The Human Performance Management (HPM) Group focuses its research and education on the topics of human performance, organizational behavior, and well-being to develop scientific knowledge and test theories that uncover and explain psychological processes contributing to high performance at the organizational, team and individual level. By examining the 'human factor' in operational processes, we aim to contribute to the interdisciplinary research of management psychology and applied psychology, focusing specifically on how the work and organization (re-)design contributes to high performance organizations in which employees work with high motivation, creativity, and pleasure. The HPM Group teaches courses at the undergraduate, graduate and PhD levels.
Resilient societies rely on teams providing rapid adaptive responses to crisis situations. But teams often have difficulty maintaining effective collaborative functioning during stressful events. Wearable technology applications represent a crucial opportunity for providing teams with valuable, real-time feedback to support their effectiveness, especially in high-stakes crisis environments. However, to date, the development of team-based wearable applications is hindered by a lack of scientific knowledge about what data are most meaningful and how to use them for team support and augmentation.
This PhD position is part of the NWO funded project 'Coordination and complexity: Augmenting team adaptive performance in crisis situations with wearable technology'. In this project, we will investigate team coordination dynamics across multiple modalities (i.e., physiology, speech, motion) to determine how specific coordination dynamics (e.g., synchrony, contagion), and the transitions therein, could be used for assessing, monitoring, and eliciting effective team functioning of work teams in general, and those operating in crisis situations specifically. Subsequently, human-centered design will be used for developing and evaluating ways to monitor and augment team functioning and performance in real-life crisis scenarios as well as team training contexts.
Your efforts will be primarily devoted to investigating how various forms of coordination related to previously established key behavioral, cognitive, and affective measures underlying adaptive team performance in healthcare and laboratory crisis scenarios.
The research will be conducted under supervision of Dr. Josette Gevers (intended 1st promotor), Prof.dr. Joyce Westerink (intended 2nd promotor), Dr. Sonja Rispens (co-promotor), and Dr. Travis J. Wiltshire (TiU; supervisor).
ProfileThe successful applicant is expected to:
- Perform scientific research in the domain described, resulting in a PhD thesis;
- Present results at (international) conferences;
- Publish results in scientific journals;
- Participate in activities of the project group, mainly in Eindhoven and Tilburg but sometimes on site with project partners at various locations within the country, most notably at partnering hospitals and game lab/studio.
- A small amount of teaching is part of the job too.