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MS LAURA FRUHEN The University of Aberdeen School Of Psychology DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN PSYCHOLOGY (SCIENCE) pref r03lf9@abdn.ac.uk

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Biography

 

I am a PhD student at the University of Aberdeen since May 2009.

I graduated with a first class Dipl Psych (German equivalent to a master's degree) from the Justus- Liebig Universitaet Giessen in 2009. My Master thesis had the title "Leadership Style, Safety Climate and Performance of German Fire Fighting Teams" and was supervised by Prof. Michael Frese.

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Research Interests

• Organisational Culture and Climate
• Leadership
• Problem-Solving, Social Competence and Knowledge in relation to safety

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Current Research

My current research aims at understanding the influence of senior managers on safety in air traffic management. Senior managers have been identified in the academic literature and by practitioners as crucially influencing organisational (safety) culture. Nevertheless, the way they exter this influence is not yet fully understood.

Under the theme 'safety intelligence', I investigate the role of skills and traits of senior managers such as their safety knowledge, problem solving abilities, social competence, personality and motivation for senior managerial influence on safety.

I am further interested in the way senior managers think about organisational culture and how this might influence the way they approach and shape culture. 

This research is carried out in close collaboration with Dr Barry Kirwan at Eurocontrol Experimental Center at Bretigny-sur-Orge. I am supervised by Dr Mearns and Prof Flin.

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Publications

Contributions to Conferences

Papers

• Fruhen, LS., Mearns, KJ., Kirwan, B. & Flin, R. (2010). 'Safety Intelligence: Senior Executive Managers and Organizational Safety'.
• Fruhen, LS., Mearns, KJ., Flin, R. & Kirwan, B. (2010). 'Safety Intelligence: How to design a safe CEO'.

Abstracts

• Fruhen, LS., Mearns, KJ., Flin, R. & Kirwan, B. (2011). 'Senior managers’ mental models of safety culture: An application of linguistic analysis'. 15th conference of the European Association of Work and Organizational Psychology, MECC Maastricht, Netherlands, 25/05/11 - 28/05/11, pp. 247-248.

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