Research

The chair of Organizational Behavior conducts research at the intersection of psychology and management. Our approach integrates theory and methodology from social-cognitive psychology, organizational psychology, and psychophysiology. To address our research questions, we conduct laboratory, online, and field research using self-report measures, computer tasks, behavioral coding, eye-tracking, and psychophysiological methods such as electroencephalography (EEG) and electrocardiography (ECG).

Our core research topics include:

Effects of social power on cognition and behavior. We investigate how the psychological experience of power affects how we pursue our goals with a focus on attentional processes, reward sensitivity, self-control, and effort investment. Moreover, we have proposed the effort investment theory of power that describes how power affects effort investment and efficiency in goal pursuit. We are further interested in the consequences of the power effect for the experience of stress and well-being.

Tensions, paradoxes, and goal conflict. In the organizational context as well as in our private lives, we often face tensions and goal conflicts. Our projects examine the factors that determine how people deal with goal conflicts and tensions in the context of innovation (e.g., tensions between novelty and usefulness and tensions between exploration and exploitation modes).

Social perception. Several of our research projects investigate the factors that influence accurate social perception (i.e., interpersonal sensitivity) and biased social perception (i.e., prejudice and stereotypes) as well as their consequences for impression formation in organizational contexts (i.e., related to hiring, promotions, etc.). For instance, we investigate how construal levels (i.e., thinking abstractly vs. concretely) affect social perception and people’s lay beliefs concerning the fit of construal levels for specific tasks and jobs. Furthermore, we study what inferences people make from other’s behavior with a focus on how they evaluate behaviors in terms of signaling power as well as effective and inclusive leadership.