Human Behaviour in Organisations
Full course description
This course familiarizes students with various aspects of human behaviour in organisations. Questions that will be addressed during the course are: How can organisations select good employees? What can organisations do to maintain a healthy and motivated workforce? What are effective leadership styles? What does a high performance team look like? To answer these questions we will present an array of different topics from work and organisational psychology such as work stress, occupational health, emotions in organisations, leadership, personnel selection, work motivation, and teamwork. The course consists of lectures, an individual assignment and a group project in whichstudents either work on a practical consultancy project (e.g., develop a plan how to address an issue in an organization) or a research project (e.g., develop a specific idea for a field study). At the end there will be a ‘mini-conference’ in which groups present the results of their group project. This course forms an excellent introduction for the Master’s programme ‘Work and Organisational Psychology’. N.B. there will be no tutorial groups, but there will be some rooms and times made available for the group project
The final assessment for this course is a numerical grade between 0,0 and 10,0.
Course objectives
Students will be able to understand in which way psychology is relevant within organizations and what are relevant areas of work and organizational psychology. Relatedly, students will learn to select relevant scientific literature, get an on-hands experience with the scientific review process where they learn to constructively give and consider feedback, and throughout the process train their skills in writing an academic text integrating scientific studies. In addition, depending on the group project chosen, students will be able to utilize scientific models and findings to develop a concrete plan for a field research in the area of work and organizational psychology or will be able to translate scientific models and findings into practical applications and solutions in organisations.