Bernad Batinic

Bernad Batinic is a Professor at Johannes Kepler University Linz, where he serves as Head of the Department of Work, Organizational, and Media Psychology and Director of the Institute of Psychology. He has held these leadership positions since founding the department in 2005 and becoming Institute Director in 2007, and has been a university professor at JKU Linz since 2004.

Batinic completed his psychology education at the University of Giessen (1995), earned his doctorate at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in 2001 (summa cum laude, with faculty prize), and habilitated there in 2006. He also served as a visiting professor at the University of Marburg in 2003. His academic career shows continuous progression from research assistant positions to his current leadership roles.

His research primarily focuses on the relationship between work and well-being, examining how employment status affects mental health through longitudinal studies with five waves of data collection. Batinic has repeatedly demonstrated the mediating role of Marie Jahoda's latent functions of work in the relationship between employment aspects and well-being. He also investigates media psychology, particularly the use and effects of new technologies, internet-based data collection methods (including web experiments and panel research), personnel development, and opinion leadership/trendsetting phenomena. A pioneer in online research methodology, he conducted one of the first online surveys on Usenet in 1994 and published the first online guide for conducting online surveys in 1995.

Analysis of Batinic's recent publications (2020-2025) reveals a strong methodological evolution toward integrating technological approaches, including wearable devices for experience sampling and objective measurement of digital behavior. His work increasingly combines traditional psychological assessment with real-world behavioral data, examining topics like fear of missing out, chatbot interactions, laughter in daily life, and the relationship between job characteristics and physical activity. The research consistently applies longitudinal and meta-analytic approaches to understand the complex relationship between work, technology, and psychological well-being.

Bernad Batinic has served in numerous leadership roles at JKU Linz beyond his departmental and institute director positions. He was the spokesperson for the professorial committee of the Faculty of Social and Economic Sciences and remains an active member of various university commissions and bodies, including as department spokesperson, senate member, and member of the study commission for web sciences. Notably, in 2015 he declined an offer for a W3 professorship at the University of Trier that would have included management of the Leibniz Center for Psychological Information and Documentation.

He leads a productive research team that has generated numerous publications in high-impact journals including Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, Frontiers in Psychology, and European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology. His work has practical applications in organizational settings and has informed the development of measurement tools like the New Work Values Scale (NWVS) and the Latent and Manifest Benefits of Work (LAMB) scale. Batinic has also co-founded several companies related to his research, including Globalpark AG (now Questback), tivian GmbH, and respondi AG, where he served in advisory capacities.