Organisational Psychology

Volledige vakbeschrijving

With this course, we aim to provide students with structured scientific knowledge of the main topics of organizational psychology and to develop their ability to apply this knowledge to practical day-to-day problems organizations face. They will learn about the main theories and concepts related to strategy, leadership, teamwork, innovation, organizational culture and climate, and change management. We designed the problems as cases that resemble real organizations. Students will be asked to take the viewpoint of a consultant applying these theories and concepts to these problems.

Two important aspects are considered for all problems throughout this course: 1) The interrelatedness between topics and 2) the multilevel structure of organizations. First, the different concepts and topics do not stand on their own but are interrelated. For instance, leadership can affect an organizational culture and vice versa. Therefore, it is important to explicate such connections between the different concepts and problems and to develop an overview of how all topics relate to each other.

Second, processes in organizations occur at multiple levels. For instance, innovation occurs at the individual, team, and organizational level. Moreover, concepts at these different levels can influence each other both bottom-up and top-down.  As a bottom-up example, individual level creativity is essentially required for a team and an organization to be creative. As a top-down example, an organization’s climate for innovation is likely to affect individual level creativity. Therefore, we explicitly take a multilevel perspective, examining constructs at the micro (individual), meso (team), and macro (organizational) levels. Importantly we also discuss relationships among constructs at these three levels.