We are researching and teaching what people do with or against each other (interaction), how they inform each other (communication), and what they in these moments feel and think, what they would like, could, or ought to do (psychic processes). Special emphasis is given to affiliation/communion and power/agency as the main dimensions of human coordination.
These intertwined social and psychic processes are influenced by the social context, i.e. the social, political, and economic structures via the implied positions, role expectations, and identities of the interactants, and these processes, in turn, may somewhat change the social context. This interplay of social and psychic processes, for us, is what social psychology is all about.

Within the scope of organizational psychology, we are applying social psychology to organizational issues, such as team work, leadership and participation, innovation, decision making, conflicts, organizational politics, and the use of power as promotive or restrictive control. This, in turn, stimulates new social psychological questions and hypotheses.
In organizational and social psychology we are in touch with other psychological disciplines as well as with the social sciences and economics.

In order to translate theories into practice and to learn from practice for our theorizing we have founded together with colleagues the consulting firm artop with which we stay in close contact.
On the one side, we support artop’s applied research and evaluate its consulting and training practices. On the other side, our students are trained by artop in basic social skills, can apply for an internship or a student job, and may carry out a master thesis within artop’s projects under joint supervision.