
Prof Dr Carsten Schermuly talks about New Work, psychological empowerment and his award as one of the "40 Leading HR Minds 2025"
Prof Dr Carsten Schermuly talks about New Work, psychological empowerment and his award as one of the "40 Leading HR Minds 2025"
Professor Schermuly, congratulations! The editorial team of the Personalmagazin honoured you as one of the "40 Leading HR Minds 2025". A special honour - how did you take the news?
I was very pleased and I feel very honoured that our HR research at SRH University is perceived so positively. However, I don't see this as an award for me, but as an honour for the work at our institute [Institute for New Work and Coaching, editor's note]. The doctoral students do excellent work every day, which we get published in international peer-reviewed journals.
The award shows: Your voice carries weight - especially when it comes to the transformation of the world of work. As Director of the Institute for New Work and Coaching you have been responsible for the New Work Barometer which analyses and classifies current trends in the world of work. The first results for 2025 have just been published - what do you think are the most exciting findings?
I find it exciting that despite the headwind that some topics in the area of New Work are currently facing in the media, the measures are being used quite consistently. Agile project work and working from home are practices that are here to stay, even if some companies order their employees back to the office. Our research shows that the blanket return to the office does not make sense. In fact, working from home seems to correlate slightly positively with organisational success and it seems to be particularly efficient when teams can decide for themselves how they work together.
How do you interpret the decline in buzzwords around New Work - is this a maturing process?
I wrote the book "New Work Dystopia" a few years ago. In it, I also tried to point out the dark side of the New Work hype. The fact that some New Work consultants have now left the field is good for practice, but also for our research. It is now easier to take a serious look at the topic. Because the challenges remain. An increasingly complex and volatile external world must be mirrored by a complex organisational internal world.
What does this mean for HR departments in concrete terms?
Frithjof Bergmann introduced the term New Work into the literature in the 1980s and wanted work to become something that empowers people. We psychologists translate this as psychological empowerment. Psychological empowerment is made up of four perceptions of the work role. People with a high level of empowerment perceive a lot of meaning, competence, self-determination and influence. We can show in many studies that psychological empowerment is associated with greater job satisfaction and performance, but also with less psychological stress and staff turnover. Anyone who wants to seriously engage with New Work should therefore strengthen the experience of empowerment. However, there are certainly deficits here, which we see in the barometer. When organisations pursue New Work, they often grant self-determination, but they do not pass on influence and power at the same time. Being sent into self-determination without power can lead to problems.
Two aspects that come up again and again both in the Barometer and in your research are power structures and leadership processes. This is exactly what you also address in the event "Psychologie der Macht – Daten, Gefühle, Verhalten" on 17 October at our SRH Campus Berlin. What can participants look forward to?
I will be reporting from my book "Psychologie der Macht" and presenting data from the New Work Barometer at the same time. This year's main topic was authoritarian power, and things are not looking so good in some sectors. The authoritarian practice of power is still widely practised in many sectors despite the negative effects on employees and organisations.
One last question: If you had one wish for the world of work in 2026, what would it be?
My biggest wish would be that we don't allow the authoritarian endeavours that we are currently seeing in global politics into companies to such an extent. The authoritarian exercise of power leads to helplessness, poorer knowledge sharing and, in the long term, more corruption. We should avoid that.
Thank you very much for the interview!