The research topics of LINOR concern employee involvement in organizational decision-making processes, corresponding management styles and strategies, relations and forms of cooperation developed on this basis. The activities are based on the understanding that leadership and employee participation are two sides of the same issue and cannot be understood separately. Accordingly, our key research themes are the psychological premises, processes and impacts involved in employee influence as well as organizational participation and the different management styles known as distributed leadership, embracing shared leadership, team autonomy, corporate leadership, organizational democracy, participative leadership, self leadership, etc.
The research field also include the importance of varying levels of influence, the organizational field in question, and the type of influence involved (individual, team-based or shared) on motivation, job function and commitment. A major research issue is related to investigation of the relations between experienced, applied and desired influence. These issues concern the following questions: Why do some people want more influence? Why do some people assign others to seek influence? Why do some people not make use of their influence opportunities? Furthermore this research includes the importance of previous experiences of having influence, of personality and of relevant organizational contexts. Our research focuses also on the psychological themes related to organizational relations, e.g. involvement, psychological contract, identity, conflicts and cooperation, and with the importance for the interaction between work and social life.
The research activities of LINOR are considered to play an important role for new approaches concerning the development of how organisations are designed and implemented. This may concern the development of new types of leadership and influence that are required in relation to the technological development together with an improved application of employee resources in order to ensure organizational innovation as well as work life quality. New approaches may also involve methods for making use of team work at different organizational levels and other forms of collaboration. Additionally our research deals with the opportunities of creating synergy between the domains of work life and personal life.
We attach great importance to cooperating with other research units, research centres, and individual researchers concerning the development of our scientific understanding of leadership and influence interactions both at a theoretical and empirical level. We also aim at cooperating with practitioners concerning the application of different forms of leadership and employee influence approaches as the foundations for introducing changes in organizations and working with innovations. Moreover, cooperation with different industrial and public organizations as well as labour market parties is natural parts of our research activities. We appreciate cooperations which can offer a mutual output of the research both concerning further scientific processes and insight of organizations in their own functions, tensions and potentials for innovation.