GUGLIELMETTI CHIARA

Chiara Guglielmetti is Associate Professor of Social Psychology (PSIC-03/A) at the Department of Economics, Management and Quantitative Methods (DEMM) of the University of Milan. She holds a degree in Work and Organisational Psychology from the University of Padua and a PhD in Social and Developmental Psychology from the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore of Milan (2000).
Her research sits at the intersection of social psychology, health psychology and organisational studies, with a sustained focus on healthcare systems as contexts in which psychological processes and organisational dynamics interact in particularly significant ways. This interdisciplinary positioning reflects a deliberate theoretical commitment: to understand how decisional, relational and identity processes unfold within complex organisations and shape the quality of care, the wellbeing of healthcare professionals and the capacity of health systems to innovate.
A first research strand concerns decision-making and communicative processes within healthcare teams: the structure of interaction among professionals with different training backgrounds, information flow in high-pressure settings and the conditions that support decision quality and interprofessional collaboration, including in relation to the adoption of digital technologies. These topics have been addressed through empirical studies conducted in real clinical environments and through theoretical contributions on work group functioning.
A second strand, developed in sustained collaboration with colleagues in management and medicine, concerns patient engagement and the co-production of care pathways. In this area she has contributed to the development of evaluative frameworks and research protocols for analysing the organisational conditions that make genuine professional-patient partnership possible, with particular attention to chronic illness. Participation in the MUSA Project (funded under the PNRR) has opened a line of inquiry into the role of telemedicine as an instrument of value co-production within the care system, examining both the social representations of this technology among healthcare professionals and its organisational implications.
A third strand concerns organisational health in healthcare services, with attention to the effects of third-party aggression and workplace violence on staff wellbeing and group dynamics. In this area, research activity has been systematically integrated with training interventions aimed at healthcare professionals, giving rise to a research-intervention model that connects empirical analysis and organisational practice.
In methodological terms, her work is characterised by the integrated use of qualitative and quantitative approaches. In-depth interviews, focus groups and documentary analysis are combined with validated questionnaires and advanced statistical techniques, following a triangulation logic suited to the complexity of the organisational phenomena under study. A significant portion of her activity takes the form of applied research conducted in direct collaboration with healthcare organisations and public institutions.
Research collaborations are stable and interdisciplinary in nature: her principal scientific partners include colleagues from medicine, management and psychology, in a model that foregrounds complementarity of expertise and the production of knowledge that is actionable within organisational systems.
Since 2005 she has been a faculty member at the University of Milan, where she teaches Group Psychology, Group Decision-Making Processes and Organisational Wellbeing in Healthcare at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. She is a member of the doctoral faculty of the Mind, Brain and Reasoning PhD programme, within which she teaches on coordination and functioning of research teams. She serves as Chair of the Degree Programme in Management, Governance and Innovation in the Public and Socio-Healthcare Sector (since 2025) and previously held the role of Deputy Head of the DEMM (2021-2024). She is a member of the scientific committee of the Interdepartmental Research Centre for Innovation and Organisational Change in Public Administration (ICONA) and of the Research and Advanced Training Centre in Health Administration (HEAD) of the University of Milan.
Her third-mission activities take the form of ongoing collaborations with healthcare institutions and public organisations. Since 2017 she has served as module leader on managerial competency development, teamwork and conflict management within advanced training programmes for healthcare executives delivered in collaboration with POLIS Lombardia. This engagement reflects a conception of research as an instrument of organisational change, oriented towards the production of knowledge that is directly applicable within the systems in which it is conducted.