BIO:

Laura Jane Packheiser is a PhD researcher at TU Dortmund University. Her research focuses on interim management, leadership, and corporate turnaround, with a particular emphasis on decision-making and leadership in organizational crises and periods of change.

ABSTRACT:

Interim managers occupy a distinctive leadership position: they enter organizations as temporary outsiders but are expected to function as effective insiders, that is, exercise authority and deliver results from the outset. Although this outsider position is widely recognized, research has largely treated outsiderness as an objective, taken-for-granted characteristic, overlooking differences in how interim managers experience themselves as organizational outsiders and the implications it has for their leadership behavior. We address this gap by examining how perceived outsider status relates to interim managers’ leadership styles and how client organizations may shape these relationships through inclusive HRM practices. We integrate Social Identity Theory, Legitimacy Theory, and an inclusive HRM perspective, and collect survey data from interim managers in Germany and Norway to test our hypotheses.

During the seminar, Laura will present ongoing work focused on the intersection between leadership, nonstandard work, and HRM. Kindly see the title and abstract below. As this is part of her ongoing work and her PhD dissertation which se will submit in April, she will be very grateful for feedback from participants at the seminar.