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. To put it more bluntly: 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 (70% of the course grade)

The closed-book exam will take 70 minutes. You will write the exam with no auxiliaries (notes, books, etc.). 70% of the exam grade comes from your correct answers to multiple choice questions. 30% of the exam grade comes from your correct answers to case study questions.

(2) Case presentation (20% 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 between Sep 11 and Oct 09. You will be assigned to a team in the first 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 at 11 am. I chose this timeframe because the class takes place at different days of the week, and this is the maximum amount of days at which we can ensure that every team has exactly the same amount of days for preparation.

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 until 11 am on 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 questions (10% of the course grade)

For each of the six sessions, you will submit a quick exam preparation for which I will provide you with 10 min. during class in each of the sessions. You can of course also do this at home. It is recommended to do this during or right after the lecture; however, latest until Oct 10.

The exam preparation looks as following: In each session taking place between Sep 11 and Oct 09, you prepare one multiple choice exam questions (= 5 questions in total) with four response options (one must be correct). These questions will be part of the exam. In other words, you contribute to creating your own exam by recapping what you have learned.

Please upload your exam questions via Moodle in the discussion forum with the correct session title. If you post them to the wrong discussion threat, we are not able to assign them correctly to your name and they will not count for grading. Make sure to read the questions that are already posted to guarantee that you post a sufficiently different question.

The one lecture in which the procedure is slightly different is the first lecture on the 05th of September. Here you will need to submit a short video message.

In contrast to the exam and case presentations in which the full grading spectrum is used, you will only receive one of three grades for each of your submissions in this part. You will receive the grade “1.0” if your submission represents a good reflection on the course content, a “3.0” if you submitted something but this reflects that you only superficially engaged with the course content, and a “5.0” if you submit nothing or something of very poor quality. Your grade for this part is the average of the six exam preparation submissions.