It is with great sadness and shock that we heard about Bernhard Wilpert’s passing away on August 20, 2007. He was one of most outstanding members of our Division and he was also a president of the IAAP. During his presidential period IAAP flourished and developed gaining a greater visibility and achieving important goals. He was very committed to bringing together colleagues from different parts of the world, stimulating research on cross cultural Work and Organizational Psychology topics.
In Europe, he was the ‘Founding Father’ of the European Network of Organizational Psychologists (ENOP).
With Bernhard’s death we lose one of the great figures of European Work and Organizational Psychology in the 20th century. He has played a leading role in scientific, professional and institutional domains within W&O Psychology. He also has contributed in a significant way to the visibility of European Work and Organizational psychology in the international community, being one of its most outstanding representatives.
Bernhard Wilpert, born in Breslau in 1936, studied psychology, anthropology and sociology in Tübingen, Germany and Eugene, United States. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Tübingen in 1965. From 1969-1978 he was a Research Fellow at the Science Center Berlin where he became well known for his international comparative studies on management and participation and the introduction of new technologies. In 1980 he was appointed Professor of Work and Organizational Psychology at Technische Universität Berlin (TUB; Berlin University of Technology). Between 2001 and 2002 he also served as Vice President of TUB, with particular responsibility for international affairs and the promotion of young scientists. After his retirement in October 2003, Bernhard continued his research as a very active Emeritus in the department of Work and Organizational Psychology at TUB.
His main research interests focused on three different fields:
International Management and Participation Research Bernhard conducted several comparative studies about decision-making of management in 8 countries, and about the role of participation in 12 European countries. Together with the IDE team he shaped the notion of Industrial Democracy in Europe. In addition, his studies covered Sino-German joint ventures from an intercultural point of view.
The Meaning of Working (MOW)
The original MOW research began in 1978 with a cross-national study conducted by the
MOW International Research Team (MOW IRT) composed of Work & Organizational
psychologists from eight countries. The research addressed comparative studies of the
role work plays in people's lives within the fabric of industrialized societies, and
focussed on work as paid employment in traditional and new employer-employee
contracts, work careers, absence of work, and work-nonwork connections. The original
research team included some of the most known colleagues in Europe. Erik Andriessen
(Netherlands), Vojko Antoncic (Slovenia), Rita Claes (Belgium), Pol Coetsier
(Belgium), Pieter Drenth (Netherlands), George England (USA), Itzhak Harpaz (Israel),
Frank Heller (UK), Marnix Holvoet (Belgium), Jyuji Misumi (Japan), Antonio Ruiz-
Quintanilla (Germany/USA), Rob van der Kooij (Netherlands), William Whitely
(USA), and Bernhard Wilpert (Germany). Based on this research another MOW research program was formally established in 1990. As part of this latter program
several replication studies were conducted enlarging the original scope of research.
Furthermore, MOW has always promoted advanced human resource management
practises using motivational programs, work stress management, career development,
diversity management, and global management.
The Role of Human Behavior in High-Reliability Organisations
From 1990 on, the main focus of Bernhard’s work had been on issues of safety in highreliability
organisations like airlines, nuclear power plants, chemical plants, or hospitals.
It was then when he founded the Research Centre for System Safety (Forschungsstelle
Systemsicherheit, FSS) at the TUB. FSS is specialized on the human contribution
(factor) to improve safety in high-reliability organisations by considering the interaction
of human, technology and organisational characteristics and processes. His main
contributions to this field include several conceptual publications, as well as the
development of a specific tool for human factors-oriented event-analyses in nuclear
power plants which meanwhile has become a standard tool in Germany and
Switzerland. The study of these questions made him the first social scientist to become a
member of the German Federal Commission for Nuclear Power Plant safety (RSK).
From 1992 on he served as consultant of RSK.
Bernhard Wilpert’s scientific work includes more than 150 journal articles and book
chapters. In addition, he was the editor of 21 books and served as member of the
editorial board of several scientific journals. The international acknowledgment of his
work is reflected in a number of awards and honorary functions and memberships. In
1989 he received the honorary doctorate of the Rijkuniversity Ghent for his
international comparative organization research. From 1994-1998 he served as President
of the International Association of Applied Psychology. In November 1999 he was
appointed honorary professor of the Academia Sinica Bejing, China, for his
contributions to international psychology. In 2001 he became a Foreign Member of the
Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences as a token of the Academy’s appreciation of
excellent scholarly work. In 2003 he received the award by the European Association of
Work and Organizational Psychology (EAWOP) for contributions to the development
and structuring of work psychology in Europe.
Prof. Dietrich Manzey,
Technische Universität Berlin.
(Germany)