Abstract:

Preparing future professionals to navigate the ethical, relational, and structural challenges of the modern world of work requires pedagogical approaches that go beyond content delivery. This work presents a teaching innovation implemented in two large undergraduate student sections of an Organizational Psychology course (N ≈ 150 students) at the University of Barcelona, where a mixed methods, real world research project forms the central component of the continuous evaluation format.

The instructional design intentionally combines Merrill’s Principles of Instruction, a contemporary and widely used problem‑centered instructional model that emphasizes activation, demonstration, application, and integration in authentic tasks, with Socratic questioning, a dialogic pedagogical strategy recognized for fostering deeper critical thinking, reflective reasoning, and productive intellectual discomfort in higher education.

The project begins with a one‑hour theoretical–practical session that introduces philosophical perspectives on moral courage (e.g., Aristotelian virtue ethics) alongside current organizational psychology research, serving as the activation phase in Merrill’s framework. Students then move into demonstration and application by collecting quantitative data using a newly developed Leadership Courage Scale and participating in its preliminary validation, exploring dimensions such as moral compass, cost assumption, relational courage, and systemic responsibility. A 1.5‑hour analytics class enables collaborative exploration of the anonymized dataset, with Socratic questioning used to probe assumptions, examine alternative explanations, and help students identify patterns that guide the development of their semi‑structured interview protocols. In the qualitative phase, students conduct interviews with real business leaders to examine how moral courage is enacted and constrained in organizational practice. The project concludes with oral group presentations.

Throughout the semester, structured tutoring sessions support methodological decision‑making, ethical considerations, and theoretical integration. The instructional approach encourages students to continuously reflect - through Socratic dialogue - on how course topics such as motivation, wellbeing, team dynamics, leadership, culture, climate, and organizational structure intersect with ethical action. Consequently, students connect their empirical learning to real‑world implications and their future professional identities. A central objective of the project is to foster the competence, interest, self-efficacy, and motivation to initiate and contribute to positive changes in the organizations and societies in which students will work and live.

By uniting a contemporary task‑centered instructional model with a dialogic, critical‑thinking pedagogy, the project positions moral courage as both a conceptual and experiential learning axis. This constitutes the core innovation: students do not merely learn about organizational behavior and ethical leadership but experience and interrogate these concepts through authentic and systematic mixed‑methods inquiry. We will present preliminary insights on student engagement, perceived learning gains, and emerging qualitative results, and will outline a replicable model for embedding ethics, empirical research, and leadership development into Higher Education Institutions at scale.

Keywords:

Teaching innovation, mixed methods learning, moral courage, organizational psychology.