Barbara Müller-Christensen is Associate Professor and Deputy Head of the Institute of Leadership and Change Management at the Johannes Kepler University (JKU) Linz, Austria.

She received her Master's (2004) and doctorate degree (2008) in Business Administration at the WU Vienna (Austria), where she was on faculty at the Institute of Change Management and Management Development between 2004 and 2010. Her dissertation on knowledge management from the perspective of social systems theory was published by Gabler research series (2009) and was awarded with, among others, the Stephan-Koren Award (WU Vienna, 2009) and the Award of Excellence (BMWF, 2009).

Barbara was a research fellow at Suffolk University, Boston, MA (2009), Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA (2012), and the University of Bath, UK (2014). She has been working as post-doc researcher and assistant professor at the JKU since 2010 where she received her venia docendi after completing her post-doctoral qualification in 2016. Since then she has been teaching and conducting research as an associate professor in the fields of leadership, HR, organizational learning and change management.

By applying qualitative research methods and taking a mainly critical and processual perspective, Barbara’s research focuses on studying complexity, identity, paradoxical phenomena and new forms of organizing, their influence on organizational development and change processes. She is especially interested in the role of leadership and HRM in this regard. Overall, her research aims at drawing practical implications as to how organizations and people develop.

Her work has been published in various academic journals, including the Journal of Management Inquiry, Leadership, International Business Review, Schmalenbach Business Review, Review of Managerial Science or The International Journal of Human Resource Management. She is an editorial board member for the Austrian Management Review, an annually published book series designed to support the transfer of theory to real-world practices and strengthen the relationships between academia and businesses. Since 2021 she serves as an associate editor for the Scandinavian Journal of Management.

Barbara is academic head of the specialization program Strategic People Management and New Work at LIMAK Austrian Business School. Since 2022 she is responsible for the Executive MBA program Management and Leadership for Women at JKU.

Google Scholar: ‪Barbara Müller-Christensen‬ - ‪Google Scholar‬, opens an external URL in a new window
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/barbara-müller-christensen-74383981/?originalSubdomain=at, opens an external URL in a new window
​​​​​​​