Course description
Business Psychology MSc.
The aim of the Business Psychology MSc is to prepare graduates who can diagnose and communicate organisational and behavioural needs, design and implement business psychology interventions, and build strategic HR goals and programmes. The emphasis is on equipping you with theoretical and analytical skills, as well as practical business psychology skills, in areas such as team building, conflict resolution, decision making, facilitation and organisational diagnostics.
You will therefore gain knowledge and skills designed to enable you to work effectively within a wide range of interpersonal and multicultural situations, while formulating costeffective solutions to operational HR problems. The course has an outstanding professional development programme, one that runs in parallel with the taught schedule and which will bring you expertise from existing practitioners through workshops, seminars and mentoring.
Modules:
The following modules are indicative of what you will study on this course.
Core modules:
Conflict Resolution: Negotiation
The module evaluates ways in which negotiations are formed and what processes may be applied to enable or disable the negotiation process. You will study and experience methods which promote the identification of different negotiation strategies and tactics, including the Harvard model of principled negotiation. The module also examines approaches to resolving organisational as well as interpersonal conflict, and what makes for an effective negotiator. We will examine professional best practice, how this promotes the design of effective organisational dispute resolution systems, and how to make them work for organisations and disputants. You will develop a body of knowledge and skills that are key to understanding interpersonal, transnational and multicultural conflict in the workplace.
Development of competency frameworks: an approach for individuals, teams and organisations
The common organisational language for behavioural analysis is that of competency. This module examines the role of competency based analyses in the assessment of a wide range of workplace behaviour. You will gain an understanding of how to diagnose skill needs at both the organisational and personal level, and how to build competence-based interventions. Various exercise guide your understanding of how to utilise different psychological models in the building of behavioural frameworks. You will also focus on the role of personally models in the unitisation of diverse, culturally and individually relevant, routes to competence.
Facilitated decision making
You will examine decision-aiding techniques and practise a wide range of facilitation skills. The module examines approaches to decision making, and how to apply structuring techniques to problem solving and decision making. Techniques will include Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA), a software-based decision support technology, Systems Thinking, which provides the methods for diagnosing, designing and implementing decision support interventions. However, effective facilitation is as much about the human dimension as it is about structuring techniques, so there is also a focus on human information processing, interpersonal biases, and processing limitations as they impact on the development of effective facilitation behaviours.
Organisational diagnostics: tools and approaches
As an introduction to the range and type of behavioural and performance information available within an organisation, this module will provide both theoretical knowledge and practical experience in the ways in which information can be collected and used in pursuit of organisational competitiveness. It provides an overview of the different levels (individual, team and organisational) at which evaluations and measurement may be conducted and how business psychologists utilise this information to form the basis for mapping organisational and behavioural complexity.
MSc Business Psychology Project
The module is designed to develop your ability to evaluate a specific business psychology problem, practice, policy or opportunity. You will be encouraged and guided in developing your research proposal and completing a discrete piece of research for your dissertation. The choice of research topic will be addressed relative to your learning experience, as well as personal and career objectives, and you will be guided on questionnaire design, selection of relevant software applications and data analysis.
Teamwork for effective organisations
In this module you will learn how to use models of behaviour to recognise and manage interpersonal differences in terms of their impact on team behaviour. Various methods are explored and applied during exercises, and you will also learn how to apply methods of team structuring which provide the basis for diagnosing team behaviour. An examination of team models, group dynamics and cognitive biases will provide you with a portfolio of interventions. You will learn how to conduct evaluations of team behaviour and how this can prompt the design of team building interventions and workshops.
