PhD Defense Inge de Clippeleer

On Wednesday October 25th 2017, Inge de Clippeleer defende her PhD thesis entitled: "Being in the driver's seat of your job: Investigating determinants, mechanisms and outcomes of job crafting and team crafting", at Ghent University, Belgium. I was part of her supervisory committee and also of the jury. Inge first presented the highlights of her PhD thesis in very engaging fashion and in understandable terms for the audience. Then, she did a fantastic job answering the questions from the jury members. A well deserved success and now officially "Dr. Inge"!

Inge's PhD thesis examined the interpay between meaningfulness of work and job/team crafting in several ways, and she also empirically tested an intervention aimed at coaching employees to craft their jobs. Among other things, Inge found that job crafting can enhance meaningfulness of work and subsequently decrease sickness absence. Also, she showed that when managers are a role model of team crafting, the teams they manage subsequently engage in more team crafting. With wonderful longitudinal, multilevel, and multisource data, Inge made a strong contribution to the scholarly debate with her PhD thesis.

Some of the questions that were raised during the defense included how individual and job crafting are related to each other, whether proactivity is becoming the new norm in workplaces today (and whether we should want and accept that), what the concrete managerial implications of her research are, and also whether there might be potential darker sides of job and team crafting. Food for thought for future research!

Congratulations Inge on this great success!