Front Page

Designing Virtual Work that Works

Welcome to the homepage of the Junior Professorship for Business Psychology at the School of Business, Economics, and Society at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg.

The Junior Professorship for Business Psychology is part of the Institute for Labor Economics and Socioeconomics (IAS) at the School of Business, Economics, and Society at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg. In both research and teaching, we focus on human experience and behavior in the (increasingly digitized) workplace. Our research spands a range of current topics, such as virtual communication, teamwork and work design and addresses questions such as:

  • How does the lack of a shared physical work environment affect communication, coordination or connectedness in teams?
  • What should company agreements on mobile or hybrid work take into account in order to ensure both individual flexibility and intrateam coordination at the same time?
  • How can we best study and design (virtual) meetings?

Recent Publications

Here are three of the most recent publications of the junior professorship (more publications can be found here):

  • Begemann, V., Handke, L.., & Lehmann-Willenbrock, N. (2024). Enabling and constraining factors of remote informal communication: a socio-technical systems perspective. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 29(5), zmae008. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcmc/zmae008
  • Hennig, F., Wesche, J.S., Handke, L. & Kerschreiter, R. (2024), “Designing virtual mentoring programs based on students’ motivation to participate: a qualitative study”, Information and Learning Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1108/ILS-10-2023-0155
  • Handke, L., Costa, P., & Feitosa, J. (2024). How Virtual are We? Introducing the Team Perceived Virtuality Scale. Journal of Business and Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-024-09966-3

News

  • Hybrid Teamwork has emerged as an omnibus term for teams with members who switch between remote and on-site work and has become a critical aspect of modern work environments. But what exactly characterizes hybrid teamwork and how is it different to what we already know? Find out more by checking out the publication (open access) here

    Category: general, publications
  • Lisa Handke participated in this year’s Academy of Management (AoM) Conference, held in Chicago from August 9 to 13, 2024. During the conference, she presented her talk “A Typology and Analysis of Collaborative Hybrid Work for Post-Pandemic Teams,”. Notably, the collaborative paper "Development and Validation of the Team Perceived Virtuality Scale," co-authored with Patricia Costa and Jennifer Feitosa, was designated as a best paper. An abridged version has been published in the Academy of Management Proceedings.

    Category: General
  • New publication in the „Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication“ by Vanessa Begemann, Lisa Handke and Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock Informal interactions are vital in daily workplace communication, shaping performance, well-being, and collaboration in organizations. In light of the ongoing trend of remote and hybrid work, supporting remote informal communication (RIC) is crucial. Adopting a socio-technical systems perspective, the authors employed semi-structured interviews to identify enabling and constraining factors related to RIC and discuss their results in terms of their practical implications for effectively facilitating RIC in organizations.

    Category: general, publications
  • New publication in 'Information and Learning Science' by Frederike Henning, Jenny S. Wesche, Lisa Handke and Rudolf Kerschreiter. The COVID-19 pandemic created a strong impetus for the deployment of virtual mentoring programs (VMPs). In a qualitative study with 200 participants, the authors explored potential mentors’ and mentees’ motivation to participate in a virtual mentoring program, even in post-pandemic times. The article concludes with practical recommendations for the effective design of virtual mentoring programs.

    Category: general, publications
  • Prof. Dr Lisa Handke is delighted to receive the Schoeller Fellowship and thanks the Schoeller Research Centre for Business and Society for funding her research project on behaviour-based feedback in virtual meetings. At the award ceremony on 13 June, Lisa Handke received the award for her research project, which focuses on improving virtual meetings. The aim of the project is to develop a feedback intervention, based on the recording of meeting behaviour and its direct feedback to participants.

    Category: general
  • In her publication (together with Prof. Patricia Costa, ISCTE-IUL Lisbon and Prof. Jennifer Feitosa, Claremont McKenna College), Lisa Handke demonstrates the validity and reliability of the Team Perceived Virtuality Scale in 5 studies with a total of more than 2,000 teams. The aim of the scale is to measure virtual collaboration beyond structural factors (such as geographical distance and the use of specific communication technologies).

    Category: general, publications
  • This semester, the junior professorship is offering seminars in the Master's degree programmes Socioeconomics and Labour Market and Human Resources. Registration for the seminars is possible from 1 April via Stud.On

    Category: Teaching
  • Prof Dr Lisa Handke, junior professor of business psychology at FAU WiSo, introduces herself. She specialises in team solidarity despite physical distance. In the interview, she talks about her research, her favorite place at the FAU and what she does when she's not on the road as a professor.

    Category: general