Noethen, Daniela

Before joining ESADE  as an Assistant Professor in the Department of People Management and Organisation, Daniela Noethen obtained her PhD in Business Administration Jacobs University Bremen, Germany.

Furthermore, she holds a Diploma in Psychology University of Bonn, Germany, equivalent to bachelor plus master and spent a year studying Psychology at the University of British Columbia Canada. Daniela Noethen believes that knowledge management becomes increasingly important in times of imminent demographic change, and that organisations must grasp the knowledge of large waves of retiring employees lest huge costs be incurred. Her dissertational research dealt with knowledge transfer in teams as one means of preventing knowledge loss.

The results of her research into predictors of knowledge transfer suggest that antecedents often differ in their influence depending on the transfer behavior examined sharing or seeking knowledge and the level of analysis individual or team. In another study of intergenerational knowledge transfer, she found that there is only slightly more knowledge transfer from older to younger employees than without such an age difference between employees, and only slightly more knowledge transfer in age-diverse teams. This suggests that in order to protect retiring employees' knowledge from being lost to the organisation, knowledge transfer must be supported more heavily. Daniela Noethen's more recent research deals with management of expatriates, a group of employees that is key for transferring knowledge in multinational corporations MNCs. Applying the theory of knowledge management and organizational learning to the field of expatriate management lead to important insights regarding expatriate selection, compensation, repatriation etc. Moreover, studying the boundary conditions established through different types of expatriate assignments or characteristics of the expatriates themselves, she revealed important consequences for how MNCs should best manage their expatriates.

For her future research, Daniela Noethen is interested in models for measuring knowledge transfer and knowledge loss, and means of preventing knowledge loss other than knowledge transfer in teams. Moreover, she wants to shed more light on the role of expatriates as knowledge agents as well as study their management from a knowledge management point of view.