Dina Van Dijk CV.pdf

Dina Van-Dijk Page 12 of 13
Synopsis of research, including reference to publications and grants in
above lists
My current research aiming to understand the role motivation plays in influencing
organizational behavior and well-being. More specifically, I'm interested in how the motivationalregulatory
focus affects peoples' reaction to feedback, relationship with supervisor, career choice,
and their well-being and health. The following synopsis of research will describe my research
agenda and achievements in the past seven years and will outlay plans for ongoing and
further research.
In my doctoral dissertation from the School of Business Administration of The
Hebrew University in 2003, I explored how the motivational system --promotion-
prevention focus -- affects the reaction of individuals to external feedback. I found that
when people are motivated by a promotion focus, positive feedback encourages them to
work harder than negative feedback. Conversely, when people are motivated by a
prevention focus, negative feedback encourages them to work harder than positive
feedback. Together with Avraham Kluger, my PhD advisor, we have shown this effect in
both lab and field (refereed articles #1, #8 and scientific report #14). For this work, we
received the Best Competitive Paper Award (2009) from the "OB division of the Academy
of Management," Recently, we suggested some unique implications of our work that could
be exclusively fit to healthcare systems (refereed article #7).
My work on regulatory focus theory had extended in two other research directions:
leadership and more recently, to well-Being and health. In the leadership arena, I have
studied the role of regulatory focus as both mediator and moderator of the relationships
between leadership style and follower outcomes. A conceptual work done together with my
colleague, Ronit Kark, was published in the Academy of Management Review (refereed
article #3). Later, we presented another theoretical framework in which the unit of analysis
is the leader–follower dyad (chapter #13). Additionally, our work on regulatory focus and
leadership was awarded the Best Paper Runner-up Award (2005) from "The International
Leadership Association Scholarship Global Learning Community" and in 2011, it received
the Overall Best Paper Award from the "International Academy of Management and
Business." Moreover, this work had won a research grant from the Israel Science
Foundation (ISF). During the last two years, we have collected data in the field and in the
laboratory to test our conceptual framework. At this stage, we are working on several
empirical papers which examine this framework.
Another direction of my current work on regulatory focus focuses on the connection
between regulatory focus and well-being. In a longitudinal field study conducted with
Israeli residents exposed to heavy missile attacks during 2009, we showed that a
threatening situation was related to a high level of prevention focus among the exposed
population and that this level of prevention focus further mediated the relationships
between the threat and the population's well-being and subjective health (submitted article
#16).
In the last year I spent a sabbatical year as a visiting scholar at Columbia University
in New York City. I continued to work on the well-being research with Tory Higgins in his
lab in the Psychology Department. During this year, we tested the role of promotion focus
in buffering the negative effect of stressful events on well-being and subjective health. In
addition to this research, I was able to continue my previous work on feedback with a
collaboration of scholars from Columbia.
Finally, since receiving my position in the Department of Health Systems
Management, I have started to work on health-related issues. Specifically, I collaborated
with a group of physicians aiming to develop a new investigating tool for the diagnosis of
psoriasis. This new tool is a self-report questionnaire that is supposed to be completed by
both the physician and the patient to give a better indication for the severity of the disease