040312 KU Virtual meetings as instruments of efficient international management (MA) (2022S)

In the third year after the first lockdown, virtual meetings, lectures and tutorials have become commonplace. And they have come to stay. It became different and more factual, faster and more exhausting, healing and lonely. And an amazing amount of things have succeeded and been possible that were once unthinkable. In this course we will examine together how virtual meetings have to be designed so that not only the technology, but also the interaction, the team cohesion works and they become helpful and effective management tools. The methodological basis for this is theme-centered interaction - TCI for short - a form of group management that originates from humanistic psychology. It is about situational interpretation and development of action strategies for shaping team processes through a situational mix of methods, participative leadership, humane attitudes and lively language.
This course combines teaching and research. On the one hand, building blocks from the concept of theme-centered interaction (according to Ruth C.Cohn) are worked out together as an introduction. On the other hand, this course follows up on the research results of last year's courses. On the basis of an interview guideline, each student will conduct a one-hour interview to find out about their experiences with virtual meetings in discussions with an employee of a company/organization. Based on the qualitative material thus obtained, already existing 28 interviews of the courses from 2021 and literature studies, research reports around the design of meetings will be created, discussed together and a paper will be written.
The goal of the course on a content level is to familiarize students with a current and for companies in the future increasingly essential form of communication - the design of interactive virtual meetings - and to implement the first steps in the design itself. On a methodological level, the students learn to empirically raise company-specific questions together with practitioners using structured open interviews, to place them in the context of existing management literature and to present these reflections between theory and practice in the form of a report. On a personal level, the participants will also reflect on their own experiences during the exercise - which will be conducted completely virtually - with each other and put them in relation to the empirical work. The research subject - design of social processes in virtual meetings as a management tool - is highly complex, hardly researched and largely underestimated.

Possible topics for the research paper:
1. the dynamic balance of the 4-factors in virtual meetings - how the high factual orientation can get new momentum again by looking at the team and the people
2. on the way from I to WE - what promotes encounter in virtual meetings and what it is needed for
3. technology as a relevant environment factor - what influence does it have on the course of meetings?
4. leading at a distance - what role do meetings play in this?
5. about the willingness to give up power by dividing functions
6. methods for loosening up in virtual meetings - what helps when and how - first observations

Further information: www.rci.at, www.mehr-teamenergie.com