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Dr Ali Naghieh

Senior Lecturer in Leadership & Workforce Management

Ali Naghieh

  • School Faculty of Business and Law

  • Department Strategy, Leadership & Operations

  • Location London

Research activities

Ali's research examines how organisations navigate complex change, particularly where uncertainty is high andstakeholders hold different interests, assumptions and perspectives. His workbrings together organisational behaviour, leadership, organisational change,participative multi-stakeholder processes and strategic foresight.

A central strand of his research concerns participativeapproaches to organisational and system-level change: how employees, managersand other stakeholders can be involved in diagnosing problems, developingshared understanding and translating competing perspectives into implementablecollective action. This includes questions of professional identity, workforcewellbeing, organisational learning and the implementation of change.

His work on strategic foresight and scenario planning examineshow organisations can challenge assumptions, prepare for alternative futuresand develop strategies that remain robust under uncertainty.

Current interests also include the future of work andprofessions, public-sector transformation, multi-stakeholder collaboration andconsensus-building around complex or 'wicked' organisational and societalproblems, including digital transformation and environmental challenges.

 

Publications

Selected journal articles

Alim-Marvasti, A., Jawad, M., Ogbonnaya, C. and Naghieh, A.(2023). “Workforce diversity in specialist physicians: Implications offindings for religious affiliation in Anaesthesia & Intensive Care.” PLOSONE, 18(8), e0288516.

Naghieh, A. and Parvizi, M. (2016). “Exercising ‘softclosure’ on lay health knowledge? Harnessing the declining power of the medicalprofession to improve online health information.” Social Theory &Health, 14(3), 332–350.

Naghieh, A., Montgomery, P., Bonell, C.P., Thompson, M. andAber, J.L. (2015). “Organisational interventions for improving wellbeing andreducing work-related stress in teachers.” Cochrane Database ofSystematic Reviews, Issue 4, CD010306.

Book chapter

Naghieh, A. (2020). “Gig Economy and the Transformationof Professional Boundaries in Healthcare.” In R. Page-Tickell and E. Yerby(eds.), Conflict and Shifting Boundaries in the Gig Economy: AnInterdisciplinary Analysis. Emerald Publishing, pp. 129–138.

Strategic foresight and applied research

Drenth, G., Ramírez, R. and Naghieh, A. (2017). How SovereignWealth Funds Engage with Uncertain Futures. International Forum ofSovereign Wealth Funds.

 


Current Teaching

Ali teaches in the areas of leadership, organisational behaviour and psychology, organisational change, and strategy, includingexecutive and professional education.

He is interested in supervising doctoral research on leadershipand organisational change; public policy and public management; workforce transformation and professional identity;participative and multi-stakeholder change; strategic foresight and scenarioplanning; the future of work and professions; andorganisational responses to complex societal challenges.

 


Biography

Dr Ali Naghieh is Senior Lecturer in Workforce Managementand Leadership at Middlesex University Business School. He is an academic andpractitioner specialising in strategic foresight, organisational change, participative multi-stakeholder processes and public policy implementation, with a particular interest inhow leaders and organisations move from competing perspectives towardscoordinated and implementable action.

He holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford. His inter-disciplinary doctoral research developedand piloted a participative organisational change intervention designed toenable organisational members to diagnose problems and develop context-specificsolutions. He subsequently held a Research Fellowship at Saïd BusinessSchool, University of Oxford, where his work focused on multi-stakeholdersystem-level change and the development of new models of integratedpublic-service delivery.

Ali was also a Lead Facilitator on the Oxford ScenariosProgramme, applying scenario planning to strategic leadership anddecision-making under uncertainty. He has designed and facilitated strategicand organisational processes for organisations including HM Treasury,Rolls-Royce, EY, Standard Chartered Bank and the International Forum ofSovereign Wealth Funds, as well as other public-sector and international clients.

His work combines academic research with organisationalpractice, particularly around leadership, stakeholder alignment,participative change and strategy under uncertainty. A recurring focus of this work is how organisations canbring together stakeholders with different interests and perspectives, surfaceunderlying assumptions, create shared understanding and move towards practicalcollective action.

Publications

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