A NEW TOOL TO CONNECT THE CONCEPTS OF LEADERSHIP AND MEMBERSHIP IN A MATERIALS SCIENCE RESEARCH GROUP: INCREASING THE SENSE OF BELONGING IN DOCTORATES

The Basque Country through the foundation Euskalit has developed a proper advanced management model. By means of this model, organizations may achieve more easily some goals that are needed for competitive activity. One of these goals is the generation in their own people of a sense of belonging to a common project. Sense of belonging is essentially conditioned by four factors:
1) membership,
2) influence,
3) integration and fulfilment of needs and
4) shared emotional connection.

In research groups at university, in particular, membership is one of the points that need more attention, since there are no models devoted to define the meaning of this term. Membership is the feeling of sharing a sense of personal relatedness, and includes limits (distinguishing members from no members), emotional stability, a sense of belonging and identification, personal investment and a common symbol system. The hypothesis in this work is that membership can be connected to leadership to enhance the sense of belonging. Thus, this connection must be correctly defined and related to the activity of the organization. In this sense, it is worth mentioning that EIDOS, a research group in Materials Science (University of the Basque Country) has been developing and improving its own management system for the last eight years.

Taking into account the latter, this work presents a tool to visualize different membership profiles in the research group EIDOS with the Basque advanced model for management as reference. The tool consists of a map that allows the identification of the activities: 1) planning, 2) implementation and 3) evaluation of the tasks of the organization processes. As these activities are connected to the definition of leadership in EIDOS, this tool permits the visualization of the direct connection between leadership and membership. A special attention has been focused to the role of doctorates in the organization. Therefore, this tool can be useful for other research groups to increase the sense of belonging in doctorates.