I am an Associate Professor of Organizational Psychology, interested in bridging between academia and practice, and utilizing academic knowledge in the service of society. My research lies at the intersection of people, management, organization and society. As a Scholar-Activist, my approach to research is inter-disciplinary and translational, focused on partnering with researchers and practitioners across fields and creating multiple forms of scholarly outputs to better integrate research and societal impact.
I am a 'context sensitive' researcher with expertise in the cross-cultural context of the Arab MENA, the context of the Healthcare sector, and Extreme contexts where crises and disasters predominate. I have led the team that developed the first indigenous model of personality for the Arab world; published extensively on individual differences and evidence-based management in healthcare; and organizing in extreme contexts. I am also interested in the context of migration in the Nordics, and am currently the supervisor of Dr Sahizer Samuk, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) postdoctoral fellow, after securing this prestigious EU-funded project (14% success rate) which focuses on career adaptability and career sustainability of the spouses of highly skilled migrants in Europe. This INSKILLS project directly informs migration policies and workplace integration strategies.
I am the recipient of the 2020 Distinguished Scholar Award from the Arab for Social and Economic Development and my scholarly activism work with my colleagues in the aftermath of the Beirut blast was also recognized by AACSB as innovations that inspire. I am an advocate of women's and other minority groups rights and have collaborated on several projects to advance workplace inclusion of women and minority groups. I am also an adjunct professor at the American University of Beirut, currently serving as co-PI, on the SAWI Project, a multi-million USD project funded from the U.S. Department of State Middle East Partnership Initiative , which focuses on mobilizing decision makers and leaders for building more inclusive HR systems and workplace cultures across 8 Arab MENA countries.
Job crafting is the behavior that employees engage in to create personally better fitting work environments, for example, by increasing challenging job demands. To better understand the driving forces behind employees’ engagement in job crafting, we investigated implicit and explicit power motives. While implicit motives tend to operate at the unconscious, explicit motives operate at the unconscious level. We focused on power motives, as power is an agentic motive characterized by the need to influence your environment. Although power is relevant to job crafting in its entirety, in this study, we link it to increasing challenging job demands due to its relevance to job control, which falls under the umbrella of power. Using a cross-sectional design, we collected survey data from a sample of Lebanese nurses (N = 360) working in 18 different hospitals across the country. In both implicit and explicit power motive measures, we focused on integrative power that enable people to stay calm and integrate opposition. The results showed that explicit power predicted job crafting (H1) and that implicit power amplified this effect (H2). Furthermore, job crafting mediated the relationship between congruently high power motives and positive work-related outcomes (H3) that were interrelated (H4). Our findings unravel the driving forces behind one of the most important dimensions of job crafting and extend the benefits of motive congruence to work-related outcomes.
Daouk-Öyry, Lina (2023)
Call of duty: When scholars organize in extreme contexts