Science & Publications

Research that informs practice

My counselling builds on research I’ve conducted myself. At the Vienna University of Economics and Business, I spent over five years researching and publishing on needs in social systems, vision development and organisational learning. At the University of Vienna, I studied the mechanisms of stress and recovery.

This scientific foundation flows directly into my practice – particularly into vocation coaching and my work on stress and recovery.

Understanding needs and developing visions

How do people recognise what they truly need? And how does this knowledge become a viable vision? These questions were at the centre of my research at WU Vienna. The findings form the scientific foundation of my vocation coaching.

  • Kaiser, A., Fahrenbach, F. & Martinez, H. (2021). Creating Shared Visions in Organizations – Taking an Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management Perspective. Proceedings of the 54th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), 5186–5195.

  • Human, S., Fahrenbach, F., Kragulj, F. & Savenkov, V. (2017). Ontology for Representing Human Needs. Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web (KESW 2017), Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol. 786. Springer. Best Paper Award for Societal Challenges.

  • Kaiser, A., Fahrenbach, F., Kragulj, F. & Grisold, T. (2018). Towards a Prioritization of Needs to Support Decision Making in Organizational Change Processes. Proceedings of the 51st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), 4390–4399.

  • Kragulj, F. & Fahrenbach, F. (2017). From Needs to Satisfiers: How Design Thinking Can Inform Organizational Learning Processes. Proceedings of the International Conference Theory and Applications in the Knowledge Economy (TAKE), 470–482.

  • Kaiser, A., Kragulj, F., Fahrenbach, F. & Grisold, T. (2017). Developing a Knowledge Based Vision for a City. Proceedings of the 18th European Conference on Knowledge Management (ECKM).

Personality and change

Can people fundamentally change? In this publication, we revisited the concept of triple-loop learning and argued that personality change can be understood as a profound learning process – with implications for coaching and personal development.

  • Fahrenbach, F. & Kragulj, F. (2019). The Ever-Changing Personality: Revisiting the Concept of Triple-Loop Learning. The Learning Organization, 27(6), 499–512. https://doi.org/10.1108/TLO-01-2019-0016

Stress and recovery

My master’s thesis in clinical psychology examined the mechanisms of stress and recovery in an experimental setting (Trier Social Stress Test) and the role of personality factors in this process.

  • Fahrenbach, F. (2024). The Moderating Effects of Personality on the Relationship Between Music and Stress Recovery. Master’s thesis, University of Vienna. Supervisor: Prof. Urs Nater. https://doi.org/10.25365/thesis.76038

Learning and teaching

  • Kragulj, F., Fahrenbach, F., Grisold, T., Kerschbaum, C. & Kaiser, A. (2018). Teaching Organizational Learning to Undergraduates: Applying Design Thinking in Problem-Based Learning. Proceedings of the 19th European Conference on Knowledge Management (ECKM), 414–422.

Doctoral thesis

  • Fahrenbach, F. (2020). Valuing Prior Learning: Designing an Artifact to Assess Professional Competences. The Case of Austria. Doctoral thesis, Vienna University of Economics and Business. Overall grade: with distinction.

Full publication list: Google Scholar · ResearchGate