Ben Walker

Dr Ben Walker (Ngāti Raukawa) is a Senior Lecturer in Organisational Behaviour at Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand). His research and teaching focus on the human side of work,  management, and organisations.

Currently, Ben is involved in four main programmes of research:

The work-identity interface - How does work shape our sense of self? How do our identities affect our work? How do we come to (not) know the identities of the people we work with? 

Counter-perspectives on motivation and high performers - What are some of the counterintuitive, even ‘dark’ psychological drivers of motivation and high performance at work? How might learning about these make us think differently about the desirability of success?

Māori employees - What’s it like to be Māori at mahi (work)? What are the challenges and how can we alleviate them? What are the opportunities and how can we make these more abundant?

Experts and expertise - What psychological factors and mechanisms promote/inhibit people’s engagement with experts? How can these be shaped to promote higher-quality engagement with (and by) experts?

Ben uses a range of methods in his research, including interviews, experiments, surveys, and analyses of social media data, and is also passionate about "meta-research": reviewing or revealing trends and patterns in existing academic literatures. 

Ben’s research has been published in premier scholarly journals including Academy of Management Annals, Human Relations, and the Journal of International Business Studies. He has also contributed expert opinions to media outlets including The Conversation, Stuff, and the New Zealand Management magazine. 

As a teacher, Ben has taught on undergraduate and postgraduate courses at UNSW Business School and The University of Sydney Business School. From 2019 to 2023, he coordinated MGMT101 at Victoria University of Wellington, where each year he introduced roughly a thousand students to the study of work, management, and organisations. Since 2023, Ben has been the co-subject lead for the Australia New Zealand School of Government's "Managing Public Sector Organisations" course, which forms part of its flagship Executive Master of Public Administration programme. In 2021, Ben was awarded a Victoria University of Wellington Early Career Teaching Excellence Award, and in 2019, an Outstanding Lecturer Award by the Victoria University of Wellington Students’ Association.

Outside of academia, Ben is a dad, golfer, gardener, and musician.