Organizations play a key role in our society. People create organizations to implement their plans and attain their goals. Organizations provide the structure that allows people to work towards common goals in a collaborative manner. Such collaborative efforts take place in for-profit or non-profit as well as in governmental or non-governmental organizations.

What We Do and Why

At the Institute of Management and Organization (IMO), we see it as a great responsibility to help people create, manage, and develop organizations. This includes the management and development of people working in organizations. Moreover, we believe that the management and development of organizations and people must comprehensively feature economic, ecological, social, and psychological aspects. Only such a comprehensive perspective allows to develop organizations and enrich people's lives in a meaningful manner.

Three activities are central to manage and develop organizations and the people in organizations. First, we need to understand key drivers and processes of an effective and sustainable development of people and organizations. Second, we need to incorporate this understanding of key drivers and processes in our training of future leaders and managers. Our aim is to equip students with the latest scientific know-how about managing and developing people and organizations. Third, we need to inform current practitioners about new scientific insights to continuously improve the practices implemented in organizations. Therefore, the IMO equally emphasizes the three activities: research to better understand, teaching to better train, and transfer to better inform.

The IMO combines the areas of strategy, organizational behavior, work & organizational psychology, and entrepreneurship. Furthermore, the institute integrates the fields of business administration and psychology to take an interdisciplinary perspective. Such an interdisciplinary perspective is important to fully embrace the dynamics of people and organizations. State-of-the-art approaches emphasize a close integration of both disciplines. Furthermore, the members of the institute understand themselves as an active part in the global context incorporating a strong international orientation in their research, teaching, and transfer activities.

At IMO, we want to achieve a better understanding. Specifically, we want to advance the theoretical understanding of managing and developing organizations and the people in the organizations by conducting research on strategy, management, entrepreneurship, innovation, and HR management. Furthermore, we believe that only research in line with the highest academic standards leads to scientific advancements that are meaningful for developing people and organizations.

Therefore, the institute is dedicated to research that is excellent with regard to the theoretical, conceptual, and methodological approach. We regard publishing in international top tier journals and conferences as a benchmark of excellence in research. Furthermore, we consider quantitative and qualitative research as complementary in identifying the drivers and processes of successfully managing and developing organizations and the people in organizations.

The members of the institute are widely acknowledged as internationally high profile scholars and prolific experts in the areas of strategy, entrepreneurship, innovation, organizational behavior, and (international) HR management. They combine expertise from the domains of business administration and psychology. They have published their research in international top tier entrepreneurship and management journals.

At IMO, we engage in collaborative initiatives and joint research projects. We bundle resources and foster a climate of permanent (formal and informal) exchange of ideas. The results are large research projects, for example on entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship trainings, entrepreneurial learning from failures, global mobility, and integrating refugees into the workforce.

The research projects of the institute have a strong international orientation. The research collaborations of the institute span universities from countries across the globe (e.g., USA, East and West Africa, Asia). For example, the institute conducts research projects on:

• entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship trainings in several countries in East and West Africa, Asia, and Latin America;
• global leadership, selection, and development in collaboration with several international universities;
• topics of international business, in particular questions of global mobility, expatriate management, and international HR practices in countries around the globe.