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About us

Karlshochschule combines business, society, and culture to create an international and practice-oriented study program.

Contact

  • Karlstraße 36 – 38, 76133 Karlsruhe, DE
  • +49 721 48095 0
  • info@karlshochschule.de
  • Mo. – Fr. 8:30 – 17:00 Uhr

Prof. Dr. Gaye Özçelik

Professor of Management and Business Psychology

Gaye studies the distance between what an organisation says it does for its people and what those people actually experience. A performance system that looks fair on paper and lands as arbitrary. A diversity policy that never reaches the people it was written for. A promise made at hiring that nobody remembers making. She began as a psychologist, spent years implementing HR systems inside real companies, and now researches why those systems so often mean something different to the manager delivering them than to the employee receiving them.

The policy and the experience are not the same thing

Much of Gaye’s published work turns on a single stubborn finding: HR practices are interpreted, not simply received. Her studies on HR attributions, psychological contracts and organisational justice ask what happens in the gap between intended policy, implemented policy and experienced policy — and what that gap costs in trust. It is unglamorous, precise work, and it explains a great deal about why well-designed management initiatives fail. Students in her modules learn to look for that gap before they look for a solution.

Who gets left out of "global talent"

Alongside her HRM research, Gaye works on the people the international mobility literature tends to overlook: low-paid migrant workers, refugees at the edge of employment, the workforce that moves across borders without the expatriate package. Her research with international colleagues on hidden inequalities, decent work and refugee integration has been presented at the Academy of Management and EURAM. It is also where her teaching on diversity, equity and inclusion gets its edge — inclusion here is not a values statement but an empirical question about who actually gets in.

She has run the systems she teaches

Before academia, Gaye worked as a senior human resources consultant at Arthur Andersen and as an HR development executive at Danone in Istanbul. That experience shapes how her seminars work: students don’t just critique a talent management framework, they have to build one and defend the trade-offs it forces. Her academic path — a psychology degree from Boğaziçi, business studies at UC Berkeley, an MBA and PhD in Management Studies — means she moves easily between the individual and the organisational level, which is exactly what management education so often fails to do.

Beyond her own modules

At Karlshochschule since September 2022, Gaye directs the International Business (B.A.) programme and serves as the university’s Equal Opportunities Officer. Her current research runs from cross-cultural work design across thirty societies to employee well-being, mental health and psychological safety at work. If you want to understand organisations as places where real people negotiate power, fairness and belonging, her seminar room is the right place to be.

An HR policy only exists in the form the employee actually experiences it.

Facts, figures and the full CV

  • Programme Director, International Business (B.A.)
  • Equal Opportunities Officer
  • At Karlshochschule since September 2022
  • Human Resource Management
  • Organizational Behavior
  • Principles of Business Administration
  • Strategic Management
  • International Business
  • Cross-cultural Management
  • Workplace Diversity and Inclusion
  • Leadership and Leading Across Cultures
  • Talent Management and Performance Management
  • Intercultural Competencies
  • Introduction to Management
  • International Business Ventures
  • Resources and Organization
  • Managing People at Work
  • Organizational Behavior
  • Strategic Management
  • Change Management and Organizational Learning
  • Diversity Management and Leadership
  • Global Teams and Organizational Cultures

Prof. Özçelik supervises BA, MA and PhD theses in:

  • Human Resource Management and International HRM
  • Organizational Behavior
  • Global mobility and decent work
  • Diversity management and leadership
  • Migration and refugee integration
  • Organizational justice and organizational trust
  • The psychological contract
  • Diversity, equity and inclusion: building inclusive environments for underrepresented and vulnerable refugee groups
  • HRM congruence between implemented HRM (line managers’ perceptions) and experienced HRM (employees’ perceptions)
  • Cross-cultural work design and cultural values — a 30-society study
  • Organizational justice and the integration processes of refugees
  • Employee well-being, mental health and resilience: organisational practices that support psychological safety and engagement (international team)
  • PhD in Management Studies, Işık University, Istanbul, Turkey
  • Master of Business Administration, Işık University, Istanbul, Turkey
  • Diploma Program in Business Administration, University of California, Berkeley, USA
  • BSc in Psychology, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey
  • Senior Human Resources Consultant, Arthur Andersen Consulting, Istanbul
  • HR Development Executive, Danone Tikveşli Gıda ve İçecek Sanayi ve Ticaret A.Ş., Istanbul
  • Member, European Academy of Management (EURAM)
  • Member, Academy of Management (AOM)
  • Research Grant Winner, EURAM (2019)
  • Best Paper Award, 7th International Conference on Business Administration (2018)

Peer-reviewed journal articles

  • Mostafa, A. M. S., Yalabik, Z. Y., Eyiusta, C. M., Zaharie, M. & Özçelik, G. (2025). Mistreated but still resilient! Unraveling the role of servant leadership in mitigating the adverse consequences of care recipients’ incivility. Human Resource Management, 64, 99–115.
  • Özçelik, G. & Uyargil, C. (2023). Talent management and boundaryless career orientation: A strategic fit and flexibility perspective. ODTÜ Gelişme Dergisi, 50(2), 323–350.
  • Aybas, M., Özçelik, G. & Uyargil, C. (2022). Can decent work explain employee-level outcomes? The roles of work-family and family-work conflict. Sustainability, 14, 11488.
  • Özçelik, G. & Uyargil, C. (2021). Does HRM’s reality fit with those of others? Exploring and understanding HR attributions. Personnel Review, 51(1).
  • Özçelik, G. & Uyargil, C. (2019). Performance management systems: Task contextual dilemma owing to the involvement of the psychological contract and organizational citizenship behavior. European Management Review, 16, 347–362.
  • Özçelik, G., Aybas, M. & Uyargil, C. (2016). High performance work systems and organizational values: Resource-based view considerations. Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, 235, 332–341.
  • Cenkci, A. T. & Özçelik, G. (2015). Leadership styles and subordinate work engagement: The moderating impact of leader gender. Global Business and Management Research, 7(4), 8–20.
  • Özçelik, G. & Ferman, M. (2006). Competency approach to human resources management: Outcomes and contributions in a Turkish cultural context. Human Resource Development Review, 5(1), 72–91.

Book chapters

  • Özçelik, G., Aycan, Z. & Keleş, S. (2023). Performance management systems in Turkey. In Performance Management Systems: A Global Perspective, ch. 11. Routledge.
  • Özçelik, G. (2020). Women’s work and careers under COVID-19: A boundary theory perspective. In Gender and the Labour Market. Peter Lang.
  • Özçelik, G. (2020). The rise of crowd work under the gig economy: Implications for human resource management practices. In Organization: Various Approaches. Peter Lang.
  • Özçelik, G., Haak-Saheem, W., McNulty, Y. & Brewster, C. (2019). Hidden inequalities amongst the international workforce. In Hidden Inequalities in the Workplace. Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Özçelik, G. (2013). Discrimination against women’s employment: An overview from Turkey. In Emerging Patterns of Work and Turkish Labour Market Challenges under Globalization. Kluwer Law International.

Selected conference papers

  • Piyanontalee, R., Farndale, E., Roumpi, D., Özçelik, G. & Yahiaoui, D. (2023). Cultural values as predictors of congruence between employee and supervisor HR strength perceptions. Academy of Management, Boston, USA.
  • Haak-Saheem, W., Özçelik, G., McNulty, Y. & Brewster, C. (2021). When bad gets worse — refugees at the edge of employment and inclusion. EURAM, Montreal, Canada.
  • Haak-Saheem, W. & Özçelik, G. (2018). Beyond high status expatriation: Crossing the boundaries of mobility for ‘other’ global workers. Academy of Management, Chicago, USA.

The full publication list is available on request.

Want to study with Gaye?

Her courses run across the International Business and Management programmes, and she supervises theses in HRM, organisational behaviour, diversity and global mobility. Come to an info day, sit in on a session, or write to her directly.

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