Organisational Wellbeing and Leadership (OWL) Research Group

Advancing wellbeing, leadership, and performance in organisations

Understanding how organisations, leadership systems, and workplace cultures influence performance and employee wellbeing is essential for addressing contemporary challenges in work and professional life. Research that moves beyond the individual to examine group, organisational, and contextual dynamics is critical for developing evidence-based solutions that support sustainable performance and healthy workforces.

The Organisational Wellbeing and Leadership (OWL) Research Group brings together researchers whose work focuses on organisational performance, leadership, culture, and wellbeing across a range of workplace settings. By integrating organisational psychology, behavioural science, and advanced quantitative methods, the group produces applied research that informs academic knowledge, professional practice, and policy.

Development of a strong evidence base in organisational wellbeing and leadership enables organisations to design more effective interventions, enhance leadership capability, and improve outcomes for both employees and employers. The focus of the OWL Research Group is on real-world organisational contexts, with particular emphasis on business, professional, public sector, and high-reliability environments.

Aims

The aims of the Organisational Wellbeing and Leadership (OWL) Research Group are:

• To facilitate and promote collaborative, interdisciplinary research focused on organisational performance, leadership, culture, and employee wellbeing in workplace settings.
• To develop a strong, externally facing network of academic, industry, and public sector partners, supporting the co-production of research that addresses emerging organisational challenges.
• To provide a supportive environment for research development and capacity building, including grant development, methodological innovation, and mentoring of early-career and doctoral researchers.
• To enhance the research profile of the School through the production of high-quality publications, impact case studies, and sustained external research income, with the longer-term goal of achieving research centre status.

Background

The Organisational Wellbeing and Leadership (OWL) Research Group was established to address a gap within the School for research that explicitly focuses on organisational-level processes and workplace contexts. While existing research groups primarily emphasise individual-level psychology and applied experimental research, the OWL group provides a dedicated space for examining leadership, group dynamics, organisational systems, and broader contextual influences on wellbeing and performance.

The group builds on the substantial expertise and established research programmes of affiliated academic staff, many of whom have longstanding collaborations with industry, professional bodies, and government organisations. These existing partnerships provide a strong foundation for applied research, external funding, and impact-driven outputs.

A distinctive feature of the group is its focus on industry engagement and professional practice, reflecting City St George’s mission as a university committed to business, practice, and the professions. The group also supports research in military, defence, and other high-reliability organisational contexts, with the ambition to develop nationally recognised expertise in these areas and translate insights across sectors.

Through regular research development activities, collaborative projects, and engagement with students across postgraduate programmes, the OWL Research Group contributes to building research capacity, supporting career development, and strengthening the research culture within the School.