Professor Dr. Bernad Batinic leads the Department of Work, Organizational, and Media Psychology (AOM), established in 2005 and located at the Institute of Psychology. Since 2007, Batinic has also served as the head of the Institute of Psychology.
Batinic studied psychology at the University of Gießen (1995), earned his doctorate (2001), and completed his habilitation (2006) at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. He served as a visiting professor at the University of Marburg (Department of Work and Organizational Psychology) for one year in 2003. Since 2004, he has been a full professor at JKU Linz. Bernad Batinic was the spokesperson for the professors' curia of the Faculty of Social and Economic Sciences and is currently a member of various commissions and bodies at the University of Linz (department spokesperson, senate member, member of the study commission for web sciences, etc.). In 2015, he declined an offer for the W3 Professorship in Psychology at the University of Trier, which also involved leading the Leibniz Center for Psychological Information and Documentation (ZPID).
At the end of his psychology studies, Batinic began his work on online research, particularly focusing on the possibilities of the internet for data collection. In 1994, he conducted an online survey in the Usenet, and in 1995, he published the first guide on the internet for conducting online surveys. He was a founding member of the German Society for Online Research. Bernad Batinic is also likely to have been the first researcher in the German-speaking region to implement a survey on the World Wide Web. In addition to numerous publications, conferences, workshops, and third-party projects, several companies have emerged from these works that Batinic co-founded and where he served as a supervisory board member, advisory board member, or consultant. Bernad Batinic was one of the three founders of Globalpark AG (since 2012, Questback), tivian GmbH, and respondi AG.
In the field of work and organizational psychology, Bernad Batinic and his team conduct research, particularly on aspects of employment and well-being. The empirical basis includes various studies, including a very large longitudinal study with now five waves. Findings from this ongoing study, in particular, have been published in several international journals. In terms of content, Batinic and his team have repeatedly demonstrated the mediating role of the latent functions of work according to Marie Jahoda in the relationship between aspects of employment and well-being.