Dr. Dale Whelehan

Dr Whelehan's research examines how people experience and organise time, and how the design of work and social systems shapes wellbeing, performance and equity. His work connects the psychology of time and temporality with occupational health psychology, human factors and behavioural science. A central concern is how temporal demands, resources and control influence psychological functioning, and how organisations can create conditions that support health and sustainable performance.

His research encompasses four connected areas:

1. Psychology of time and temporality: How time pressure, waiting, uncertainty, anticipation and orientation towards the future shape attention, emotion and behaviour. This includes temporal autonomy, temporal inequality and the relationships between individual experiences of time and wider social expectations.

2. Working-time design and occupational health: How working hours, workload, work intensity, availability expectations and opportunities for recovery affect health and organisational functioning. This includes examining which forms of working-time reduction are feasible, inclusive and sustainable, for whom, and under what conditions.

3. Human factors, fatigue and performance: How interactions among people, technologies, tasks and organisational processes influence safety and performance, particularly in healthcare and other demanding environments. This work examines the effects of fatigue, sleep deprivation and pressure on attention, decision-making and skilled performance.

4. Leadership, culture and organisational change: How leadership practices, norms, incentives and power shape working conditions, coordination, psychological safety and inclusion. This includes temporal leadership and the development of interventions that translate psychological evidence into sustainable changes in practice.

Methodologically, his work combines quantitative and qualitative research with behavioural and psychophysiological approaches, including EEG, and applied intervention research across public, private and not-for-profit settings.

Current work includes developing the Temporal Intelligence framework, investigating temporal leadership, contributing to the Horizon Europe OPTIME project on working-time reduction, and developing Temporal Commons as a programme of research and institutional experimentation within Trinity.

Supervision interests include time and temporality; temporal autonomy; working-time reduction; occupational wellbeing; human factors; fatigue and recovery; decision-making; organisational behaviour; leadership; and systems change.