thesis_Daniela Noethen_print final - Jacobs University

Acknowledgements
and who made teamwork easy, efficient, and most of all, enjoyable. Beyond being cherished
team members, Katie and Stefan have been wonderful office mates who provided professional
and emotional support, distraction, focus, and motivation. We have come to tolerate,
appreciate, and even adapt to one another, and have observed more than once in between
papa-jokes and not-its that, in a positive sense, “we have been working together for too long”.
Furthermore, I would like to thank the Business Administration work group which provided
me with many intra-disciplinary insights, topics, research, and discussion. I would like to
especially thank Katharina Speckmann for sharing my first teaching experience, during which
collaboration with her seemed just natural.
Moreover, I would like to express my thanks to the ESADE Business School in Madrid,
and more specifically to Jaime Bonache, for hosting me for two months, engaging me in very
interesting project work, collaborating on my dissertational work, specifically the second
paper, and opening up new possibilities.
Speaking of possibilities, I would never have been able to write this dissertation without
the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und
Forschung), who financed the “demopass”-project, and the companies who granted me and
my colleagues access to their employees within the framework of the project. Along the same
lines, I would like to thank the three departments of the Verwaltung Bremen who enabled my
second study. I am especially grateful to Staatsrat Henning Lühr and Dr. Anke Saebetzki for
supporting the project, as well as to Kerstin Federbusch, Hilke Wiezoreck, and Monika
Steffens for coordinating the project from the departments’ side, and for immensely
contributing to its smooth implementation. Not to forget, of course, I am thankful to the
participants of both studies, who took the time to respond to my questions and were willing to
share their knowledge with me.
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