EdTech Scholarship Holder 2025 and PhD-Candidate at the Chair of Research and Science Management,
TUM School of Management

September 25, 2025

Research Spotlight

The TUM Center for Education Technologies is back with Research Spotlight, its first podcast series.
Each episode features concise, insightful conversations with its distinguished scholarship holders,
offering listeners a closer look into their research and inspirations.

Third Episode: Arij Briki

In this third episode, Arij Briki explains the importance of properly assessing destructive leadership in order to prevent it and provide tailored trainings. Drawing on her neuroengineering background, she explores how neurophysiology together with VR-based methods help uncover the cognitive processes behind destructive leadership behaviours and hence facilitate their assessment. Listen now on Spotify.

Interview

1. Can you briefly introduce yourself and your current role at TUM?

Hi, my name is Arij, I am from Tunisia. I studied neuroengineering for my Master’s at TUM and am currently pursuing a PhD at the School of Management while working as a Research Associate at the Chair of Research and Science Management.

2. What is your primary area of research, and what initially drew you to this field?

My research is mainly about crafting an assessment for destructive leadership while trying to uncover the antecedents and potential underlying cognitive processes. With my background in neuroengineering, I’ve naturally been mostly drawn to interdisciplinary research fields and I thought that combining research areas such as neuroscience, innovative technologies with social sciences, especially leadership, would be quite interesting. Not to mention that the topic of destructive leadership has always been relevant and research is needed to keep track of its ever emerging new forms.

3. What are challenges related to leadership behaviour and from what do these originate?

I would say the main challenge for leadership is it being a social construct and therefore very context specific. You cannot explain the behaviour solely by looking at the leader. This challenge makes the assessment even harder, and obviously we need to be able to properly assess destructive leadership in order to prevent it or to provide tailored trainings.

4. What role do technology and neurophysiology play in your research to mitigate the emergence of destructive behaviours?

First of all, a facilitating role. With VR we can easily generate real life situations where we can preserve the contextual aspect of leadership and neurophysiology from the other side could help us go beyond the behaviours and explain them through the cognitive processes. And once these processes are understood, we can find ways to mitigate them, again through technology. So neurophysiology and computational methods in general can help us understand and assess, and VR can facilitate the assessment as well as the training.

5. Do you have a favorite poetry book, and what makes it significant to you?

I have actually published a short poetry collection of mine last summer as part of a writing competition. Sorry if this sounds like self promotion, but just to tell you that I am indeed very fond of poetry myself. And on the top of my head I can mention Iain Saint Thomas. Although I cannot tell you which of his books are actually my favourite, I can tell you that these books are significant to me because they express simple emotions in simple words, and it is a reminder that self-expression is beautiful and important even when we are expressing basic emotions.

Website

https://www.msl.mgt.tum.de/en/rm/team/research-associates/arij-briki-msc/