Marlene Walk

The interdisciplinary research and teaching at the chair focuses primarily on the overlapping and mutually enriching topics of human resource management, organizational behavior and organizational change. Specifically, the research focuses on employees and volunteers in the context of a changing organizational environment and attempts to explain why people work for nonprofit organizations, how they react to change, and what factors influence their retention behavior. Since employees and volunteers consciously perceive their organizational environment and this perception can affect their attitudes and behaviors, we also explore why and how nonprofit organizations and educational institutions in the public sector respond to external change and how they implement organizational change. Qualitative and quantitative methods help to capture the complexity of interactions at multiple levels and to incorporate individual, organizational and contextual factors in the design and implementation of our research.