Professor of Business Psychology

FOM is an internationally oriented university, which is primarily addressed to professionals who want to obtain academic qualifications in addition to their business activities.

With currently about 50,000 students, FOM is Germany's largest campus university, present at 36 locations. In September 2020, FOM opened a new university center in Saarbrücken, where I am also employed. The focus of my teaching is on practice-oriented Bachelor's and Master's programs in the field of business psychology.

Since the winter semester 2012/13, I have been working full-time as a university lecturer for business psychology, human resources and marketing at the University Study Center Mannheim.

A particular challenge is that all participants have professional experience and therefore the direct connection to professional practice and the respective professional reality is a central topic. In my approach, I regularly combine theoretical lecture parts with group work and discussions in order to directly link the subject matter to be learned with the students' previous knowledge.

For the consolidation and continuation of classroom teaching, FOM offers an OnlineCampus that serves as a central platform for all data, questions, discussions and suggestions. Here, I offer students material for their own in-depth study and individual participants can get ideas for literature research and independent discussion on topics that are particularly relevant and interesting for them.

My scientific interests center around a qualitative-hermeneutic understanding of science. Most universities and research institutions are dominated by an understanding of science that is very much linked to a nomothetic understanding of reality and methods. This scientific way of thinking is about describing reality (or the object considered relevant) with measurable concepts, i.e., measuring it and explaining it with statistical correlations.

I am interested in a different approach: with the help of hermeneutic and especially psychoanalytic ways of thinking I try to encircle the respective reality in an understanding way, to describe it and to understand it in its inner dynamics. There are many studies and many scientific researchers who are committed to this scientific paradigm and who research and work in this context. To bring these researchers together at my university, I founded the KCQF Competence Center for Qualitative Researchtogether with my colleague Prof. Dr. Ulrike Schwegler. Within this framework, we bring together qualitative research services, generates exciting synergy effects, and provides an institutional "home" for this group of researchers.

The current Corona pandemic has shifted teaching very much toward online courses and virtual lectures and seminars. These shifts need their own didactic approaches and different methodological approaches to achieve student learning goals. For this purpose, I have completed an extensive continuing education course, which aims to professionalize virtual classroom teaching with a modular concept.