General information

The mission of the department of HRM&OB is to deliver high-quality research and teaching at the cross section of Human Resource Management and Organizational Behavior. This HRM&OB research and teaching is about how to create, motivate, and manage a workforce that can realize competitive advantage for organizations in increasingly complex and dynamic domestic and global environments.

We focus on the following goals to realize our mission:

Contribute to the HRM&OB research programme

This programme comprises five interconnected research themes: teams, diversity, creativity & innovation, leadership, and ethical behavior. Research within these themes examines:

1. the relationship between the design, functioning, and outcomes of work teams as well as relations among different teams;
2. the impact of differences between employees on their motivation and effectiveness;
3. how personal and work context characteristics (de)motivate employees to come up with creative ideas that can improve and innovate work processes, products, or services;
4. how and under which conditions leadership can promote individual, team, and organizational effectiveness, and
5. the factors and mechanisms that influence individuals’ (un)ethical behavior.

We conduct research in a wide range of settings such as manufacturing, healthcare, finance, education, and the service industry. In our research, we use a variety of research approaches including field and lab experiments, longitudinal and multilevel data collections, case studies, and simulation studies. Based on this research, numerous influential articles have been published in top journals like the Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management Studies, Organization Studies, and Organization Science.

Deliver research-driven education on HRM&OB

We deliver a MSc HRM degree programme that aims to graduate students who are able to define, analyze, and solve problems related to the management of work and employment of people in organizations. Typical courses in this program are Strategic HRM, Personnel Instruments, Labor Law, Work Design and Team Processes, and Leadership. Our graduates are highly employable and find a broad variety of jobs in HRM-related domains.

In addition, we offer courses on HRM&OB topics in several other bachelor and master degree programs of the Faculty of Economics and Business. We also participate in the Research Master program, a challenging two-year program intended to prepare students for doing a PhD research project.

Provide a developmental academic climate

We strive to create an internationally-oriented research climate that stimulates faculty to share and pool their knowledge and skills to reach out in various research projects, and that provides individual members with proper conditions for professional and personal growth.

In our teaching, we strive to create a research-driven learning climate in which students learn from research, learn about doing research, and learn to do research on HRM&OB-relevant topics. In this academic environment, students are challenged to achieve to their highest potential and prepared to fulfil leading positions in the domains of Human Resource Management and Organizational Behavior.