The Academy of Finland’s Research Council for Culture and Society announced today 21 new Academy Research Fellow posts, one of them at the University of Eastern Finland. University Lecturer Jonna Koponen’s research project, E-Leading with Digital Communication, secured 447,650 euros of funding for a five-year period. Jonna Koponen currently works as an Associate Professor (Tenure Track) at LUT University.
The Research Council’s aim with the Academy Research Fellow funding is to support talented, mid-career researchers. The Research Council paid special attention to applicants who in their research plans combined high quality with strong academic and societal impact and scientific renewal. In this round, the Research Council’s funding for Academy Research Fellows totals around 9.4 million euros. The success rate was 11 per cent. Women account for 59 per cent of the funding recipients and for 53 per cent of the applicants.
Koponen’s project investigates e-leading with digital communication focusing on top managers in the IT industry. First, the project will explore e-leadership strategies, practices, and digital communication competences in two culturally diverse settings: in Finland and Japan. Research data are collected via expert interviews, focus group interviews, and participant observation in large IT companies in both countries. Second, by triangulating the country-specific qualitative datasets, the project can build a more culture-general theoretical foundation of the e-leaders’ digital communication competence (DICO), produce a conceptualisation of it, and further operationalise the construct. Third, in the quantitative phase of the research project, the aim is to test a measure of e-leaders’ DICO with empirical data from an international IT company. Furthermore, whether e-leaders’ DICO has a positive impact on employee motivation, satisfaction, commitment, and performance in the IT company is investigated.
Source: Academy of Finland press release, Academy Research Fellows
