Exploring Business Psychology & Entrepreneurship
By Staff Writer, écoute moi
Manchester: All entrepreneurs, businesses, companies and organisations search for a means to help improve their business operations, interactions and effectiveness. Business Psychology is an applied science that investigates how to make people and organisations more effective. It uses social scientific research methods to study people, workplaces and organisations in order to better align their multiple and sometimes competing needs. Its goal is to create healthy, productive and mutually beneficial relationships between people and organisations.
What is Business Psychology?
As an applied science, Business Psychology can inform organisations about what constitutes effective organisational practice. It has a reciprocal relationship with business, drawing insights from those with experience of what works at work to enable psychological research to be applied pragmatically in ways that are appropriate to the situation. It also allows a cross fertilisation of experience: from business into psychology, and of academic knowledge and rigour from psychology into business.
Business Psychology is an important tool which can help improve your business journey. Alongside this Business Psychology helps people delve and further explore their environment and context which allows for advancement and more likelihood of success in the business world.
Exploring Business Psychology
Business Psychology can be applied to almost any people issue at work. Nonetheless, there are several well established domains of Business Psychology, which include:
- Selection and assessment
- Organisational development
- Coaching
- Leadership development
- Learning and development
- Talent management
- Employee engagement
- Safe and user-friendly work environments
- Performance management and appraisal
- Culture
- Health and well-being at work
- Psychometric testing
So as you can see the above list is not exhaustive, however it allows you to better understand different aspects of working environments where Business Psychology can be applied.
Entrepreneurship & Leadership
Within
Business Psychology is the element of leadership which is a highly desirable
trait or skill. An entrepreneur needs leadership qualities to assist their
process of engaging and directing others as well as boosting the potential to
succeed in there endeavours. Roebuck (2004) defines entrepreneurial
leadership as “organising a group of people to achieve a common goal using
proactive entrepreneurial behaviour by optimising
risk, innovating to take advantage of opportunities,
taking personal responsibility and managing change within a
dynamic environment for the benefit of an organisation”.
Such leadership aims to cultivate entrepreneurial individuals and
teams that fully leverage their creative potential in creating
value for an organisation. Entrepreneurial leadership does this by
employing leadership practices that “develop the ability
in employees to self-generate, self-reflect,
and self-correct in their workplace”.
Entrepreneurial leadership is effectively using the skills associated with successful individual entrepreneurs and applying those within the environment of a larger organisation. This especially means within an organisation where those skills have been lost and replaced with a “corporate” mindset that focuses on process, systems and risk minimisation rather than on entrepreneurial behaviour.