Maastricht University, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience

Master Psychology: Work and Organisational Psychology

You’ll study human behaviour in the context of work and in organisations. You’ll combine theoretical knowledge with practical applications that can be implemented in organizations and build a strong foundation for an academic career.

In the master’s specialisation in Work and Organisational Psychology, you’ll study human behaviour in the context of work and in organizations. The programme combines theoretical knowledge of work and organisational psychology with practical applications that can be implemented in organisations.

Questions we will address include:

• What are the causes of stress, and what can be done about them?
• How can jobs ideally be designed?
• What motivates people in their work?
• How does the composition of a team influence its effectiveness?
• How does team climate influence team performance?
• Is there an optimal leadership style?
• What are good HRM practices to recruit, select, train, and retain employees?
• What does the future of work look like?

Programme Outline

Core courses of this programme are:

• Work psychology: focuses on job design, occupational health, and work behaviour. You will learn about sources of work stress, how to foster day-to-day recovery from work, why people sometimes behave uncivil at work and how this affects their colleagues. We will also discuss new work arrangements and why working from home might be a blessing and a curse for work-life balance.
• Human resources: addresses HR practices of personnel selection and assessment, training, performance management, continuous professional development, talent management, and career development. The aim is to be able to design and evaluate these practices in line with an evidence-based approach to decision-making.
• Organisational Psychology: focuses on strategy, leadership, innovation, teamwork, organisational culture and climate, and change management. In subgroups, you will work on case studies, developing research-based solutions for a variety of problems organisations may face.
• Human performance: is centred on the question ‘How do people process information during the performance of tasks?’ You will focus on topics such as motivation, interruptions at work, organisational citizenship behaviour and ageing at work.
• The Future of Work: addresses key questions work and organisational psychologists are facing now and in the near future. For instance, how can artificial intelligence (AI) help organisations operate efficiently in the 21st century? How does the introduction of robots change daily work?

In addition to these core courses, you will be offered workshops on research methods and design, analysis and academic writing, which will prepare you for conducting your own research as part of the master thesis.

Develop your Professional Skills

One of the key features of the programme is its focus on skills development. Over an eight-week period starting in January, a series of assignments and workshops will stimulate further development of the primary competencies of work and organisational psychologists.

You’ll practice skills such as:

• needs analysis
• goal setting
• assessment
• intervention design
• communication

You may work on the assignments in either a simulated or a real-life organisational setting. Afterwards, you'll complete an activity report in which you will reflect on your professional development.

Linking up with Ongoing Research

The themes of the Work and Organisational Psychology specialisation are closely linked to the research of our staff. This close link between education and research offers you many opportunities to participate in ongoing research.

Our themes include:

• Recovery and well-being at work
• The role of mindfulness for workplace functioning and well-being
• Inclusive organisations
• Leadership
• Teamwork
• Personality at work
• Sustainable employability
• Work and technology
• Occupational neuroscience
• Ethical behaviour at work

Research on work and organisational psychology has two complementary aspects: basic research focused on building new models that help to explain human behaviour at work and research aimed at improving and changing organisations. For basic research, we have a laboratory that enables us to simulate realistic work settings where we can study phenomena that are difficult to investigate in real-life settings, such as the effects of being interrupted at work.

Problem-Based Learning

As with many Maastricht University programmes, the Developmental Psychology programme is taught using Problem-Based Learning (PBL). In small tutorial groups of 10 to 12 students, you'll seek solutions to ‘problems’ taken from real-world situations. Instructors act as facilitators, giving help as it’s needed. This allows you to build independence and develop problem-solving skills that you’ll need in the field. This active, dynamic and collaborative learning method has one of the highest knowledge retention rates of any instructional method.

International classroom

From day one of the programme, you’ll be challenged with differing viewpoints and experiences as you interact with staff and students from all over the world. Your worldview will be enhanced by this interaction, bringing you closer to the programme’s goal of teaching students not only facts and concepts but also international accessibility and understanding. Roughly 80% of the students in this master’s programme come from outside the Netherlands. Such diversity creates an international atmosphere that is strengthened by the international orientation of the programme.