Organizational Behavior & Human Resource Management
Mission Statement
The research interests of this interdisciplinary section cover the areas of Human Resource Management and Organizational Behavior. Specific fields of interest include leadership; teamwork; new team-based forms of organization; the roles of hierarchy, power, status and influence; emotions in organizations; personnel diagnostics (e.g., applicant selection, employee assessment); career management and career adjustments; assessing and promoting work performance in different contexts; personality and intelligence in careers; and the scientist-practitioner gap in Human Resource Management and Organizational Behavior.
The section aims to advance the research areas of Human Resource Management and Organizational Behavior at JLU and strengthen JLU’s national and international visibility in these fields to make JLU even more attractive to young researchers. The section strives to involve both senior and early-career researchers in all academic disciplines concerned with the human being in an organizational context and/or organizational structures.
Section Head
The OB & HRM Section is lead by the following team: Dr. Katja Wehrle, Dr. Sascha Etgen, Dr. Katerina (Aikaterini Eleni) & Dr. Marco C. Ziegler.
Notes:
Responsible for this website is Marco C. Ziegler.
Budgetholder: Section Head
Current Events
Announcements WiSe 2025/26:
Presentation: Prof. Rosalind Searle (University of Glasgow) - 17.06. (Wednesday) um 15:30.
Location: Raum S101 (Seminargebäude II, Alter Steinbacher Weg 44).
Short Bio:
Rosalind H. Searle holds the chair in Human Resource Management and Organisational Psychology at the University of Glasgow’s Adam Smith Business School, in Scotland, UK and founding director of the European Association of Work and Organizational Psychology’s Impact Incubator (www.Eawopimpact.org). She is a Chartered Occupational Psychologist, and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Science (FASS), the British Psychological Society (BPS), the International Association of Applied Psychology (IAAP), the Royal Society of Arts, and an academic fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personal and Development (CIPD). Her work examines trust in organisation and counterproductive work behaviours. Since 2023 she has sat on NHS England’s domestic and sexual violence taskforce and the Royal College of Surgeon’s England’s working party of sexual misconduct in surgery.
Research presentation: Dr. Roman Briker (WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management) 8. Juli, 11:00 am (s.t.) Room: 031 (Campus Recht & Wirtschaft, Licher Str. 68).
Title: Customized AI Agents for High-Quality Behavioral Research: Illustrations from leadership and team research
Abstract:
In this talk, I discuss how scholars can leverage conversational AI agents—systems capable of holding intelligent conversations with human users—to study organizational processes, employees, and workplace outcomes in more rigorous, high-quality, and open ways. While existing research in leadership, management, and the broader behavioral sciences often relies on scenario-based and similar methods, these approaches offer limited ecological validity. Recent advances in no-code platforms now allow researchers to design and deploy customized conversational AI agents without technical expertise, making it possible to study real-time, interactive experiences with functional agents.
I will showcase how such AI can represent different organizational actors, including leaders, coworkers, or subordinates; display diverse characteristics and behaviors; and be embedded in lab or field studies using experimental, observational, quantitative, or qualitative designs. Drawing on various empirical examples, I will demonstrate how interactions with customized AI can shape participants’ perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors in incentivized settings. I also introduce ResearchChatAI (https://about.researchchatai.com/), a novel open-source tool, as an illustrative example and reflect on key practical and methodological trade-offs. Overall, the talk highlights how conversational AI agents can expand the methodological toolkit of psychology and management scholars and enable more valid, realistic, and scalable research on AI and with AI.
Short Bio:
Dr. Roman Briker is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Organizational Behavior at WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management in Düsseldorf (Germany). Roman’s research focuses on social influence processes within the “Future of Work,” including human-AI interaction, temporality, and (human) sustainability. Roman’s research has been published in outlets such as Nature, Nature Reviews Psychology, Science Advances, Personnel Psychology, Journal of Management, and Organizational Research Methods and was supported by awards or grants from the EU, DFG, and the Center for Open Science.