Research

Research focus

• Human resource management
• Organizational behavior
• Organizational change

The interdisciplinary research and teaching at the chair focuses primarily on the overlapping and mutually enriching topics of human resource management, organizational behavior, and organizational change.
In particular, the research focuses on employees and volunteers in the context of a changing organizational environment and attempts to explain why people work for nonprofit organizations, how they react to change, and what factors influence their retention behavior.
Since employees and volunteers are aware of their organizational environment and this awareness can influence their attitudes and behavior, we also investigate why and how nonprofit organizations and educational institutions in the public sector respond to external change and how they implement organizational change.
Qualitative and quantitative methods help us to capture the complexity of interactions at multiple levels and to incorporate individual, organizational, and contextual factors into the design and implementation of our research.

Current publications (2023–2025)

• Walk, M., Stewart, A., & Kuenzi, K. (2025). Not all wine and roses: Nonprofit consulting as nonprofit-sector-adjacent work. Public Management and Governance Review, 2(1).
• Walk, M., Cart-Turner, L., Peterson, E., & Klippel A. (2025) Organizational Change in the Nonprofit Context – A Scoping Review of the Literature. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 54(5), 1043-1071.
• Melville-Holder, J.; Stewart, A.J.; Kuenzi, K.; Walk, M.; Russell, D.; & McGovern, S. (online first) A worthy investment? Investigating alumni perceptions of nonprofit degrees. Teaching Public Administration.
• Walk, M., Stewart, A., & Kuenzi, K. (2024). Investigating Turnover Intentions during Organizational Change – The Role of Negative Appraisals, Psychological Contract Violations, and Resistance to Change. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 53(6), 1434–1458.
• Levine Daniel, J., Curley, C., & Walk, M. (2024) Message (In)Congruence: Tweeting While Competing for Donations, Communication and the Public 9(1), 69-83.
• Kuenzi, K.; Stewart, M. & Walk, M. (2024).Pause don’t panic: Exploring COVID-19 as critical incident for nonprofit workers, Review of Public Personnel Administration, 44(2), 353-376. 
• Greenspan, I. & Walk, M. (2024) Informal volunteering and immigrant generations: Exploring overlooked dimensions in immigrant volunteering research. VOLUNTAS, 35(1), 23-35 (equal contribution).
• LePere-Schloop, M., Walk, M., & Paarlberg, L.E. (2024). “We expected a revolution and got a slow burn”: Micro-foundations of institutional change in the community foundation field. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 53(1), 159-185.
• Fehrenbach, H., Walk, M. & Greenspan, I. (2024). Organizational Change in Nonprofit Organizations. VOLUNTAS, 35, 1041–1045.
• Paarlberg, L.E., LePere-Schloop, M., Ai, J., & Walk, M. (2023). The Political Embeddedness of Voluntary Action: The Case of Local Philanthropic COVID-19 Relief Funds. Administration and Society, 55(7), 1402–1431.
• Walk, M. & Peterson, E.(2023). Volunteers as Active Shapers of their Work: The Role of Job Crafting in Volunteer Satisfaction and Organizational Identification, VOLUNTAS, 24(2), 289-300.
• Fehrenbach, H. (2023). Transnational alliances in higher education: Vehicles for strategic change or to maintain inertia. Buchreiche Organisationssoziologie der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie (DGS). Wiesbaden: Springer VS. 

Ongoing research

• Eurovision Song Contest 2025 – Volunteering Study
  Research question: “What role does communication play in event volunteers’ perceptions of onboarding and training strategies?”
• Racial Equity as racialized change in US community foundations
  Research questions: “How do organizations actualize racial equity? How do organizations initiate racialized change, and how are the content and process of change designed to reflect the organizational context?”
• Nonprofit Consulting as nonprofit sector adjacent work
  Research questions: “What is the demand for nonprofit consulting services? How much has the demand for nonprofit consulting services change over time? Which organizations are most likely to use consulting services?”
• Cross-sector collaboration
  Research questions: “Why and how do various organizational forms work together in the context of artificial intelligence? Who are the actors? How is collaborative/relational governance related to ecosystem resiliency?”
• Epistemic Injustice in Organizations
  Research questions: “What do we know about epistemic injustice in organizations? How has epistemic injustice in organizations been defined, conceptualized and theorized? Which study designs and methods have been used? How does epistemic injustice manifest on the individual and organizational level in organizational contexts? What are the causes and consequences of epistemic injustice in organizations on the individual, organizational and societal level?”