Academic associates
Dr Wilson Wong, Senior Researcher, The Work Foundation
Wilson is a Fellow of The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, member of the International Association of Applied Psychologists, and a barrister (Middle Temple). He has a PhD in Psychology from Exeter University, an MA (Critical Theory) and MBA
(Finance) from the University of Nottingham and read law at King's College London. An economic psychologist, Wilson joined The Work Foundation in December 2008 and is currently Acting Programme Director for the People Effectiveness Research Group. His research interests include the psychological contract between employees and their employer, strategic HRM and organisational change. At TWF, he established the Employee Voice Group as the primary staff consultation mechanism. He also chairs the Future of HR expert challenge group comprising academic experts and people management practitioners, who have the role of critically reviewing the research outputs to ensure integrity/quality of the research and relevance to industry application. In economic psychology his research area is in framing effects, in particular, that of time and timing on perceptions of opportunity.
He has a wide variety of employment experience, including working as Research Fellow at the Primary Care Unit, Peninsula Medical School and as Lead Researcher on the Exeter University-Broadband4Devon programme (2004-2007). From 1999-2002, Wilson was an IT Policy Technologist for the National IT Council Secretariat (NITC) in Malaysia, where he headed Globalisation and E-Commerce policy research. He began exploring futures methodologies while at the NITC and has co-facilitated with Ged Davis, then head of the Scenario Planning Workshop at Shell International, a Scenario Planning workshop for senior civil servants. He has also used the Delphi Technique successfully in his research. He was Trustee of Exeter Community Initiatives and Chair of the Devon BME Strategic Group, 2005-2008. Wilson is also an expert facilitator and has worked with senior teams in private, public and third-sector organisations on their strategic thinking and planning processes.
Stephen Bevan, Director, Centre for Workforce Effectiveness, The Work Foundation
Stephen is Director of the Centre for Workforce Effectiveness at The Work Foundation and is an Honorary Professor at Lancaster University. He joined The Work Foundation from the Institute for Employment Studies (IES) 2002 as Director of Research. Stephen has carried out research and policy work for the No.10 Policy Unit, HM Treasury, the Cabinet Office, the Department of Health, the Department of Work and Pensions and the European Commission. He has also advised many blue chip companies on many aspects of HR strategy and practice. Stephen has conducted research on high performance work practices, employee reward strategy, staff engagement and retention and Good Work.
He has written and spoken widely about The Work Foundation's research programmes, both in the UK and overseas, including the Health Technology Assessment International (HTAi) Conference in Singapore, 2009, the Pan-Hellenic Congress on Occupational Health & Safety, 2010 and the Swedish Almadalen in 2010. Stephen is a member of the expert group supporting the government’s review of Sickness Absence, a member of the McLeod Review’s ‘guru’ group and was an expert advisor to the Hutton Review of Fair Pay in the public sector. Stephen is Founding President of the Fit for Work Europe Coalition which promotes active policies to improve labour market participation among people with long-term health conditions and in 2010 he was named in the Top 10 most influential ‘HR Thinkers’ of the last 5 years by HR Magazine. He was Managing Director of The Work Foundation from 2008-2011.
Dr Benjamin Reid, Senior Researcher, the Work Foundation
Benjamin currently leads the Work Foundation’s Creative Industries research programme, and its leadership development evaluation offering. He joined the Work Foundation in 2009 as Senior Researcher on its Future of HR Programme. Prior to joining The Work Foundation, Benjamin spent nine years as a researcher and tutor at Henley Business School – latterly as a post-doctoral Fellow in Leadership and Innovation. At Henley he worked on a wide range of large-scale collaborative commercial research projects – most of which focused on management and leadership development – and was a lecturer in HR, and research methods, on Henley’s MBA and DBA programmes. Between 2006 and 2008 he was a Visiting Tutor on the MBA at American International College, based in Springfield, Massachusetts. Benjamin’s primary research interests are around a) innovation and HR – both how HR develops itself and how HR supports organisational innovation, b) the evaluation of management and leadership development, and c) the role of evidence – particularly of qualitative methods – in organisational practice.
Research clients for major projects Benjamin has worked on include: the National College for Leadership of Schools and Children’s Services, the EU Leonardo and 6th framework programmes, the Clore Social Leadership Programme, PETRONAS, ITV, Channel 4, the DfES, the Advertising Association, Ford Motor Company, the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, the Centre for Excellence in Leadership, the Corporate Research Forum, Henley’s HR Centre of Excellence, and the BBC. Between 2007 and 2009 he compiled the HR Most Influential listing for Haymarket Media’s HR Magazine.
Benjamin holds a PhD from Henley Business School at the University of Reading, awarded for a study of management and leadership development programmes from an individual identity perspective. He was supervised by Lancaster University Management School Professor John Burgoyne and Henley’s Professor David W Birchall.
Dr Shashi Balain, Lecturer, Centre for Organizational Health and Well Being, Lancaster University
Shashi is a Lecturer in the Centre for Organizational Health and Well Being. Before this, he was a Research Associate at Centre for Performance-led HR, during which time he led work on Employee Engagement. He continues to work with the Centre in this area. Shashi has a PhD in Psychology with specialization in the field of performance management. He has an MBA from Lancaster University. He has worked as a research associate at the Institute of Work Psychology (IWP) at the University of Sheffield on research funded by the National Health Service’s Service Delivery Organization (SDO). The major aim of the project was to review the existing state of research on the linkage between HRM policies and organizational performance. Building on his PhD work, he has examined the sensitivity of individual, team, and organizational performance to the policies and practices of the organization in general and HRM practices in particular. He has over seven years of experience in this field.
Craig Marsh, Director of International Academic Delivery, Liverpool/Laureate online programmes
Craig has nearly 20 years of experience of HR in industry, consulting, and academia. The early part of his career comprised senior HR roles in industry; at BP Exploration, where he specialised in Organisational Development, and at GEC - Marconi, where he was a site HR manager. This was followed by 5 years of HR executive education in the UK and France, and 4 years as a member of the faculty and management team of Theseus Institute in France. Most recently, he was associate professor of HR at EDHEC, a French Grande Ecole, and director of the full-time MBA programme. He maintains a strong involvement in HR strategy and practice through his consulting work in Europe. His current research interests centre on the impact of HR performance management systems on middle and first line management, and has recently completed a large scale study of the impact of performance management in the Police Service.
