responses (and especially waiting times for rejections). Anybody who would like to work on this with me, send me a message.
