The Digital+Sustainable Innovation Lab at Católica-Lisbon School of Business and Economics is launching a new research programme built around a simple question with far-reaching implications for how people work: As generative AI becomes increasingly agentic, what happens when individuals change and automate parts of their jobs faster than their colleagues, teams, or organizations can coordinate?
Today, almost anyone can use AI agents to streamline tasks, rewrite processes, or redesign workflows in a matter of hours. Yet most organizational work is deeply interdependent. Even small, local improvements can generate hidden frictions: duplicated effort, misaligned expectations, disrupted handovers, or new bottlenecks. The gap between individual optimization and system-level performance is widening rapidly, and we understand it poorly.
What the project is about
This project is among the first to study this phenomenon in a rigorous and systematic way. The research starts from two core observations:
- People hold imperfect perceptions of how work actually fits together. They often misjudge who co-owns a workflow, who depends on it, or how changes propagate across a workflow.
- Agentic GenAI dramatically accelerates local change. When individuals modify workflows and routines without a shared understanding of dependencies, adoption and change become fragmented and can even become counterproductive.
The goal of this project is to build an empirical foundation for understanding this emerging coordination challenge through field work in a large partner corporation.
What you will do
You will contribute to a large-scale research programmes examining how GenAI-driven task innovation spreads inside real organizations. Depending on your interests and strengths, your work may include:
- Mapping how individuals represent their workflows, responsibilities, and points of coordination or conflict with their co-workers
- Identifying where misalignments among employees (silently) generate delays, rework, or conflict
- Studying how individuals use agentic GenAI to reshape their habits, routines, and workflows
- Observing when local changes improves overall system performance, and when it undermines it
- Designing or testing interventions that help teams coordinate GenAI-enabled change
The research may involve interviews, structured surveys, field experiments, lab studies, or comparative case analysis. It is explicitly designed to generate multiple high-impact academic papers. Early opportunities include:
- A theory paper on representational misalignment and task co-ownership
- An empirical paper comparing coordinated and uncoordinated GenAI-driven innovation
- A comparative study examining how these dynamics vary across industries and workflows
You will have substantial scope to take ownership, lead first-author projects, and shape the direction of the research. You will be supervised by
Rene Bohnsack (https://www.linkedin.com/in/renebohnsack/), and
Ekin Ilseven (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ekin-ilseven-741a4943/),
and work closely with them throughout the project.
We are looking for candidates with
A PhD degree (completed or near completion) in management or a related social science field (such as strategy, organizational behavior, entrepreneurship, organization theory, information systems, economics, or sociology).
Ability to develop mechanism-based theory. For example: you have completed a PhD with strong theoretical grounding; written theory-driven working papers or dissertation chapters; and can clearly articulate causal mechanisms, including what changes, through which pathways, and under what boundary conditions.
Strong empirical research skills along with experience in at least two of the following areas is expected: (i) qualitative interviewing and coding, (ii) survey design and construct measurement, (iii) causal inference or field experiments, (iv) network, process, or workflow analysis.
Experience working with organizations: You are comfortable managing access, ethics and consent, and stakeholder coordination, including handling sensitive data and navigating shifting field conditions.
Strong academic writing skills and motivation to publish: You can turn complex and messy field observations into clear constructs, propositions, and testable predictions, and you are motivated by peer-reviewed publication.
Please send your applications to r.bohnsack@ucp.pt and eilseven@ucp.pt attaching (i) motivation for this position, (ii) your most recent CV, (iii) abstract of your PhD dissertation, (iv) one previous peer-reviewed publication or a writing sample, and (v) contact information.
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Ekin Ilseven
Assistant Professor of Strategy and Organizations
School of Business and Economics, Católica-Lisbon
Email:
eilseven@ucp.ptWebsite:
http://www.ekinilseven.com------------------------------