Network Social Innovation

Network Social Innovation - NSI

"R&D for Social Innovation"

News

Archi Leenaers (Director Anatech and member of NSI's Think Tank) has appeared in Link Magazine, April 2012, source: www.linkmagazine.nl.

Andries de Grip and Frank Cörvers have appeared in Me Judice about "Both firms and employees will benefit from long-term temporary contracts", 24 March 2012 (article in Dutch).

NSI invites colleagues of Maastricht University School of Business and Economics (SBE) to submit short-term research project proposals qualifying for co-financing, that contribute to NSI’s aims and meet NSI criteria. The deadline for submitting project proposals is May 7th 2012.
More information can be found here.

Andries de Grip has appeared in Informatiebulletin VWL SamenWerkend Limburg about "The Labour Market Will Automatically Become More Flexible", 6 February 2012 (article in Dutch).

Lex Borghans appointed chair of scientific advisory committee research program Ministry of OCW.
The Dutch Ministry of OCW (Education, Culture and Science) plans to experiment with performance-based compensation in the field of education. A scientific approach is regarded to be essential for these experiments. Researchers, together with schools, are invited to develop proposals for experiments and evaluations thereof. The Ministry grants subsidies to qualified schools and research projects. There are also opportunities for follow-up research in the field of performance-based compensation of teachers. The Ministry of OCW organises an information session for interested researchers on January 12th 2012. The scientific advisory committee for the research programme includes NSI board member Lex Borghans (chair), as well as NSI fellows Frank Moers and Bas ter Weel. More information (only in Dutch) can be found here.

Previous News items can be found here.

Upcoming events

The EURAM 2012 annual conference, with the theme: “Social Innovation for Competitiveness, Organisational Performance and Human Excellence” will be held from 6th – 8th June in Rotterdam.
For more information, check the conference website

Previous Events can be found here.

In the picture

The effects of optimism on productivity

feld de grip peters

Researchers: Jan Feld, Andries de Grip (Research Centre for Education and the Labour Market) and Madelon Peters (Faculty of Psychology & Neuroscience)
Co-operation with: a multinational telecommunication firm
Research theme: Human resource development in companies

Introduction and position in the current literature

Optimism, which can be defined as the disposition to expect good things to happen, is related to a number of favorable outcomes in the domain of health and well-being¹. Recently optimism has also come into the focus of economists, who found that optimists work more hours and get promoted faster^2,3. However, the causal link between optimism and these outcomes has not yet been established. This is particularly important because the observed correlations might also be explained by reversed causality when being successful makes people more optimistic.

References

Research methods

Research⁴ has shown that it is possible to temporarily increase people's optimism through various manipulations, like asking them to imagine and write about their best possible selves. We plan to use these techniques to demonstrate the causal effects of optimism on effort provision and target setting in a randomized laboratory experiment with a homogeneous group of students. The structure of the experiment is as follows:

The students are randomly assigned to a treatment or control group.
The optimism of the treatment group is temporarily increased.
Treatment and control groups perform real effort tasks and choose performance targets.

Research questions & hypothesis

Based on the findings in the psychological and economical literature we expect that students in the treatment group will provide more effort and that this effort at least partly explained by more ambitious performance targets. If this is the case, we will develop a field experiment aimed at increasing productivity through optimism training in the workplace.

This research project contributes to the optimism literature by addressing the questions of causality and provides the basis for the development of optimism training as an innovative HR practice. Building on this experiment, we will also study the relation between optimism and workers' effort in the call center of a multinational telecommunication firm.

Results & follow-ups