Hadassah Littman-Ovadia, PhD

Hadassah Littman-Ovadia, PhD is a Full Professor of Psychology at Ariel University in Israel. She played a pivotal role as one of the founders and chaired the MA program in vocational-organizational psychology for nine years. As a senior counseling and vocational psychologist, she was engaged in hundreds of career counseling and career-psychotherapy interventions for adults helping them design and plan their career paths. Additionally, she has conducted mentoring and supervision processes with dozens of vocational psychologists. She has held the position of director at two counseling centers. Based on her extensive and diverse professional and managerial experience, her research interests are primarily centered around career counseling and career development, character strengths in the workplace, the optimal use and misuse of character strengths across various life domains, as well as the impact of overuse and underuse of character strengths on psychopathology. Her work also delves into the significance of achieving a balanced and meaningful work-life equilibrium, along with personal and organizational growth. Collaborating closely with her MA and Ph.D. students, she strives to synthesize elements of vocational psychology with those of positive psychology in the realms of research, theory, and practice. Her main goals are teaching, exploring, and supporting the flourishing of individuals, teams, and organizations. Hadassah seeks to bridge gaps between academic research and psychological practice. She has developed interventions (e.g., Strengths-Based Career Counseling) and measurement tools (e.g., the Optimal-Under-Over-Use of Character Strengths). These applied contributions have been found effective and adopted by the Ministry of Labor and other institutions. Hadassah actively collaborates with the VIA Institute on extensive international projects, and on the 20th anniversary of the VIA institution, she initiated a special issue and led it with colleagues (see VIA Character Strengths: Theory, Research and Practice | Frontiers Research Topic (frontiersin.org) . Hadassah’s work has been published in vocational psychology, positive psychology, and personality journals (see Google Scholar and ORCID ).