Degree Theses

Please find all currently open topics below. If you are interested, please should submit a statement summarizing your motivation and a brief CV via email to the respective thesis advisor.

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The future of workplace meetings – Exploring group dynamics in immersive meetings in the metaverse (4 bachelor theses)

Workplace meetings are essential for employees in their daily business and impact organizational benefit at large (Allen & Lehmann-Willenbrock, 2023). Virtual and hybrid meetings (besides classic face-to-face meetings) are already being held in many organizations today, however, to date new technological developments open up new possibilities in the way we can conduct meetings. Immersive meetings – using technology supported Virtual Reality (VR)-goggles and own embodied avatars – in the highly publicized ”metaverse” might have the potential to enhance meeting experiences (e.g., Grabowski et al., 2024; Han et al., 2023). Depending on the type of meeting, the degree of immersion allows different possibilities to "dive" into the meeting (Grabowski & Lehmann-Willenbrock, 2023). The overall aim is also to compare 2D Zoom meetings with 3D immersive meetings to conclude future research that combines the literature streams of Industrial & Organizational Psychology and Human-Computer Interaction. You will explore different meeting characteristics in Zoom and immersive meetings, such as entitativity, social presence, and meeting satisfaction. Building on recorded Zoom, immersive meetings, and questionnaire data, the topic for your thesis is still open to your ideas and preferences. Data will be provided; no own data collection will be necessary. However, please ensure that you allow sufficient time for coding the Zoom and immersive meetings using INTERACT software.

Start date: December 2024 (Please note that coding the new data will start in January 2025. Students will enroll in our final colloquium in the summer term 2025)

Contact: Marvin Grabowski (marvin.grabowski"AT"uni-hamburg.de)

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Zoom in online coaching processes (1 master thesis)

In the coaching literature, knowledge on how and why certain interventions work is still limited. In your master theses, you will contribute to process research by observing coaches’ behavior during digitalized coaching aiming to prevent burnout and to improve detachment and work-life balance. Specifically, you will focus on intervention delivery and empathic communication behavior of the coach in different sessions and its impact on clients’ intervention receipt in the last coaching session as a proximal outcome and perceived stress/detachment/work-life balance as distal outcomes.  

Start: as soon as possible

Contact: Dr. Christine Busch (christine.busch"AT"uni-hamburg.de)

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Understanding hybrid work and its consequences for leader-follower-relationships: What happens when the leader is remotely connected? A qualitative study (2 bachelor theses / 1 master thesis)

Many companies believe that the post-pandemic future of work will be extensively hybrid. Working hybrid poses a lot of new challenges – especially for leaders (Krüger et al., 2022). At the core of hybrid work are hybrid meetings (Neumayr, 2021). However, to date, we do not know how these changes in the interaction format affect the leader-follower-relationship in the short- as well as the long-term. Therefore, you will explore the effects of a hybrid work on the leader-follower-relationship using an interview study (support to gather enough participants is guaranteed).

Start date: as soon as possible

Contact: Fabio Krüger (Fabio.krueger"AT"uni-hamburg.de)

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The Power of Inquiry: Exploring Leadership Questions in Organizational Interactions (2 master theses) 

Communication is one of the central leadership responsibilities. Questions are one powerful tool in this context. They may serve as a means to engage with followers, to obtain information from them, motivate them by attributing competence and expertise through the act of asking but also represent a milder form of assigning task. Yet, we have limited insights into the specific types of questions leaders may ask in their day-to-day interactions. In this research project we will analyze transcripts from a large-scale organizational simulation provided by the Center of Creative Leadership. Specifically, we aim at identifying specific types of questions and develop a deeper understanding of how they are used by leaders. In a second step, we will explore the type of answers that are elicited by these questions. Students will be provided that data and focus on the exploratory qualitative data analysis. This project requires high motivations to learn new research methods in a self-directed way.

Start date: October 2024

Contact: Clara S. Hemshorn de Sanchez (clara.sofie.hemshorn.de.sanchez"AT"uni-hamburg.de)

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ASSIGNED/NO LONGER AVAILABLE:  “Ok, thank you, byeee!” – The role of pleasantries in team interactions (1 master thesis)

Team interactions are fundamental to organizational life. While past research has explored behavioral dynamics related to team tasks and (emergent) leadership, little attention has been paid to the seemingly trivial, informal, and ritualized exchanges between team members. This thesis will investigate the micro-level dynamics and patterns of these informal, ritualized interactions during virtual meetings of zero-history teams.
As part of an international research project in collaboration with BI Norwegian Business School and Maastricht University, you will engage in detailed interaction coding using the open-source Communication Analysis Tool. This work demands a high degree of self-organization, rigor, and strong English proficiency, as the recorded team interaction data, as well as some of our project meetings will be in English.

Start date: as soon as possible

Contact: Vanessa Begemann (vanessa.begemann"AT"uni-hamburg.de)

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ASSIGNED/NO LONGER AVAILABLE: Exploring Work-Life Balance Crafting in a Coaching Setting

In your thesis, you will dive deep into a coaching session where specific behaviors are planned. The aim of this work is to identify the strategies discussed and connect them to the concept of work-life balance crafting.

Contact: Romana Dreyer (romana.dreyer"AT"uni-hamburg.de)

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Don’t Shut me Down: Exploring Communicative Barriers for Female Academics in Performance Interviews (2 master theses)

For decades, research has documented a range of challenges female academics face on their way to attaining academic leadership positions. Yet, despite notable progress in female representation among the ranks of full professors in recent years, many women still get lost along the way to tenure or remain in the lower ranks of academia. In this research project, we want to throw light on the role of communication dynamics in performance interviews. These one-on-one meetings between junior researchers and their supervisors (i.e., typically professors), represent important events for career decision-making. In this project we will collect qualitative data of professors and junior academics about their experiences pertaining to their last performance interview. Students will be involved in data collection and analysis. This requires a high level of independent and self-organized working as well as an interest in acquiring qualitative methods and applying them. Starts in April.

Contact: Clara S. Hemshorn de Sanchez (clara.sofie.hemshorn.de.sanchez@uni-hamburg.de)

Final colloquium I/O Psychology

If you would like to write your final thesis in the I/O field, you should attend the accompanying final colloquium on I/O. In these colloquia the writing of the final thesis is accompanied.

In the final colloquium, you will receive the tools for writing a scientific thesis within the framework of various exercises. In the course of the colloquium, you will present the structure and results of your thesis in a plenary session. Therefore, please keep in mind when planning that your thesis should reach an appropriate level of work in the course of the semester.

In addition, we offer a research colloquium in which our doctoral students, as well as external scientists and our post-docs, present and discuss their research work.

Guidelines for writing a thesis in industrial and organizational psychology

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