Lode De Waele has obtained his PhD at the faculty of Business and Economics of the University of Antwerp (2019), specializing in public management. He started his PhD in 2013, after being employed in the public sector for several years as an accountant, cabinet member, and senior consultant. After his PhD, he worked for the Federal Parliament of Belgium as a political advisor.
He publishes his research in internationaal peer-reviewed journals such as Frontiers in Pyschology, International Review of Administrative Sciences, Review of Public Personnel Administration and Journal of Public Budgeting, Accounting & Financial Management.
His main research interests focus on corruption, hybridity, dark triad characteristic traits and Public Service Motivation.
In 2019, he founded the thinktank Eleni for which he publishes opinion articles on a regular basis.
Many organizations today are behaving as hybrids in that they are simultaneously combining different governance logics, such as those of Traditional Public Management, New Public Management, or Public Value Governance. In this context, he analyzes the main antecedents of hybridity and how it affects organizational performance.
Furthermore, he analyzes the main underlying mechanisms of corruption and their interaction at the micro, meso, and macro level of behavior by conducting rigorous experimental research.
At TIU, he is enrolled in courses such as Introduction to Organization Studies, Academic and Professional Abilities and Financial Management. At the University of Antwerp, he teaches the course Introduction to Business Administration.
In 2018, he co-founded the Public Sector Corruption (CorPuS) project which aims to advance theoretical insights and collect rich evidence about a few of the main underlying mechanisms of corruption and their interaction at the micro, meso, and macro level of behavior by conducting rigorous experimental research in fifteen countries. As a consortium-member, together with his colleagues dr. Kristina S. Weissmueller and prof dr. Arjen van Witteloostuijn, he coordinates the project. Furthermore, he developed the vignettes for the study, which have been now translated in more than ten different languages across the world. At present, the project connects more than 25 researchers in countries such as Spain, the UK, the US, Taiwan, China, Italy, Australia, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and South-Korea.