After graduating from a Master’s in Human Resources from Grenoble IAE – INP, 31-year-old Ludivine Adla completed a thesis at Magellan Laboratory at IAE Lyon, which she defended in 2018. Her PhD thesis studied the relationship between human resources management and innovation in small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs), from a sociological and anthropological perspective. She received awards from both AGRH (French Association of HR Management) and AIREPME (International Association of Entrepreneurship and SME Research). In September 2019, Ludivine Adla began to work as a lecturer at Grenoble IAE – INP.
HR at the centre of her research
It was during her tutored project in the second year of her Technical University Diploma in Company and Administration Management (DUT GEA) at IUT2 Grenoble that Ludivine Adla first discovered her passion for the SME world in general, particularly for HR management within such companies. Fast-forward to today, and the project for which she has just received ANR funding focuses on the connection between HR management and innovation in SMEs through the lens of the CEO’s attachment style. “Attachment theory is a field of psychology that concentrates on a specific aspect of relationships between individuals,” she explains. “A person’s attachment style depends on the relationship that they built in childhood with the adults that took care of them, in general, their parents. This conditions their relationships with others in adulthood.” The aim is to understand how the CEO’s attachment style (“secure” in 50% of cases, “avoidant” or “anxious” for others) influences the HR practices that they choose to implement in the company, and the impact of this on innovation. “Depending on their type of attachment style, the CEO may adopt behaviours that can be identified as drivers or obstacles to innovation.”
This original approach caught the attention of the ANR, which awarded the researcher a grant of €273,000 over three and a half years as part of the 2023 “Young Researchers” programme. The grant will mainly serve to fund a thesis, which Ludivine Adla has just begun.
