Dr Mark Robinson

Profile

I am currently Associate Professor in the Management and Organizations Department at Leeds University Business School, where I was formerly Head of Organizational Behaviour. Before moving to the University of Leeds, I started my academic career as a Research Associate in the Institute of Work Psychology at the University of Sheffield.

I'm an organizational psychologist, so I conduct research examining people's behaviours (what they do) and cognitions (what they think) at work. Although a psychologist, much of my research is interdisciplinary, working with other social scientists and also experts from engineering and computer science. I'm particularly enthusiastic about this approach, as I believe that complex societal and business problems can only be addressed with integrated and systemic solutions. I conduct a wide range of research, but my main interests currently fall within three key areas: (1) human performance, (2) safety management, and (3) quantitative research methods.

Within human performance, I am interested in assessing and developing people's potential (e.g., Robinson et al., 2005), identifying barriers to and facilitators of high performance (e.g., Crowder et al., 2012; McKay et al., 2020; Robinson, 2010), and understanding elite performance (e.g., Brown et al., 2018; Robinson, 2022).

Within safety management, I am interested in how to help people survive and avoid injury in emergencies and other non-routine situations, such as crowd events (e.g., Challenger et al., 2010; Radburn et al., 2018) and evacuations (e.g., van der Wal et al., 2017; van der Wal et al., 2021), and predicting, managing, and preventing accidents and disasters in complex socio-technical systems (e.g., Clegg et al., 2017; McKay et al., 2020).

Finally, within quantitative research methods, I am interested in how social scientists can conceptualise and measure variables in more reliable and valid ways (e.g., Robinson, 2018; Unsworth & Robinson, 2020), use new techniques to examine complex systems more dynamically (e.g., Crowder et al., 2012; Hughes et al., 2012; van der Wal et al., 2021), and incorporate naturalistic data into research (e.g., Robinson, 2022; Robinson et al., 2023).

I have been awarded £3.4 million of research funding (£8.3 million including consortia) from various organizations and research councils including EPSRC, Horizon 2020, and Innovate UK. I am passionate about conducting research with practical applications and my impact case study submitted to REF2014 was commended by the National Assessment Panel.

I was a founding member of the MSc Organizational Psychology and Business programme here at the University of Leeds, on which I continue to teach. I also formerly taught on the MSc Occupational Psychology programme at the University of Sheffield. At doctoral level, I have supervised ten PhD candidates through to graduation and frequently act as examiner.

Qualifications

• Ph.D. Organizational Psychology (University of Leeds)
• M.Sc. Research Methods in Psychology (University of Bristol)
• B.Sc. Social Psychology (Loughborough University)
• Chartered Psychologist (British Psychological Society)
• Occupational Test User (British Psychological Society)

Current postgraduate researchers

• Chan Yung Chun (YOUNG, Yung)