The Team of Researchers Led by Christian Vandenberghe Receives a $2 million Grant for Research Infrastructure

The John R. Evans Leaders Fund of the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) has awarded a substantial grant to support the research infrastructure project proposed by Professor Christian Vandenberghe, who teams with professor Yany Grégoire. The $800,000 CFI grant is in addition to the $800,000 awarded by the Quebec government and a private-sector contribution, adding up to a total of $2 million. These sums will allow the team to create a panel of potential respondents for collecting management research data over a five-year period.

The CFI John R. Evans Leaders Fund is a federal government program aimed at funding scientific infrastructure projects to give researchers the best tools or the technology they need to innovate in their fields. The HEC Montréal team’s project, while not a piece of equipment or a laboratory, was approved by the CFI since it will lead to the development of a means of collecting valuable data for advancing management research. “This type of panel is rare and has no equivalent elsewhere in Canada. […] It will allow us to gather sophisticated and complex data guaranteeing top-quality information,” says Professor Vandenberghe.

Access to this new data will open the doors to leading scientific journals for our researchers in different management fields, on subjects relating to industrial psychology, human resources management and marketing (e.g. analyzing employees’ social comparison processes within an organization, or longitudinal observation of interactions between a firm’s customers and its front-line employees).

The CFI grant to the team of HEC Montréal researchers will go largely to a marketing research firm chosen through a tendering process. The firm will be responsible for assembling this panel of potential respondents selected from about 100 Canadian companies. The panel will consist of employees from over 100 work teams and will be used for a variety of surveys over a multi-year period. This means that the panel will give researchers access to data from over 10,000 participants, holding different positions in companies in different sectors.