Bridging Design and Behavioral Research with
Composite-Based Structural Equation Modeling

Prof. Dr. Jörg Henseler holds the Chair of Product–Market Relations at the Faculty of Engineering Technology of the University of Twente, Enschede, the Netherlands. Moreover, Jörg Henseler is Visiting Professor at NOVA Information Management School, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal, and Distinguished Invited Professor in the Department of Business Administration and Marketing at the University of Seville, Spain. Before, he was affiliated with Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands; University of Cologne, Germany; and University of Kaiserslautern, Germany. His broad-ranging research interests encompass empirical methods of marketing and design research as well as the management of design, products, services, and brands. His vision as expressed in his inaugural lecture is to bridge design and behavioral research with composite-based structural equation modeling. He has repeatedly been listed as a "Highly Cited Researcher" by Clarivate/Web of Science (see the news report). His outstanding teaching performance has earned him repeated recognition as "Teacher of the Year" according to Master’s in Marketing students.

Prof. Henseler is a leading expert on composite-based structural equation modeling, in particular its subtype partial least squares (PLS) path modeling, which is useful in empirical studies focused on the success factors for businesses. He is the author of the book "Composite-Based Structural Equation Modeling: Analyzing Latent and Emergent Variables" published by Guilford Press, New York. He has written dozens of scholarly articles and edited two books on PLS (see the list of publications). He is the inventor or co-inventor of several methodological tools, for instance:

  • A new way of specifying composites in structural equation modeling, the Henseler-Ogasawara specification (see Schuberth, forthcoming), which relies on synthetic variables (i.e., emergent variables and excrescent variables).
  • Confirmatory composite analysis (CCA), a form of covariance-structure analysis aiming at assessing composite models, analogous to confirmatory factor analysis (cf. Henseler & Schuberth, 2020).
  • Consistent PLS (PLSc), an extension to traditional PLS that allows estimating reflective measurement models consistently (Dijkstra & Henseler, 2015a).
  • Dijkstra and Henseler's rho (ρA), a consistent reliability estimate of PLS construct scores (Dijkstra & Henseler, 2015b).
  • The Heterotrait-monotrait ratio of correlations (HTMT), a coefficient for assessing discriminant validity (Henseler, Ringle, & Sarstedt, 2015), as well as an improved version, the HTMT2 (Roemer, Schuberth, & Henseler, forthcoming).

An important concept in Prof. Henseler's doctrine is emergence, see for instance his inaugural speech or a recent publication discussing emergent variables as an alternative to latent variables. Emergence means that the whole is more/different than the sum of its parts. In the following video a case of emergence is visualized:

A popular guest speaker, Prof. Henseler has been invited by universities around the world to speak to students, faculty, and professionals about structural equation modeling. Prof. Henseler contributes to the scientific community and serves as reviewer for several scholarly journals.