The Faculty of Business Administration at Al Maaref University organized the fourth webinar from the Human Resources webinar series, on Thursday, December 16, 2021, entitled “Positive Workplace Psychology and the Role of HRM”, hosting innovative researchers from the Curtin and Peninsula Universities via GoToMeeting web-hosted service.

The guest speakers were: Dr. Lew Tek-Yew, Associate Professor at the Department of Management, Marketing and Digital Business, Faculty of Business, Curtin University, Malaysia. Dr. Gabriel Gim Chien Wei, Senior Lecturer at Peninsula College Georgetown, a fellow member of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants. Ting Qian Hui, a Doctor of Philosophy candidate at Curtin University Malaysia.

Pointing to that workplace retains a central role in people’s lives, the guests touched on the role of psychology in the work environment and its impact on the employees’ life and the organization as well, focusing on how a positive workplace psychology can cultivate the employee’s motivation, productivity and happiness mindset, thus increasing organizational competitiveness.

The lecturers referred to the cumulative impact of positivity vs. negativity on the organization and productivity on one side, and on the employees’ work-family interface on the other side; which will eventually lead to physical and mental health problems.

Great importance was given in the webinar to the creation of positive workplace culture in times of Covid-19 pandemic, whereby some work-related and organizational factors could play a crucial role in exacerbating or moderating the remote-work effect on people’s mental health. Within this context, the lecturers stressed the importance of organizational justice on positive organizational behavior; which refers to employee perceptions of fairness in the workplace and can be classified into four categories: distributive, procedural, informational, and interactional. This relates to employee perception of fairness, derived from comparisons between one's self and others, and affects his mentality whether positively or negatively.

The webinar gathered a diverse audience of HR and psychology professionals and academics from Lebanon and abroad in addition to MU students with others from different universities in an interactive manner between the guests and participants.