ERIM PhD Defence Evgenia Dolgova

Evgenia Dolgova sees collaborative relationships as key to fulfilling careers that enable employees to realize their full creative potential within the organizations. To this end, her research focuses on social network dynamics in innovative contexts.

Evgenias’ research investigates why people get along within the organizations – and why they don’t – and how it matters. She applies dynamic social network analysis to study how organizational members collaborate to innovate. Zooming in on how people form relationships, Evgenia explores the role of individuals’ personality and interpersonal perceptions in organizational contexts where people innovate (e.g. marching bands, teams working out a strategy, companies reinventing their organizational structure). Zooming out, she looks on the interplay between relationships and individual and team performance. This stream of research advances the social network perspective on organizations by emphasizing how individuals and their relationships matter for organizational performance. Evgenia is particularly excited about the new research venues that dynamic social network analysis opens up for organizational scholars.

Her research has been published in Harvard Business Review and is now under review in key management journals. She regularly presents her research at leading international conferences. Currently, Evgenia teaches and conducts research at the Department of Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship. Previously, at the Erasmus Center for Women and Organizations at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, Evgenia studied how to foster inclusion and create fulfilling collaborative relationships within the organizations and evaluated measures that lead to increased female representation in leadership roles. The work of the center has been recognized with “Force for Positive Change Award” by the Executive Board of the RSM for advancing Strategic Development Goals.
She also completed a Post-Doc on social networks at VU Amsterdam, worked as an Assistant Professor at Tilburg University, and received a Marie Curie Fellowship from the European Union to conduct research on management of emergent technologies at Leeds University. There, applying dynamic analysis of social networks and semantic network analysis, she studied how new technologies propagate through society, taking massive open online courses as an example. Before embarking on the PhD trajectory at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, Evgenia completed a Masters degree in Psychology at the Ludwig-Maximillians-Universitaet in Munich and worked as an organizational change consultant.