Manifesto for the future of work and organizational psychology

This is a self-archived version of an original article. This version may differ from the original in pagination and typographic details. Author(s): Title: Year: Version: Copyright: Rights: Rights url: Please cite the original version: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Manifesto for the future of work and organizational psychology © 2019 The Author(s). Published version Bal, P. Matthijs; Dóci, Edina; Lub, Xander; Van Rossenberg, Yvonne G. T.; Nijs, Sanne; Achnak, Safâa; Briner, Rob B.; Brookes, Andy; Chudzikowski, Katharina; De Cooman, Rein; De Gieter, Sara; De Jong, Jeroen; De Jong, Simon B.; Dorenbosch, Luc; Ghoreishi Galugahi, Motahareh Alsadat; Hack-Polay, Dieu; Hofmans, Joeri; Hornung, Severin; Khuda, Kudrat; Klamer, Renze; Mendy, John; Mol, Stefan T.; Navarro, Jose; Notelaers, Guy; Ossenkop, Carolin; Pickett, Jennifer; Röllmann, Laura; Sanderson, Zoe; Sosnowska, Joanna; Spanouli, Andromachi; Vantilborgh, Tim; Van Dijk, Hans; Van Zelst, Marino Bal, P. M., Dóci, E., Lub, X., Van Rossenberg, Y. G. T., Nijs, S., Achnak, S., Briner, R. B., Brookes, A., Chudzikowski, K., De Cooman, R., De Gieter, S., De Jong, J., De Jong, S. B., Dorenbosch, L., Ghoreishi Galugahi, M. A., Hack-Polay, D., Hofmans, J., Hornung, S., Khuda, K., . . . Van Zelst, M. (2019). Manifesto for the future of work and organizational psychology. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 28(3), 289-299. https://doi.org/10.1080/1359432X.2019.1602041 2019 Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=pewo20 European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology ISSN: 1359-432X (Print) 1464-0643 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/pewo20 Manifesto for the future of work and organizational psychology P. Matthijs Bal, Edina Dóci, Xander Lub, Yvonne G. T. Van Rossenberg, Sanne Nijs, Safâa Achnak, Rob B. Briner, Andy Brookes, Katharina Chudzikowski, Rein De Cooman, Sara De Gieter, Jeroen De Jong, Simon B. De Jong, Luc Dorenbosch, Motahareh Alsadat Ghoreishi Galugahi, Dieu Hack-Polay, Joeri Hofmans, Severin Hornung, Kudrat Khuda, Renze Klamer, John Mendy, Stefan T. Mol, Jose Navarro, Guy Notelaers, Carolin Ossenkop, Jennifer Pickett, Laura Röllmann, Zoe Sanderson, Joanna Sosnowska, Andromachi Spanouli, Tim Vantilborgh, Hans Van Dijk & Marino Van Zelst To cite this article: P. Matthijs Bal, Edina Dóci, Xander Lub, Yvonne G. T. Van Rossenberg, Sanne Nijs, Safâa Achnak, Rob B. Briner, Andy Brookes, Katharina Chudzikowski, Rein De Cooman, Sara De Gieter, Jeroen De Jong, Simon B. De Jong, Luc Dorenbosch, Motahareh Alsadat Ghoreishi Galugahi, Dieu Hack-Polay, Joeri Hofmans, Severin Hornung, Kudrat Khuda, Renze Klamer, John Mendy, Stefan T. Mol, Jose Navarro, Guy Notelaers, Carolin Ossenkop, Jennifer Pickett, Laura Röllmann, Zoe Sanderson, Joanna Sosnowska, Andromachi Spanouli, Tim Vantilborgh, Hans Van Dijk & Marino Van Zelst (2019) Manifesto for the future of work and organizational psychology, European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 28:3, 289-299, DOI: 10.1080/1359432X.2019.1602041 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1359432X.2019.1602041 © 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Published online: 16 Apr 2019. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 3808 View Crossmark data Manifesto for the future of work and organizational psychology P. Matthijs Bal * a , Edina Dóci * b , Xander Lub c,d , Yvonne G. T. Van Rossenberg e , Sanne Nijs b , Safâa Achnak f , Rob B. Briner g , Andy Brookes a , Katharina Chudzikowski h , Rein De Cooman i , Sara De Gieter f , Jeroen De Jong e , Simon B. De Jong j , Luc Dorenbosch k , Motahareh Alsadat Ghoreishi Galugahi l , Dieu Hack-Polay a , Joeri Hofmans f , Severin Hornung m,n , Kudrat Khuda a , Renze Klamer o , John Mendy a , Stefan T. Mol p , Jose Navarro q , Guy Notelaers r , Carolin Ossenkop e , Jennifer Pickett f,s , Laura Röllmann t , Zoe Sanderson u , Joanna Sosnowska f , Andromachi Spanouli f , Tim Vantilborgh f , Hans Van Dijk v and Marino Van Zelst v a Department of People and Organisations, University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK; b Department of Management & Organization, VU University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands; c Academy of Hotel & Facility Management, Breda University of Applied Science, Breda, Netherlands; d Center for Strategy, Organization & Leadership, Nyenrode Business University, Breukelen, The Netherlands; e Institute for Management Research, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen the Netherlands; f Department of Work & Organizational Psychology, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium; g School of Business and Management, Queen Mary University London, London, UK; h School of Management, University of Bath, Bath, UK; i Department of Work and Organisation Studies, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium; j School of Business & Economics, Maastricht University, Maastricht, Netherlands; k Nederlandse Stichting voor Psychotechniek (NSvP), Arnhem, Netherlands; l Department of Counselling, Allameh Tabatabai University, Tehran, Iran; m Heinz College of Information Systems and Pubic Policy, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA; n Institute of Psychology, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria; o School of Culture and Society, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; p Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands; q Department of Social Psychology and Quantitative Psychology, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain; r Department of Psychosocial Science, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway; s Department of Psychology, University of Jyväskylä, Jyvaskyla, Finland; t Department of Work and Organizational Psychology, Universität Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany; u Department of Management, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK; v Department of Organization Studies, Tilburg University, Tilburg, the Netherlands ABSTRACT This manifesto presents 10 recommendations for a sustainable future for the field of Work and Organizational Psychology. The manifesto is the result of an emerging movement around the Future of WOP (see www. futureofwop.com), which aims to bring together WOP-scholars committed to actively contribute to building a better future for our field. Our recommendations are intended to support both individuals and collectives to become actively engaged in co-creating the future of WOP together with us. Therefore, this manifesto is open and never “finished.”It should continuously evolve, based on an ongoing debate around our professional values and behavior. This manifesto is meant, firstofall,forourselvesasanacademiccommunity. Furthermore, it is also important for managers, decision makers, and other stakeholders and interested parties, such as students, governments and organizations, as we envision what the future of WOP could look like, and it is only through our collective efforts that we will be able to realize a sustainable future for all of us. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 1 March 2019 Accepted 16 March 2019 KEYWORDS Future; academic system; work and organizational psychology; organizational behavior; manifesto 1) We have responsibilities towards individuals: As work and organizational psychologists, we must keep the wellbeing of individuals at heart when doing our research and place it central in our research questions, above and beyond business interests. 2) We have responsibilities towards ourselves: We must be aware of the enormous workload and pressure in academia and protect our own wellbeing in the midst of the mental health crisis in academia. 3) We have responsibilities towards reducing inequality:We must strive to reduce inequalities in academia and to protect all academics who are in unstable, precarious positions. 4) We have responsibilities towards our community:We need to break the silence in our communities, share our experiences and show active solidarity. 5) We have responsibilities as supervisors and managers: We must place the wellbeing of individuals at the heart of management and organize work in ways that protect the health of (academic) employees. 6) We have responsibilities towards how work is organized in universities:Wemustdemocratizethewayswesetourgoalsand objectives to allow ourselves to be intrinsically motivated in our work. 7) We have responsibilities towards how the publication system is organized: We need to redesign the competitive, “publish-or-perish”, publication system and business model that operates on the basis of using unpaid academic labor, and create better ways to communicate about our research to the scientific and non-scientific community. 8) We have responsibilities towards how our financing is organized: We have to stop relying largely on competitive grants to obtain the financial means to do our work, and have CONTACT P. Matthijs Bal [email protected] *Matthijs Bal and Edina Dóci share first authorship and contributed equally to the manifesto. This manifesto is the result of discussions concerning the future of Work and Organizational Psychology at Panel Debates at the EAWOP Conferences, and the Small Group Meeting on the Future of Work and Organizational Psychology which took place May, 2018 in Breda, the Netherlands. See also www.futureofwop.com, and https://www.researchgate.net/project/The-Future-of-Work-and-Organizational-Psychology. EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF WORK AND ORGANIZATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY 2019, VOL. 28, NO. 3, 289–299 https://doi.org/10.1080/1359432X.2019.1602041 © 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. to debate how financial means can support rather than distract us from doing our core work. 9) We have responsibilities towards society:Weneedto be critical about how our work impacts society at large, and keep societal interests in mind when doing our research. 10) We have responsibilities towards our students:We have to engage in an open dialogue with our students to find sustainable ways to benefit students, their learning processes, wellbeing and health, and their development to become responsible citizens and Work and Organizational Psychology-practitioners. Introduction In the recent past, scholars in our field have pointed out the lack of relevance of Work and Organizational Psychology (WOP) research for society (Byington & Felps, 2017), detrimental research practices (Grand et al., 2018), ongoing pressures on academics within universities leading to a burnout crisis (Watts & Robertson, 2011), and the decline of WOP- departments in universities with scholars increasingly moving to business schools (Anseel, Carette, Lang, & Lievens, 2014). We are not the first and unlikely to be the last to point out that our field of Work and Organizational Psychology is currently in a state of crisis and faces many structural problems (Banks & O’Boyle, 2013; Kepes & McDaniel, 2013) which do not appear to be resolved anytime soon. This crisis concerns not only our research and its validity and value (such as how we produce “robust science”; Grand et al., 2018), but also the academic system in which we are working. We, as academics, have to conduct our main task of the study of the psychology of individuals in the workplace from within a system which is unhealthy for many of us working in it. For instance, the rise of stress, burnout and mental health problems among academics (e.g. FNV, 2017; Levecque, Anseel, De Beuckelaer, Van der Heyden, & Gisle, 2017;Watts&Robertson, 2011) is a cause for great concern in universities across the world. Work and Organizational Psychology is particularly suited to respond to the mental health crisis in academia, and to take a proactive and central role in addressing and changing the organizational processes and human resource practices that play a role in the emergence of this crisis. As Work and Organizational Psychologists, 1 we are not only aware of this crisis and the underlying causes of poor wellbeing at work, but we also have expertise in addressing how organizations and people can create workplaces and cultures in which people can thrive and experience wellbeing. Many of us want to use our psychological expertise to enhance the wellbeing of people in contemporary workplaces. Therefore, we call on this sense of shared responsibility to get actively involved in the public debate and contribute to ways of addressing both concerns around the future directions of our research as well as the high prevalence of burnout in academia, and thus how our work and profession are constructed and organized. In delineating our responsibilities, we refer to the Ethics Code of the American Psychological Association (APA), which states that a key responsibility of psychologists is that they should “respect the dignity and worth of all people, and the rights of individuals”(APA, 2017,Principle E).Inlinewiththis,theEuropeanAssociationofWorkand Organizational Psychology (EAWOP), in defining its strategy, establishes its overarching objective as “contributing to the quality of working life in terms of employee wellbeing and effective work organization”and identifies “influencing policy making in academia and practice”as one of the means to achieve this. Hence, this manifesto is a call to all Work and Organizational Psychologists, and academics who feel affiliated with this field, to act upon our responsibilities towards ourselves, our workplaces, and the institutions we work for to elicit positive change. While many of the adverse issues we address have been debated elsewhere in isolation, we believe that it is necessary to take a more integrative perspective in order to assess how the academic system contributes to these various problems, and to explore and experiment with ways in which we, as academics, are able to change the system that we work in. We need an integrative perspective as it is no longer sufficient to narrowly focus on one problem manifesting in our work and working lives (e.g. how we are inhibited to produce “robust science”), without taking into account how the abovementioned problems are connected within the larger system (see e.g. Bal & Dóci, 2018). Indeed, the problems are not isolated but tend to have similar underlying causes, which means that they also need to be addressed in relation to each other. We therefore integrate our recommendations by focusing on what needs to be done at multiple levels in which our working lives are embedded: the individual, the organizational, and the societal level. If we, as WOP-scholars, believe that we are experts in the psychology of the workplace, and that we are able to exercise at least some agency within our own work and academic system, it is then our responsibility to actively engage in building a sustainable future of Work and Organizational Psychology as a scientific discipline. At the same time, we have a responsibility to implement long-needed changes in the broader academic field, as an important sector of work, institutions, and employment. This manifesto offers ten recommendations for scholars in WOP to contribute to a more sustainable future for our discipline and for our academic system and beyond. These recommendations should not be seen as dogmatic ”commandments”to be adhered to, but rather, as a call to all scholars in our field to become more aware of our academic responsibilities. The manifesto is the result of an emerging movement around the Future of WOP (see www.futureofwop.com), which aims to bring together WOP-scholars committed to actively contribute to building a better future for our field. Our recommendations are intended to support both individuals and collectives to become actively engaged in co-creating the future of WOP together with us. Therefore, this manifesto is open and never “finished.”It should continuously evolve, based on an ongoing debate around our professional values and behavior. This manifesto is meant, first of all, for ourselves as an academic community. Furthermore, it is also important for managers, decision makers, and other stakeholders and interested parties, such as students, governments and organizations, as we envision what the future of WOP could look like, and it is only through our collective efforts that we will be able to realize a sustainable future for all of us. 290 P. M. BAL ET AL. The recommendations proceed from the individual to the organizational-systemic and societal level. First, we discuss the responsibility we, as WOP-scholars, have towards individuals in the workplace. Next, we address the responsibilities we have towards ourselves as individuals, towards our academic community, and towards our employees when we are in managerial positions. On the systemic level, we focus on the need to redesign our performance management system and our publication system. Finally, we discuss our responsibilities toward society, and finish by reflecting on how we can integrate our recommendations into our teaching. Our recommendations are meant to be inclusive and integrative, as they jointly describe our responsibilities towards ourselves, our immediate and more distal environment, and towards society as a whole. After presenting our ten recommendations, we summarize in Table 1 the practical steps we can take in the short and long term to put our recommendations into practice. By describing the practical steps we can take, we hope to not just inspire the debate on how the future of WOP can be shaped, but also to be able to put our ideas into practice. We believe that all ten issues we raise are equally important in changing our work and workplaces, that they mutually influence each other, and, therefore, that we need to address and resolve them concurrently through a holistic people-centered approach. Recommendation #1: we have responsibilities towards individuals We as work and organizational psychologists subscribe to the code of ethics of the APA (2017), which declares our responsibilities towards beneficence, fidelity, integrity, justice and the dignity of the individuals we are working with, including employees. In addition, other professional bodies have ethical codes based on the same or very similar principles, including the Academy of Management (2018), the British Psychological Society (2018), the Indian National Association of Psychological Science (2018) and many other national societies for Psychology. Hence, the starting point of our research as WOP-scholars is that individuals in the workplace should not be treated as mere instruments (“human resources”, “human capital”) toward the achievement of a narrowly defined goal, such as performance, or profitability. Therefore, managerial and employer interests in profitability, productivity and other business- or performance-related outcomes should not be prioritized as the ultimate and unquestionable goals of our research. In particular, financial interests and objectives can, from our ethical point of view, never be prioritized over the health and wellbeing of human beings, and cannot be accepted as legitimate, if their pursuit and attainment is at the expense of the integrity, justice and dignity of individuals in- and outside organizations. Instead, in our scientific inquiries, we must prioritize or, at the very least, be at all times aware of the interests, needs and wellbeing of individuals, and how these are impacted in the context of the organizational phenomena we study. We also need to be mindful of the (power) inequalities that determine the particular positions of individuals in the workplace, as well as of how society and structural factors influence the workplace experiences and the career trajectories of individuals. In practice, this means that we carry a responsibility to conduct research that benefits individuals in society, is meaningful and strives for the enhancement of the dignity of individuals in the workplace, and challenges dominant structures and conventional wisdoms threatening individual justice, integrity and dignity. Moreover, it also means that we investigate how individuals can contribute to workplaces which are meaningful, respect the dignity and integrity of other people, and contribute to a more equal, fairer and decent society. Recommendation #2: we have responsibilities towards ourselves As work and organizational psychologists, we know that work can only be sustainably performed under conditions that offer the right balance of job demands and available job resources (Bakker & Demerouti, 2007). To be able to conduct research that is creative, critical and meaningful, we should not strive to fulfill impossible job demands, and expect ourselves and others to fulfill practically unattainable, occupational ideals of the perfect academic, which increasingly means striving to be the “sheep with five legs”. The current pressure on academics demands excellence in all areas, and, more often than not, institutional initiatives for conducting better science (e.g., data management, blended learning, research ethics) imply a moral obligation to carry out more tasks, and to spend more time on research, teaching, scientific communication, impact generation, writing funding applications, public engagement, citizenship and so on, with limited available resources (Ogbonna & Harris, 2004). This problem is amplified by the (self-)imposed demands which academics may put upon themselves to achieve unattainable standards that compromise their worklife balance. We should recognize that trying to live up to these demands is a rather unviable and unsustainable future for ourselves (and our families and communities). Instead, we should value diversity in academic careers and foster academic freedom, such that people within (and outside) WOP do not have to struggle with the pressure of being the perfect academic excelling in every area. In practice, this means that we need to engage in continuous systematic conversations with our colleagues, managers, and others, to define what a healthy, dignified and reasonable job in academia looks like. Furthermore, we need to think about and construct academic work in more collective and less individualistic ways. While in other sectors and organizations, team members are often expected to complement each other in their skills and expertise, academics are still expected to excel in every single domain of academic work during selection procedures and in the working culture of universities. These unrealistic expectations result from and reconstruct an individualistic and unsustainable model of academic careers. We, as work and organizational psychologists, know that health and wellbeing are among the most precious aspects of human life. Given the pervasiveness of burnout in academia and the rise of mental problems among academics (Levecque et al., 2017), it is our responsibility to not compromise our own and others’physical or mental health and wellbeing in order EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF WORK AND ORGANIZATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY 291 Table 1. Recommended practices for a sustainable future of WOP. Recommended Practices Recommendation Current Dominant Practices Short-Term Long-Term 1 We have responsibilities towards individuals. ●We treat individuals in our research as instrumental to organizational goals, such as productivity and profitability. ●Describe the implications of our research for individuals in our publications. What can individuals embedded in work settings do on the basis of our research that promotes their wellbeing, integrity and dignity? ●In our work, prioritize the needs of employees for wellbeing, integrity and dignity over the interests of organizations in profitability. ●Conduct research that investigates how individuals in workplaces are affected by societal (power) structures. ●Conduct research that investigates how workplaces can be created that promote greater dignity and integrity of individuals, and how individuals can contribute to more sustainable communities. ●Collaborate with individuals, organizations and other stakeholders to create workplaces that promote integrity and dignity of people. 2 We have responsibilities towards ourselves. ●Academics are expected to excel in every area, at the expense of their health and wellbeing. ●Engage in dialogue with our colleagues about how workloads are distributed within departments and universities. ●Engage in active citizenship to improve our working conditions, for instance by collectively organizing as department, faculty or university. ●Prevent burning out by remaining vigilant about our own health and wellbeing and discussing with our colleagues and managers when work pressure becomes too high. ●Continuously debate and (re-)define what a dignified and reasonable job looks like in academia and how working conditions can be created that fit with this. ●Take actively part and claim our part in decision making processes within our department and universities. ●Design and create democratic academic structures and cultures that sustain wellbeing of all people within the university. 3 We have responsibilities towards reducing inequality ●There are various biases in academia against those who do not align with the prototype of the average ideal academic. ●These biases are amplified during the early career stages. ●Actively debate with colleagues and management how we can promote and contribute to diverse universities which respect all people, no matter what background. ●Use and apply research on biases in promotion and selection to avoid reproduction of biases in academia. ●Set up and participate in mentor schemes for early career researchers, so mentees are more prepared for a career in or outside academia and mentors are more aware of the biases and struggles specific to the next generation of academics. ●Work toward equal representation of different societal groups in all the roles in the university, including management roles. ●Create departments that are representative of the people in the workplace, and where everyone has equal chances to develop a career. ●Create safety nets for individuals so when their temporary contracts run out, they have time to find new employment. ●Abolish insecure, precarious positions and create stable employment opportunities for academics to generate scientific knowledge to advance WOP. 4 We have responsibilities towards our community ●Academics work in hierarchical systems with alienated cultures. ●Break the silence and talk to each other about our experiences in contemporary academia. ●Create discussion spaces, where we can engage in conversation with and support each other. ●Construct academia as a collaborative space where we can jointly advance scientific knowledge in collaborative spirit. ●Create networks of peers within and across universities to share experiences and successful ways to change the academic system. 5 We have responsibilities as supervisors and managers ●Managers experience high work pressure as well. ●Under the pressure from hierarchy and institutional directives, managers often neglect the wellbeing of academic employees. ●As managers, we have to prioritize the dignity and wellbeing of those who we manage. ●Enhance leadership programs to make managers better aware of their responsibilities towards people they manage. ●Create a system where managers are democratically elected, and are expected to truly represent their departments and the people they supervise. ●Managers involve and engage all people in decision making processes. 6 We have responsibilities towards how work is organized in universities ●Extrinsic rewards, incentive structures, and emphasis on quantitative metrics are detrimental to scientific progress. ●Collectively discuss in our departments what our goals are in science, and how we can organize ourselves to be able to achieve our goals. ●Engage in collective dialogue on how tasks are distributed in universities and departments ●Choose the focus of research not (only) on the basis whether it can be published in top-tier journals, but whether it answers relevant questions about individuals in the workplace. ●Create more diverse selection processes where applicants are not merely judged based upon narrowly defined quantitative output indicators. ●Abolish narrowly created metrics as outcomes of our work, and define plural goals and ways to evaluate whether we are achieving our scientific goals. ●Create systems where departments can collectively decide on which tasks are conducted and how they are distributed among people in the department. ●Lobby at the political level for policies that support the aims of this manifesto. (Continued) 292 P. M. BAL ET AL. to have a career in academia. In the Netherlands, 7 out of 10 university employees experience high to very high work pressure, and 59% of university employees reported to have experienced mental or physical issues due to high work pressure in the previous three years (FNV, 2017). We, as work and organizational psychologists, have a responsibility to acknowledge and address this crisis. As the mental health experts of the workplace, we should apply our expertise to improve working conditions in the very workplaces we occupy. An academic system lacks legitimacy and will not be sustainable if the academics who are part of the system and are contributing to its outputs are constantly struggling to remain healthy. We need to collectively create a work environment in which we can be mindful not only of our own health and wellbeing, but we also need to pay attention to and look out for the health and wellbeing of others around us, including our colleagues, students, and managers. In practice, this implies that we no longer put pressure on ourselves and others to compete with each other in ways that compromise our health and wellbeing. Instead, we need an active and inclusive debate within universities and departments on how workloads are distributed, how to make sure that there is sufficient teaching staffto prospectively and sustainably deal with increasing student numbers, and how we can make meaningful contributions toward our goals. Democratic, bottom-up approaches (Foley & Polanyi, 2006) are important ways through which we as academics can self-organize and Table 1. (Continued). Recommended Practices Recommendation Current Dominant Practices Short-Term Long-Term 7 We have responsibilities towards how the publication system is organized ●Academics devote free labor and their wellbeing for the publish-or -perish system. ●Redefine and discuss what the goals are of communicating our research. ●Rethink how our research can be effectively communicated to our stakeholders. ●Strive towards publishing primarily in open-access journals that are not owned by commercial publishers, if possible. ●Develop a new system of peer-to-peer networks to communicate our knowledge to our stakeholders. ●Design innovative ways to communicate our findings and knowledge beyond papers, such as videos, documentaries, interviews, podcasts, poetry, art installations etc. ●Recognize and integrate the diversity of ways of publishing. 8 We have responsibilities towards how our financing is organized ●Academics have to compete for funding to conduct their core tasks. ●Work towards a system where we only take part in funded projects or applications when it is team-based, and when there are clear prospects for funded positions to become permanent and stable. ●Only participate in funded projects if they contribute to greater integrity and dignity of individuals, sustainable communities, and a more sustainable future for WOP as a discipline. ●Advocate stable positions in our departments, and abolish precarious (teaching) positions for standard, core tasks that need to be conducted. ●Advocate the abolishment of competitive funding in academia and create stable and secure positions for people to conduct their work. ●Lobby governments to abolish competition to distribute funding for academia, and promote dialogue and democracy to distribute resources and to limit overhead costs. 9 We have responsibilities towards society ●The role of WOP within society is currently not acknowledged and unclear. ●Prioritize societal interests in our work (research and teaching). ●Be critical of existing structures in society that hamper the integrity and dignity of people. ●Develop closer links with practitioners and other stakeholders to contribute to a more dignified society. ●Organize critical streams in our conferences which are focused on how WOP can contribute to society. ●Conduct research on underprivileged groups in society. ●Be critical observers of dominant societal structures which stifle fair and decent workplaces. ●Conduct research on how individuals in the workplace may contribute to fairer and more decent communities and societies. ●Conduct research that aims at improving working conditions, wellbeing and equal chances for underprivileged groups in workplaces and society. ●Collaborate with various stakeholders (policy makers, civil society, organizations, labor unions) to contribute to a more dignified workplace and society. 10 We have responsibilities towards our students ●There is currently no structural link between what we prioritize in our research and what we teach our students. ●Share the manifesto and related publications with our students. ●Enhance research-led teaching, and teach our students in line with the principles we have. ●Inform students of current debates in academia and integrate them in thinking around solutions. ●Practice what we preach in our teaching. ●Support our students who are also being part of the academic system and suffering from pressure put on them. ●Enhance democratic participation of students in the academic system. ●Integrate students in the research we conduct. ●Emphasize and create a system where learning is central, and where teaching and research are no longer opposite domains requiring attention from academics, but are jointly part of the learning that takes place within and beyond the university by academics in collaboration with students and other stakeholders. EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF WORK AND ORGANIZATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY 293 ensure that we can create jobs and careers that protect the health and wellbeing of all academics, today and for future academic generations. Recommendation #3: we have responsibilities towards reducing inequalities We, as work and organizational psychologists, know how academics who do not resemble the prototype of the average ideal academic (i.e., straight, white, male), such as (but not only) women, disabled people, or academics with minority ethnic backgrounds, are exposed to more pressure and stress. Moreover, they face prejudice in academic encounters and processes, and receive less support and fewer resources, which stifle their equal chances of career development in academia (Martell, Emrich, & Robison-Cox, 2012). The additional pressure and job uncertainty affecting them is due to negative biases they encounter throughout the academic trajectory (Monroe & Chiu, 2010), impeding their chances to obtain stable academic jobs. Because women and minorities (and especially academics who are in the intersection of multiple forms of exclusion) are often have lower chances when it comes to promotions (Harris, Ravenswood, & Myers, 2013), grant applications (Bornmann, Mutz, & Daniel, 2007), publication opportunities (Larivière, Ni, Gingras, Cronin, & Sugimoto, 2013), and, overall, are less likely to secure substantiated employment in academia. Moreover, these biases are experienced even stronger during the early stages of one’s career. In the current academic system, early career researchers, including PhD-students, lecturers and many teachers and researchers on temporary and unstable contracts, suffer from enormous pressure to build a “high-quality” publication portfolio, obtain above-average teaching scores and so on, often leading to depression, burnout (Levecque et al., 2017) and turnover (and thus a loss of talent for academia). From our research, we know that job insecurity is related to adverse health outcomes, while also being detrimental for performance, voice and creativity (Shoss, 2017), which are key to success for early career researchers, especially if they are women or minorities. We therefore have to acknowledge that the insecure, and sometimes precarious, positions that are nowadays so common for early career researchers, including tenure-track systems, probationary and post-doc positions, are symptoms of a dysfunctional system and counterproductive to facilitating younger generations (and particularly women and minorities) to enter a sustainable academic career and conduct their work based on their intrinsic motivation. These insecure positions are aggravated by the enormous pressure that researchers experience to survive in academia. To address these issues, we need to engage in an ongoing dialogue within our departments and universities on how we can reduce inequalities within academia, by creating working conditions and structures where everyone has equal chances to develop an academic career commensurate with their aspirations and expectations. We also need to create a system where stability and security is central for everyone, with special attention to creating workplaces with truly equal chances for ethnic minorities, women and early career academics. A safety net can be created through national (or international) professional cooperation supported by universities to ensure that researchers are supported to continue working in academia when their temporary contracts run out. Furthermore, we also need to consider that the proliferating number of PhD positions in some countries creates a situation where the overwhelming majority of PhD graduates cannot hope for a career in academia. Therefore, it may be necessary in some contexts to reduce the number of PhD positions when there are little chances for academic careers afterwards, and more carefully preparing PhD candidates for careers outside the academia. Recommendation #4: we have responsibilities towards our community We, as work and organizational psychologists, know how cultures of fear in organizations can hamper motivation and performance (Schneider, Ehrhart, & Macey, 2013). Many academics experience a culture of silence and alienation in universities, where people work in relative isolation in a hierarchical system, making them wary to speak up about misconduct, structural problems and inequalities, discrimination, bullying, and other dysfunctional phenomena in contemporary universities (Brandist, 2014). It is our responsibility, however, to break the silence in the face of misconduct in academia, to speak up and question current practices and dominant structures within academia that hamper our potential to conduct meaningful research while retaining our health and wellbeing. In practice, this means that we need to create personal relationships within and beyond our departments and discipline in order to find supportive peers whom we trust and can enter in conversation with about our own experiences and observations in our respective universities. Only by breaking the silence and creating a psychologically safe environment will we be able to share our experiences, support and stand up for each other, so that we deindividualize our work and re-appreciate its collective meaning. We have to open our doors (sometimes literally!) to our colleagues to share our experiences and engage in dialogue about these experiences at work and try to find new ways to support each other. However, support may not be restricted to within the walls of universities. Functioning as a close-knit inter-university support network, in addition to nurturing fruitful research collaborations, may provide many with much needed support and solidarity in their career and workplace experiences. Recommendation #5: we have responsibilities as supervisors and managers We, as work and organizational psychologists, are especially aware of the vast impact supervisors and managers may have on the wellbeing of their employees (e.g. Ilies, Morgeson, & Nahrgang, 2005). Universities are predominantly hierarchically organized, featuring a structure that allocates power and control increasingly to administrative and managerial functions relative to academics, whose decision authority and access to resources depend on their position within their own “nested”hierarchies. At no point, should we forget that leadership positions come with an additional responsibility towards those that one “manages”or “supervises”. Managers, 294 P. M. BAL ET AL. who are often academics themselves, are also university employees, and thus, are likely to suffer themselves from enormous pressure put on them, being in between staff and higher-level management. We, work and organizational psychologists, must place the wellbeing and dignity of all individuals in universities at the heart of management and leadership. This means that if we are in management positions, we need to be aware that all of our behavior and decisions affect the wellbeing of others (in addition to ourselves), and that we carry a certain responsibility towards the needs of those we “manage”. In practice, this means that managers should encourage continuous open dialogue within their departments and among staffon how systems can be created or reformed to simultaneously stimulate meaningful research and teaching, and support the health and wellbeing of academics. While management by numbers (where achieving numeric performance goals, such as number of publications in “high-impact”journals is at the heart of management, and publication scores become the ultimate indicator of a researcher’s worth) may be convenient in terms of ease and efficiency for the academic manager, it is detrimental for employees’wellbeing and creates alienated and extrinsically motivated work cultures. Moreover, burnout and other health-problems in academia often occur in the “absence of leadership”, where managers are unaware or absent from being involved in preventing or appropriately responding to health problems. However, for a leader, “not knowing”often translates into “not wanting to know”,or failure to live up to a “responsibility to know”. Thus, we believe that it is particularly crucial to be aware of our full set of moral responsibilities towards others, when we fulfill roles as managers and decision makers. Recommendation #6: we have responsibilities towards how work is organized in universities We, as work and organizational psychologists, know that existing performance management systems are often dysfunctional, as research suggests that extrinsic rewards hinder intrinsic motivation (Deci, Koestner, & Ryan, 1999). Moreover, the contemporary obsession with metrics in academia is detrimental to both high-quality research and the wellbeing of academics (Edwards & Roy, 2017; Esarey, 2017; Hicks, Wouters, Waltman, Rijcke, & Rafols, 2015). For instance, the current emphasis on the quantitative metrics as indicators of academic performance has led to a system that promotes incremental, irrelevant and poorly conducted or nonreplicable science (Edwards & Roy, 2017; see also Seeber, Cattaneo, Meoli, & Malighetti, 2019). While the large majority of people entering academic jobs tend to show high to very high levels of intrinsic motivation (or even perceive a “calling” to academia), overreliance on extrinsic performance management and key performance indicators is detrimental to intrinsic motivation, and the very foundation of academia (Edwards & Roy, 2017). The introduction of extrinsic rewards for work that is initially driven by intrinsic motivation, may, over time, lead to a system where people only work towards the fulfillment of goals and the manipulation of metrics (i.e. “gaming” the system) that are generally set top-down by university managers. Instead, we need to start setting the goals of our work through democratic and self-organized processes. In practice, this means that we should collectively organize within our departments and our discipline (e.g. EAWOP), to set our own professional goals, in line with our values, strengths and needs, thereby taking into account that we do not have to strive to be the “perfect”academic, excelling in every area. That we need to manage our own performance collectively and individually, in line with the goals we set for our research while taking into account potential trade-offs with our health and wellbeing. In particular, employees in universities and departments need to engage in dialogue on how tasks (e.g. research, teaching, impact, public engagement) can best be divided among academics so that everyone can maintain their wellbeing and conduct meaningful work. Finally, as EAWOP, we also have to engage in lobbying at the political level to ensure policies are designed at the national and European level that facilitate the goals we have described in this manifesto. Recommendation #7: we have responsibilities toward how the publication system is organized We, as work and organizational psychologists, know that the publish-or-perish publication system is detrimental for our wellbeing due to its effects on experienced performance pressure, psychological stress and job insecurity (e.g. Miller, Taylor, & Bedeian, 2011). Furthermore, the current “business model” of the publication system is built on the utilization of free academic labor by publishers of journals, thereby contributing to the exhaustion of academics. At the same time, we are aware of the importance of communicating our work and research progress to our scientific community and the wider public, including individuals in the workplace, governments, organizations and other groups in society. However, our current publication system has become largely dysfunctional in achieving these goals, and we are currently subjected to a system where we all collectively suffer from the publish-or- perish culture and the metric fetish (i.e. the obsession with measurability of our work and outputs; Hicks et al., 2015). These metrics are generally very poor indicators of whether we are achieving our scientific goals, and instead create a competitive system, where academics are not collectively collaborating but forced to compete with each other for limited journal space to publish their work (Edwards & Roy, 2017). To generate an alternative to this system, we need to refocus our attention to the underlying goals of publication, which is communication about our scientific insights, and to make our work accessible to all who may be affected or interested. This also entails a need to rethink our wider publication system, as competition at the expense of other academics over limited journal space does in no way guarantee good research, and leads to largely uncontrollable odds of publishing in (top-tier) journals (Esarey, 2017). Hence, we need to create better systems of communicating our knowledge to each other, while retaining the value that peer-review processes (may) add to our work. In practice, this means that we should not only focus on open access publications on platforms that are not dominated by profit-driven publishing companies (including open access journals which are still commercially driven by having authors EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF WORK AND ORGANIZATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY 295