American citizen from St. Simons Island, Georgia. Served 28 years in United States Navy flying F-14 Tomcats from US Navy aircraft carriers around the world. Also occupied several top-level leadership positions in the US, Norway, and NATO (Brussels) responsible for strategic level operational planning and organizational change implementation. Former director in Powersim AS responsible for international modelling and simulation consulting, and CEO of Nutec Crisis Management (both in Bergen, Norway). Received PhD from the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration (NHH) studying the strategic change process known as Take-Off 05 in the Norwegian civil aviation air navigation services provider (Avinor).
Thesis available at: http://hdl.handle.net/11250/164418
Research areas
The leadership's role in strategic-level organizational change in high risk environments (and particularly High Reliability Organizations), and its effect on safety.
Teaching areas
Health, Safety and Environment (HSE), Human Resources Management (HRM), Strategy (business strategy, corporate strategy, international strategy, and strategic management), Leadership and Leader Psychology, and Strategic Crisis Management.
There is an increasing interest in how to organize operations carried out by multiteam systems (MTS). Large MTS typically operate with a dedicated integration team, responsible for coordinating the operation. We report a study of a military multiteam system that prosecute time-sensitive targets. We asked whether and how the integration team’s efficiency depends on its communication setting. Specifically, we studied how a co-located vs. a distributed communications setting influenced the shared situation awareness and whether the shared situation awareness again influenced the outcome of the decision processes. We found that performance fell when the integration team shifted from a co-located to a distributed setting. The fall in performance seemed to be mediated by a corresponding fall in situation awareness. Moreover, while the performance improved for each run in the co-located setting, we did not see such learning in the distributed setting. Qualitative observations revealed that misunderstandings lasted longer in a distributed configuration than in a co-located setting. We found that situation awareness at level 3 was the only level of situation awareness significant for predicting all dimensions of performance. Implications for theory, research, and practice are discussed.
Lofquist, Eric & Isaksen, Scott G. (2019)
Cleared for Takeoff? A Snapshot of Context for Change in a High-Risk Industry
Civil aviation is a high-risk industry where actors are experiencing increasing focus on economic performance, greater international competition, and growing safety threats that require continual organizational adjustments. In this article, we present the findings of a case study conducted within the Norwegian national air traffic management organization—Avinor, in preparation for a major reorganization initiative. In this study, we mapped the aggregated readiness and positioning for organizational change in the three main air traffic control centers in Norway using a mixed-method approach to person–environment Fit to help organizational leaders better understand each unit’s positioning for change, and more specifically, individual preferences for change styles. The results suggest that participants at the different air traffic control centers had developed distinctly different change preferences at both the group and individual levels, and that each was distinctly different from the other units in their positioning and readiness for change.
Onarheim, Benedicte Astor & Lofquist, Eric (2019)
Du er ikke alene: Psykodrama kan hjelpe overgangen til høyere utdanning
Overgangen til studier i høyere utdanning, enten som ung eller voksen student, kan oppleves stressende og vanskelig og i verste fall medføre emosjonelle problemer og avslutning av studiet. Nye undersøkelser viser at mer enn 30 prosent av studenter ved høyskoler og universi- teter faller ut av studiet og er særlig sårbare det første året. Sosiale og økonomiske konsekvenser av dette for samfunnet har ført til et skjerpet søkelys på førsteårs- studenters erfaringer og alternative tilnærminger for å dempe denne trenden og faren for tidlig frafall. Interna- sjonalt har tradisjonelle strukturelle og psykologiske tiltak hatt minimal effekt i å redusere frafall det første året, og dagens muligheter for å skape sosiale nettverk dekker ikke sårbare studenters behov. Som en alternativ tilnær- ming fulgte dette aksjonsforskningsprosjektet en selv- valgt gruppe risikoutsatte førsteårsstudenter gjennom et ettårig prosjekt hvor psykodramateknikker ble brukt for å hjelpe studentene med å overleve det krevende første året. Vi fant at psykodramametoden signifikant reduserte det psykiske og emosjonelle stresset hos del- takende studenter, og at teknikkene som ble benyttet, fremmet mulighetene for deltakerne til å bearbeide sine utfordringer og evne til å takle forventninger og presta- sjonskrav ved bruk av mestringsferdigheter. Enda mer overraskende fant vi at arbeid i grupper med bruk av psykodramateknikker skapte en følelse av å tilhøre et sosialt nettverk som ikke var tilgjengelig gjennom tradisjonelle sosiale nettverksaktiviteter. Den økonomiske innsatsen som skal til for å gjennomføre denne typen intervensjon, antas å være minimal i forhold til de betydelige kostnadene frafall medfører for studentene, deres familier og samfunnet for øvrig.
Lofquist, Eric; Isaksen, Scott G. & Dahl, Tom Jarle (2018)
Something Fishy: Exploring Change, Job Engagement and Work Environment in the Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries
Measuring the distance between the performance of safety rules as imagined and safety rules as enacted in high-risk environments has been an area of great interest and debate in recent years. Yet a significant gap in our understanding remains. Some authors have even advised us to “stop bitching about the gap” and start closing it (Hale and Borys, 2013a, p. 218). In this paper, we follow this call by investigating the relationship between safety rules as imagined, and enacted, in a rule-driven organization working in the oil and gas industry in Norway. Specifically, we investigate how three different sub-cultures within the organization: the management culture, the engineering culture, and the operations culture - make sense of safety rules at their respective levels, and why their interpretations of the gaps created by these same rules, are different. These differences lead to different levels of rule enactment. Using a case study approach, we found that how employees’ were engaged in the rule creation process led to different levels of psychological ownership, and this, in turn, led to different levels of rule enactment. We also found that these distinct occupational sub-cultures use different sensemaking approaches in understanding safety rules, and that the resultant differences in understanding directly affects both the understanding of the gap that exists between rules as imagined and rules as enacted, leading to different levels of rule compliance.
Lofquist, Eric & Lines, Rune (2017)
Keeping Promises: A Process Study of Escalating Commitment Leading to Organizational Change Collapse
Valaker, Sigmund; Yanakiev, Yantsislav, Lofquist, Eric & Kost, Dominique (2016)
The Influence of Predeployment Training on Coordination in Multinational Headquarters:The Moderating Role of Organizational Obstacles to Information Sharing.
Coordination is critical to the success of multinational military operations and may be fostered by predeployment training. We argue that whether such training is related to a high degree of perceived coordination at the individual level is likely to depend on whether individuals experience a low degree of organizational obstacles to information sharing. We examined this using data from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Kosovo Force headquarters (survey: n = 131). We controlled for whether it was the participants’ first deployment, the participants’ background (military or civilian), the amount of time spent in the headquarters by participants, whether differences pertaining to culture and opinions were valued by the organization, the quality of supervisor/subordinate relationships, and the degree of national cultural obstacles to information sharing. The results showed no significant direct effects on coordination from 3 different training configurations: national training, multinational training, and a combination of national and multinational training. However, we found a negative direct effect from organizational obstacles to information sharing on coordination, and support for organizational obstacles to information sharing as negatively moderating the multinational predeployment training and coordination relationship. Qualitative interviews (n = 14) indicated that informal information sharing, and the problems exchanging information from tactical to operational levels could hinder coordination. Interventions to foster coordination could benefit from a focus on multinational training and lowering organizational obstacles to information sharing. Our findings contribute to more precisely pinpointing the types of training that are useful in multinational operations, as well as the factors upon which training transfer is contingent. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
Lofquist, Eric Arne (2011)
Doomed to Fail: A Case Study of Change Implementation Collapse In the Norwegian Civil Aviation Industry/Published
Measuring safety as an outcome variable within the ultra-safe civil aviation industry during periods of deliberate organizational change is a difficult, and often fruitless, task. Anticipating eroding safety processes, based on measuring nothing happening over time, does not adequately capture the true state of an evolving safe system, and this is particularly relevant for leaders and managers in a civil aviation industry responsible for maintaining and improving ultra-safe performance while simultaneously managing demanding strategic business goals. In this paper, I will look at the difficulties of measuring safety as an outcome measure in high reliability organizations (HROs) using the traditional measures of incident and accident reporting during periods of deliberate organizational change inspired by the desults from a three-year longitudinal case study of the Norwegian Air Navigation Services provider - Avinor. I will first review the current safety literature relating to Safety Management Systems (SMSs) used in the civil aviation industry. I will then propose a more holistic model that shifts the focus from the traditional safety monitoring mechanisms of risk analysis and trial and error learning, to the natural interactivity within socio-technical systems as found in High Reliability Organizations. And finally, I will present a summary of the empirical results of an alternate methodology for measuring perceived changes in safety at the operational level as leading indicators of evolving safety at at the organizational level.
