Psychology

Why do you find it more difficult to keep up a good lifestyle after a long day of studying? Is ita good idea to work together professionally with friends? And what do you do if you are in a leadership position but no one follows you in your decisions? These seemingly unrelated phenomena share much more than you think. They are all rooted in the psychological foundations and processes underlying the behavior of individuals and groups in organizations.

The objective of this class lies in providing you with a sound understanding of psychological theories and models of human behavior. In other words: This course is about making you more effective in (1) managing yourself, (2) managing peers, and (3) managing your employees in work environments by using psychological theories. So unless you plan to become an eremite, this course will be of value for you. We will devote 360 lecture minutes (= 2 sessions) to each of the three topic areas.

Topics cover among others: Personality, self-control, habits, group conflicts, team dynamics, charismatic leadership, and motivation.

Case Studies

(1) Exam (60% of the course grade)

The closed-book exam will take 70 minutes. You will write the exam with no auxiliaries (notes, books, etc.). 50% of the exam grade comes from your correct answers to multiple choice questions. 50% of the exam grade comes from solving question study questions (i.e., open questions).

(2) Case presentation (25% of the course grade)

You will be part of a team and present a case study for 20 minutes.

Your presentation will take place in one of the sessions 03, 04, 05, or 06. You will be assigned to a team in the second lecture. Each team is then randomly assigned to a date for presentation. If the assigned date does not suit you, you are free to autonomously change dates with another team. This process must be self-initiated and self-guided.

The case materials will be made available to everyone five days before the class.

You will need to hand in your slides via email as a pdf document before you present them in class. This has to happen latest until30 minutes before the classon the day at which your presentation takes place. To keep your workload reasonable, you are allowed to submit max. 20 slides (excl. title page & 1 end page). The exact grading criteria for the case presentations are available on Moodle.

(3) Exam preparation submissions (15% of the course grade)

You will have to submit possible exam questions in multiple-choice format (4 answer options, please indicate the correct one) for 5 sessions as well as send in a short video (~1min) in which you introduce yourself.

For more information, please refer to the syllabus.