Dr Simon Schafheitle, University of St. Gallen

'Good Brother vs. Big Brother and the great moment of HR heroes!?' 
Thursday 24 February, 10am - 11.30am 
Zoom online seminar 

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Abstract

For decades, the interplay of trust and control lies at the heart of understanding the effective functioning of workplaces (Long & Sitkin, 2018), and recent trends, such as digitalisation or the ongoing deliberation of work have surely fuelled it. Nowadays, the question of whether trust and control work as complements or substitutes is particularly relevant, given that the advent of smart workplace technology is quickly associated with the visible employee (Stanton & Stam, 2006), a panopticon of power inside workplaces (e.g., Bernstein, 2017) or leadership by non-living entities, keyword: Taylorism 4.0. In this seminar, we will address these matters and discuss questions of whether technology-augmented control will necessarily be the new coercive of our times (Cardinal, Miller, and Kreutzer, 2017: 583). In doing so, we will shed light on the transforming and disrupting impact of technology on organisational control, as a means of employers to guide and motivate employees to act in desired ways. Secondly, we will then discuss how technology control can be designed and implemented in a way so that employees’ willingness to be vulnerable inside workplaces is at least not undermined but rather strengthened. In this seminar, we adopt a configurational lens of trust and control and engage with rather novel empirical methods to the OB/management landscape, such as morphological analysis and qualitative comparative analysis. 

Biography

Currently Dr. Simon Schafheitle is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Institute of Work and Employment Research of Prof. Dr. Antoinette Weibel (FAA-HSG). He received his doctorate summa cum laude from the University of St. Gallen in 2020 for his dissertation titled 'Towards a Nuanced Understanding of 21st-century Workplaces – Broadening the Configurational Perspectives of Organizational Control and Trust of Leaders'. In his dissertation he focused on the use and application of datafication technologies in HR management as well as with 21st-century workplaces architectures in the realm of trust and control dualities. He gained his academic knowledge and skills from various institutions across Europe and Canada, such as the University of Excellence in Konstanz (DE), the University of St. Gallen (CH) as well as the School of Management, York University Toronto, (CA). He has worked as a representative of the German informant of the Federal states on negotiations in EU council meetings ,the Representation of the Federal State of Baden-Württemberg to the European Union, for Sino-European think tanks as well as for Diethelm Keller Management AG, Zürich (CH) as a member of the CEO office staff.

Further information: business-school-research@glasgow.ac.uk 

First published: 4 February 2022

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