Current Research Projects

Project duration: 2021 – 2026

Funded by Australian Research Council (ARC) under the Discovery Scheme (ARC DP210103780)

PIs: Prof Markus Hӧllerer, Prof Renate Meyer, Prof Martin Kornberger, Prof Dennis Jancsary, Assoc Prof Paul Spee, Assoc Prof Graham Dwyer, and Dr Jaco Fourie

Short description: The project aims at tackling the multiple challenges that collective action and collaborative governance face in situations of immediate and complex crisis – a topic that existing literature has insufficiently considered. Crises such as drought and wildfires, the global refugee crisis, or the COVID-19 pandemic constitute ‘grand challenges’ or ‘wicked problems’ that have become a permanent feature of increasingly globalized societies. Importantly, complex crises cannot be addressed by any single actor (or even by one single societal sector) and, in addition, elude routinized procedures of engagement. Accordingly, it is often a cross-sector collective of heterogenous actors that needs to mobilize and sustain collective action. These actors regularly do not share a common history, tradition, experience, or identity; rather, they are guided by a range of potentially contradictory values and logics of action, creating a veritable governance challenge.

Project webpage: https://www.cacgcs.unsw.edu.au/

Project duration: May 2023 – April 2028

Funded by European Research Council, Starting Grant

PI: Kenneth Silver

Short description: Within business ethics, there is a longstanding debate concerning Corporate Moral Responsibility, the question of whether corporations themselves are the kinds of things that can be responsible for wrongdoing. Proponents of this view hope to vindicate our sense that firms are the appropriate targets of blame and censure. However, proponents have failed to decisively make their case, and they have also failed to come to terms with the magnitude of corporate wrongdoing. Even if firms are possibly responsible, this is far short of showing that corporations have the sensitivity, incentives, position, to be anything but accidental agents for good, let along equal members of the moral community.

As corporations are some of the most significant actors in modern society, this presents a real problem. If it is right to think that corporations have genuine obligations, then a sincere effort must be made to come to terms with why they fail to meet them as well as how to train firms to behave morally in the future. In short, corporations need a moral education. Given this, CMP is broken into three objectives:

• It considers whether corporations are capable of being morally responsible for their actions.
• It uncovers the challenges to corporate moral conduct.
• It determines whether and how to facilitate corporate moral progress.

CMP meets these objectives with resources far outside of business ethics. Defending corporate moral agency involves using cutting-edge work within metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of action. Understanding corporate wrongdoing requires reconceiving of how corporations make moral decisions and are motivated to act on them, as well as the nature of their privilege in society. And determining how to improve firms morally requires integrating work on moral education and moral progress with management disciplines such as strategic management. By doing all of this, CMP will pursue concrete ways to improve firms for good.

Project duration: January 2024 – December 2025

Funded by Signed an NDA (but funded by Fortune 500 listed company)

PI: Dr Kiera Dempsey-Brench (Professor Amanda Shantz on the research team)

Short description: The research team aims to understand the devolution of employee volunteer programmes across regions. The project will help organisations to evaluate volunteering trends across countries, highlighting similarities and differences within MNCs.

Project duration: 2020 – 2027

Funded by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Canada (SSHRC)

PI(s): Dr. Ali Dastmalchian, Dean and Professor, Beedie School of Business, Simon Fraser University (SFU), Vancouver, Canada. Dr. Dastmalchian is the CEO of GLOBE Foundation

Co-country investigator for Ireland and UK: Eimear Nolan

Short description: The GLOBE 2020 Research Project is the latest phase of the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness study, expanding on earlier work to examine how national culture influences leadership, trust, and organizational practices. GLOBE 2020 explores evolving cultural norms, the relationship between culture and trust, and changing perceptions of leadership.

Project webpage: https://globeproject.com/

Project duration: 2024 – 2027

Funded by the European Union

PI: Siobhān McQuaid

Short description: The world’s economic systems do not currently recognise the value of nature to planetary and human health, and mainstream economic drivers negatively affect the natural world both directly and indirectly. The degradation of land and marine ecosystems undermines the well-being of billions of people, costing about 10% of the annual global gross product. However, the restoration of nature presents enormous economic opportunities. The idea of a Nature-Positive Economy (NPE) – an economy that fully considers environmental impacts and sustainability, and works to actively improve the state of nature – and the pathways towards realising it remain poorly understood.

The ambition of GoNaturePositive! (GoNP) is to provide much-needed clarity and direction through a transdisciplinary consortium adopting a multi-stakeholder approach for systemic change, with nature-based solutions (NBS) and nature-based enterprises (NBEs) at its core. Five European and one Global Pilot (covering Agri-Food, Forestry, Blue Economy, Tourism & the Built Environment) will be co-created with industrial, political, NGO and societal stakeholders. In GoNP we will deliver a clear definition and conceptual framework for the NPE, a roadmap proposing policy and governance pathways towards a NPE, blueprints for ground-breaking solutions to stubborn roadblocks, and demonstrations of what a NPE could look like on the ground.

GoNP will demonstrate how nature-positive practices can generate multiple benefits for people and planet while reducing business risk and attracting increasingly nature-sensitive investors. It will pay particular attention to the role and potential of NBEs, developing unique platforms and capacity building measures to help them scale for maximum nature-positive impact. Finally, we will cultivate Nature-Positive leadership, harnessing the commitment of an Impact Board of multiplier networks towards achieving a long-term shared vision of the Nature-Positive Economy.

Project webpage: https://www.gonaturepositive.eu/

Welcome to Ireland’s Project Economy 2025, this longitudinal study is now in its fifth year. The report profiles Irish high-skilled independent professionals, also known as professional contractors, freelancers and solo-self employed workers.

Trinity College Dublin and Contracting PLUS are delighted to collaborate on this unique study, which examines the contribution this key cohort have to employment and the economy in Ireland. This is the only report of its kind completed in Ireland and this report has been produced entirely digitally, in line with both companies strong commitment to sustainability.

For more information, visit here.

Media Contact:
Fiona Tyrrell | Media Relations | tyrrellf@tcd.ie | +353 1 896 3551

Project duration: July 2024 – July 2026

Funded by Enterprise Ireland

PI: Ulrich Leicht-Deobald

Short description: Today’s work teams typically do not operate in a vacuum but, are closely embedded within their parent organization (e.g., Drach-Zahavy & Somech, 2010; Leicht-Deobald et al. 2022). As such, scholars have emphasized that a team’s effectiveness critically hinges on its ability to manage interdependencies with other teams and work units but also stakeholders outside the host organisation (Ancona, 1990; Gibson & Dibble, 2013). Beyond internal team processes (Gladstein, 1984), external team activities have therefore been identified as a crucial success factor for team-based work (Ancona & Caldwell, 1992). Such external activities are reflected in a team’s boundary management, defined as the activities a team performs to establish and maintain boundaries and manage interactions with external agents, e.g., to secure resources critical for team functioning or coordinate actions with other work units (Leicht-Deobald et al., 2023).

Conceptually, these boundary-work interactions can involve any other party inside and outside of a focal organization. For example, they can include persons or teams at higher hierarchical levels (e.g., when lobbying for resources and support at the level of upper management) or at the same hierarchical level (e.g., when coordinating a shared task among different teams) (Ancona & Caldwell, 1992; Leicht-Deobald et al., 2023). These interactions could also include external parties outside the organization, such as clients, customers, or external allies (Harvey, Peterson, & Anand, 2014).

Additionally, employees rarely work for a single team in contemporary organizations but have cross-cutting relationships with multiple work groups (Mortensen & Haas, 2018; O'Leary et al., 2011). Such organizational arrangements of members working on more than one team simultaneously have been referred to as multiple team membership (MTM) (O’Leary et al., 2011). Surveys suggest that up to 65 to 95 percent of knowledge workers operate on more than one team simultaneously, sometimes concurrently working on ten or even more teams (Bertolotti et al., 2015; Rapp & Mathieu, 2019). Organizations use such structures with the expectation that MTM may improve their overall productivity (Crawford, Reeves, Stewart, & Astrove, 2019; Mortensen et al., 2007). Despite the increasing prevalence of multiple team memberships in a wide variety of countries, industries, and occupations today (Mortensen & Gardner, 2017), MTM has been the subject of little research (Rapp & Mathieu, 2019), and the consequences of MTM on team performance, particularly regarding how they unfold over time (Mortensen & Haas, 2018), are not well understood (Wimmer, Backmann, & Hoegl, 2019).

To conceptualize MTM, prior theoretical work has drawn upon the notion of teams as dynamic participation hubs, defined as centres of activity to which individuals connect in different ways as they contribute to that activity (Mortensen & Haas, 2018). Research has traditionally regarded teams as exhibiting a clear boundary between members and non-members (Sundstrom, De Meuse, & Futrell, 1990). However, this classic definition of teams is ill-suited to conceptualise teams with blurred boundaries (Mortensen, 2014). Conceptualising teams as dynamic participation hubs rather than stable groups acknowledges this reality of contemporary teams. Teams often do not comprise a clearly bounded set of individuals who work interdependently to achieve their team’s goals but instead have blurred boundaries with overlapping and fluid team memberships (Mortensen & Gardner, 2017).

The notion of teams as dynamic participation hubs is part of the so-called “changing ecology of teams” (Wageman et al., 2012, p. 301), calling into question the very assumption of how we study and even define teams (Mortensen, 2014). As such, the notion of teams as dynamic participation hubs is better suited than the classic team definition to accommodate the contemporary realities of MTM in organisational teams. However, the shift from a classic team definition to the notion of teams as dynamic participation hubs does not require one to abandon the term team or discard the theories and concepts developed in the team literature altogether. Those theories and concepts are still valuable and valid, but need to be reevaluated regarding the extent to which they hold vis-à-vis the new complexities of MTM and blurred team boundaries in contemporary teams.

The project for the ERC consolidator grant aims to contribute toward this new ecology of teams with the following three research objectives:

1. Examine how between-team boundary management and MTM influence team and organisational performance over time.
2. Measure highly granular longitudinal data to answer this theoretical question for different types of knowledge teams (i.e., research & development [R&D] teams, healthcare teams, and open-source software development teams [OSS]).
3. Develop novel methods to analyse these longitudinal data.

Project duration: May 2025 – December 2025

Funded by Community Foundation Ireland with support from Trinity Development & Alumni

PIs: Dr Gemma Donnelly-Cox, Dr Sheila Cannon, Dr Maria Gallo

Short description: This is a scoping research study to better understand the motivations, patterns, and priorities of women who give, to increase visibility of this significant new trend in philanthropy and to inform how women can be better engaged with and supported in their philanthropic journeys.

Project duration: Apr 2024 – Oct 2029

Funded by BiOrbic - Ireland's National Bioeconomy Research Centre with funding also provided through industry partners.

PIs: Associate Professor Martha O'Hagan Luff and Professor Jane Stout

FI: Assistant Professor Catherine Farrell

Short description: ReFarm is focused on three work streams: Nature Positive Actions on Farms, Developing a Sustainable Funding Mechanism for Farmers, and Tracking Outcomes through High Impact Research. The project vision is to make farming for nature a sustainable and scalable solution to address the biodiversity and climate crises. We will do this by piloting a financial structure to fund farm-based nature-positive actions and outcomes, partnering with farmers, businesses, investors and researchers.

Project webpage: https://www.refarm.ie/

Project duration: Feb 2024 – Jul 2027

Funded by the European Union

PIs: Giulio Buciuni and Paul Ryan

Short description: REMAKING is a major Horizon Europe research project exploring how remote work is reshaping the future of work, wellbeing, business, and regional development across Europe. With a €3 million budget, the project is coordinated by the University of Bologna and involves leading academic and policy partners from across seven countries.

Trinity Business School professors Giulio Buciuni and Paul Ryan play a central role in REMAKING, leading research on business model innovation and contributing to cross-country analysis on labour markets, policy frameworks, and regional impacts. These researchers are examining how remote working is transforming organizational strategies, worker experiences, and innovation practices in different territorial contexts, including Ireland’s second-tier cities and rural areas.

The project focuses on four target groups - forced migrants, digital nomads, post-pandemic returners, and high-tech professionals - using a combination of scenario building, participatory research, and policy evaluation. Outcomes include forward-looking insights on remote work trends, comparative reviews of EU labour and mobility policies, and tools to support local and national policymakers.

REMAKING aims to inform inclusive, sustainable, and place-sensitive policy responses to the remote work revolution - making a key contribution to future EU resilience, with TBS at the heart of this research and impact agenda.

Project webpage: https://remaking-project.eu/ 

Project duration: 2024 – 2026

Funded by the European Union's Research Executive agency

PI: Dimitra Xidous

Short description: It is now widely acknowledged that to make adequate and timely progress in the direction of biodiversity mainstreaming, three critical aspects – previously overlooked or insufficiently handled by supranational policies – need to be emphasised and further explored in their transformative potential:

• The establishment and operation of bottom-up and especially City – and Community – driven initiatives, which may adequately complement the Country level National Sustainable Development Plans and Green Growth Strategies.
• The introduction and refinement of appropriate methodologies, and capacity-building activities, to enable the engagement of all key societal stakeholders (notably including market players, citizens and local government actors) in concerted actions to restore the most compromised elements of the national environments
• Continuous work on enabling nature-based solutions by identifying the connections, and addressing the disconnects, between biodiversity conservation and social, economic, and technological challenges.

To meet the requirements of the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 and of the recent Commission proposal for a Nature Restoration Regulation, the UGP+ consortium proposes a 3-year long action research plan, engaging 11 academic partners and 5 European Cities as “Lighthouse” and “Greening” testbeds, ready to share knowledge and scale up from their ongoing experiences in UGP design and NBS implementation & scaling, to a next-generation strategy for urban and periurban ecosystem transformation, mainstreaming biodiversity, ecosystem services, and natural capital in urban policies and economies through adopting a whole of society approach.

Project webpage: https://networknature.eu/unpplus