Salford Business School’s Associate Professor of Change Management, Dr Ann Mulhaney, recently presented for the second year at the British Psychology Society’s Division of Occupational Psychology Annual Conference 2025.
The conference was a gathering of academics and practitioners dedicated to advancing research, practice and policy, centring on this year’s key theme of, ‘the future workplace: advancing practice to stay relevant and innovative.’
About Ann’s research
Over the last 13 years, Ann has been collecting data using a culture survey tool, designed as part of her PhD, with a number of SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises). The tool provides perceptive insights into the operations of an organisation and gives a baseline analysis.
In 2023, Ann and her two collaborators, Sarah Clarke and Steph Durban from Think Organisation, cleansed, validated, analysed and then finally interrogated the data set to provide a benchmark indicator which is now incorporated into the survey tool. It also gave the opportunity to look at trends in the data and, at last year’s conference, Ann and Sarah presented ‘a decade of data: a journey of change and organisational culture in UK businesses.’ This paper was well received and is currently being finalised into a journal paper.
At this year’s conference, Ann and Sarah returned to deliver another presentation, this time focusing on ‘culture versus innovation: are SME’s futures in jeopardy?’ incorporating the data collected during 2024, showing an incremental improvement in cultural and innovation metrics over the past five years, nearing levels last seen in the early 2010s. The data showed a significant gap between management quality, innovation and productivity which will be explored further in their ongoing research.
The conference provided Ann with the opportunity to present the valuable research, network with peers and identify collaborations and synergies with other researchers and practitioners.