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13 August 2024
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Story Anthony Mthembu
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Photo Sibahle Dayimani and Amandla Kulu
Prof Peter Roseel, Managing Director of Management Consulting and Research – a spin-off of the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium; and Prof Nicolene Barkhuizen, Director of the UFS Business School.
The Business School at the University of the Free State (UFS) hosted Prof Peter Rosseel, Managing Director of Management Consulting and Research – a spin-off of the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium – for a guest lecture during his visit to the UFS Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences (EMS).
The guest lecture took place on 19 July 2024 in the Business School Auditorium and was attended by academics from the UFS.
Reflecting on the lecture
The lecture presented by Prof Rosseel focused on how combining strategy, strategy implementation, culture transformation, leadership, and learning successfully leads to sustainable growth, creates engagement, and delivers tangible results. Throughout the lecture, Prof Rosseel spoke about how experts tend to make bad leaders and therefore stop change from happening within an organisation. In fact, he highlighted that, “Experts stop change from happening within the workplace because experts, by definition, look through the eyes of their expertise, but you cannot reduce the world to different forms of expertise, as it is holistic.” As such, he argued that to change an organisation, one must see things from the point of view of others.
Furthermore, Prof Rosseel delved deeper into the hierarchical operating model within organisations. He indicated that the above model should be one community within organisations; however, unfortunately it is not. This is because organisations are made up of several departments such as finance and human resources. As such, he regards these departments to be silos that could prove to be detrimental to organisations, as each silo can create its own culture as opposed to an organisational culture. These are some of the points he discussed throughout the lecture.
After the lecture concluded, the audience had the opportunity to engage with Prof Rosseel on his viewpoints. In fact, Lyle Markham, Academic Head of Department and Lecturer in Industrial Psychology at the UFS, was one of the audience members and described the lecture as insightful.
Prestigious Fulbright Scholarship to Senior Researcher
2010-05-27
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| Ms Melody Mentz. |
Ms Melody Mentz, Ph.D. student and Senior Researcher at the University of the Free State’s (UFS) Division for Student Development and Success (SDS) has been awarded the prestigious Fulbright Scholarship award to work on her Ph.D. in the United States of America (USA). This award has only been granted to a limited number of students from the UFS in the past.
For the 12-month duration of the scholarship, Ms Mentz will be based at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. During this time she will be doing a part-time internship at the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) Institute. Ms Mentz will also be completing doctoral level coursework in the School of Education’s Higher Education and Student Affairs programme. She intends to complete her Ph.D. thesis during her time abroad.
Both her Ph.D. and research work at SDS focus on factors influencing the success of students in South African higher education and the impact of student engagement on student success. More specifically, her Ph.D. focuses on how high-school experiences and expectations of higher education influence the success of first-year students at the UFS.
Ms Mentz completed her B.Com (Human Resource Management), as well as the rest of her postgraduate studies in Psychology at the UFS, obtaining all her qualifications with distinction. She was also the recipient of the Dean’s medal for the best honours student in the Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences in 2006, and the Kovsie Dux student of the year in 2005.
Ms Mentz will be departing for the USA during August of 2010.