The Department of Strategy and Management invite you to a faculty seminar with Associate Professor Lauren Hajjar.
BIO:
Dr. Lauren Hajjar is an Associate Professor of Public Service and Healthcare Administration at Suffolk University’s Sawyer Business School in Boston. Her research examines how organizational relationships, processes, and practices shape coordination, decision-making, and performance, particularly in complex environments characterized by interdependence and uncertainty. Her work spans the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, including healthcare, education, public safety, and professional sports. Through research across diverse organizational settings, she seeks to advance organizational theory and identify insights that can inform management and organizational practice across sectors.
Her research explores relational coordination, organizational mindfulness, psychological safety, and resilience, with particular attention to how organizations coordinate interdependent work, integrate knowledge, and adapt to changing conditions. Recent projects include cross-sector collaboration in rural communities and a study of the organizational drivers of performance in professional European football clubs, conducted in collaboration with researchers at NHH Norwegian School of Economics and Aalborg University.
Hajjar also serves as Board Chair of the Relational Coordination Collaborative, Co-Founder of the Resilient Communities Innovation Lab, and Research Affiliate with the Organizational Sociology Research Group (OrgSoc) at Aalborg University in Denmark.
Abstract:
Professional football clubs provide a distinctive organizational context for examining how specialized expertise is coordinated under conditions of interdependence, uncertainty, and time pressure. This exploratory comparative qualitative study examines how organizational and relational practices shape cross-functional knowledge integration and adaptive decision-making during player transfer processes across four European professional football clubs. Drawing on semi-structured key-informant interviews, organizational documents and other secondary data sources, the study explores how expertise is shared across functions, decisions are coordinated, and organizations respond to unexpected developments. Preliminary findings highlight three interrelated dynamics: the integration of specialized knowledge and competing priorities into organizational decisions; coordination vulnerabilities at functional boundaries and handoffs; and the complementary roles of formal structures and informal relational practices in facilitating adaptation under pressure. These findings are informing further theoretical exploration of mutual adjustment, temporal and relational dynamics, and strategizing under uncertainty, particularly how organizations maintain coordinated and attentive decision-making as circumstances change and deadlines approach. The next phase of research will examine these emerging theoretical perspectives through more detailed, multi-perspective analysis of transfer episodes, tracing decision processes, information flows, and adaptive responses. The larger study seeks to advance organizational theory by identifying mechanisms that may support coordination and adaptation in complex, interdependent organizational settings.