Positive Organizational Psychology

Learn how organizations and employees can create productive, engaged, and happy workplaces.

Employees play a crucial role in the success of organisations. In a fast changing and competitive environment, the performance of organisations is, in part, dependent on the engaged and proactive behaviours of their employees. For example, employees can learn new skills that will help them with their job, they can voice suggestions to their team and find new and innovative ways to go about their daily tasks. Often, these positive organisational behaviours are positively linked with employee health and well-being. Therefore, modern organisations can stimulate such positive organisational behaviours, and thereby ensure employee well-being through invigorating job design and leadership.

In this minor, students will explore how organisations can build an engaged, proactive, and healthy workforce and understand the psychological processes at play in organisational performance and well-being. Examples of topics that will be covered include job design, leadership, motivation, work engagement, emotion regulation, job crafting, coping with work stress, and work-life balance.

This minor provides students who are interested in work and organisational psychology a unique opportunity to learn about the latest insights from the fields of organisational psychology, organisational behaviour and occupational health psychology, applied to relevant issues in human resource management, people & culture, and personnel selection. The minor has unique added value to the knowledge gained in economics and business administration.

Students will gain knowledge and understanding of:

1. Job design and work engagement . How can we design jobs that motivate workers and promote their well-being?
2. Positive human resource practices . What HR practices contribute to productive and happy employees, and prevent burnout?
3. Leadership . How can leaders inspire their followers, and how can leaders ensure follower well-being and performance?
4. The social work environment . How do interactions with colleagues relate to worker well-being? What is the role of fairness and justice in well-being at work?
5. Work motivation . What are the psychological processes of work motivation? How do workers set and achieve their work goals?
6. Job crafting and proactive career behaviours . How can workers tailor their work to their own needs? What is the importance of proactive work behaviours (e.g., job crafting, idiosyncratic deals)?
7. Emotion regulation and coping with stress at work . How can workers best cope with work stress? Are certain job stressors more difficult to cope with than others?
8. Work-life balance . How do workers achieve work-life balance? How can work-family conflicts be prevented?

The minor will be open for international students. For this reason, all the materials and course-related activities will be in English. The course is offered offline (on campus). The exam will be in English only.

Students from all educational backgrounds are admissible for this minor. It is a broadening minor which automatically implies that psychology students are excluded.

Teaching methods
Self-study and lectures

Teaching materials
Recent journal articles and book chapters provided on the internet.

Method of examination:
Both modules will be concluded with a final exam consisting of multiple-choice Questions. The grades of both modules count equally in the final grade. The exam is in English.

Composition final grade
The final grade is the average of the grades for Module 1 and Module 2.