Dr Emma Soane

Dr Emma Soane is a Chartered Psychologist and an Associate Professor at LSE’s Department of Management. She teaches risk, leadership and organisational behaviour to postgraduate and executive students.

Emma has held several roles within the Department of Management, including Programme Director Global MSc Management, Programme Director CEMS Global Alliance in Management Education MSc International Management and Director MBA Exchanges.

Emma’s research explores how risk, leadership and organising processes influence outcomes including performance and safety. Emma has worked with a wide range of public and private sector organisations, including government departments, hospitals, technology services, television production, investment banks and other financial institutions, facilities management, construction and manufacturing. She has published numerous academic and practitioner articles and has co-authored two books. Her research has won several awards.

Emma has delivered keynote speeches, presentations and workshops for many organisations. She is a fellow of the British Psychological Society and a member of the Society for Risk Analysis.

Before joining LSE, Emma worked at Kingston Business School, London Business School, in the NHS and Social Services. She holds a PhD (Psychology) and MSc (Occupational Psychology) from the Institute of Work Psychology at the University of Sheffield and a BSc from the University of Leicester.

Emma is a member of the Organisational Behaviour Faculty Research Group.

Expertise

Personality, risk taking and risk management, leadership, engagement with work

No-one should go to work to die. Yet, workplaces continue to cause trauma, injury and fatalities in the pursuit of goals. Moreover, organisational actors create risks that may not be visible to senior managers or be aligned with organisational objectives.

Dr Emma Soane's research explores how to engage with risk, keep people safe and embed an understanding of risk within organisational systems and processes.

One research stream focuses on developing a microfoundations perspective that combines top-down and bottom-up processes to explain how contextual features of organisations influence individual and social processes that have emergent effects on organisational-level phenomena. Recent publications shed new light on the relationships between organisational contexts, individual risk behaviour and organisational risk. She has also developed a new concept, the risk position, that gives managers a language and a framework to integrate risk with elements of organisations’ systems to connect risks with goals.

A second research stream focuses on advancing theorising about risk and paradox. In her study of television production, she shows how perceptions the tension between risk management and risk retention differ at the individual level. While some managers emphasise safety goals, others create a dynamic equilibrium that reduces harm, realises opportunities and enriches performance.

Explore Dr Soane's recent articles to learn more:

• Why A ‘Risk Position’ Should Be The Next Big Thing In Business Leadership | Forbes
• What Has The Pandemic Taught Us About ​​Organizational Risk? | Forbes
• How To Make Good Decisions In Uncertain Times | Forbes
• How to make risk analysis an effective guide to managing risk | LSE Business Review

Courses

• MG434: Organisational Behaviour and Leadership (Global MSc Management)
• MG443E: Organisational Behaviour and Leadership (Executive Global MSc Management)
• MG488A: Management in Action (Global MSc Management)
• Executive Education: Achieving Leadership Excellence
• Executive Education: Leading Risk in Organisations

Dr Soane’s research has impact in several contexts by enabling managers to translate rigorous research into effective practices.

Executive education sessions elevate organisational leadership and risk leadership through interactive and structured discussions that connect theoretical insights, personal reflections, assessment data and considerations of organisational contexts.

Examples of impact include:

• Enhancing risk-based communication to improve decision processes concerning risk and safety in television production.
• Collaborating with Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust to develop a simulation for developing leadership skills for patient safety.
• Contributing to discussions about remuneration policy at the Bank of England through studies of risk taking and bonus schemes.
• Advancing the Chartered Institute for Personnel Development employee engagement framework and engagement practices in organisations through research in a range of sectors, including government, manufacturing and retail, as well as a seminar series that connected academics, policy makers and practitioners.

The ISA (Intellectual, Social, Affective) Engagement Scale is a measure of employee engagement that Dr Emma Soane developed with colleagues Katie Truss, Kerstin Alfes, Amanda Shantz, Chris Rees, and Mark Gatenby, published in Human Resource Development International in 2012.

Grounded in Kahn's (1990) theory of psychological engagement at work, the scale was built around a model of engagement with three requirements, a work-role focus, activation and positive affect, operationalised across intellectual, social, and affective dimensions.

Participants respond to nine items on a seven-point scale, yielding both an overall engagement score and a score for each facet. Validation studies confirmed strong internal reliability and associations with task performance, organisational citizenship behaviour, and turnover intentions. One of the scale's distinguishing features is that it allows engagement to be evaluated as a clearly distinct factor making it easier to identify the drivers and outcomes of engagement.

The scale is freely available and can be used in a range of contexts. We just ask that you cite our paper in any outputs.