Industrial and organizational psychology
Industrial psychology
The branch of applied psychology that is concerned with efficient management of an industrial labor force and especially with problems encountered by workers in a mechanized environment.
Industrial and organizational psychology(also known as I-O psychology or work psychology) is the scientific study of employees, workplaces, and organizations. Industrial and organizational psychologists contribute to an organization's success by improving the performance, satisfaction, safety, health and well-being of its employees. An I-O psychologist conducts research on employee behaviors and attitudes, and how these can be improved through hiring practices, training programs, feedback, and management systems. I-O psychologists also help organizations transition among periods of change and development. Industrial and organizational psychology is related to organizational behaviorandhuman capital.
An applied science, I–O psychology is represented by Division 14 of the American Psychological Association, known formally as the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology(SIOP).
Overview
In classic overviews of the field, Guion (1965) defines I–O psychology as
"the scientific study of the relationship between man and the world of work: ... in the process of making a living" . Blum & Naylor (1968) define it as "simply the application or extension of psychological facts and principles to the problems concerning human beings operating within the context of business and industry" .
History
The historical development of I-O psychology had parallel developments in the United States and other countries, such as Britain,Australia, Germany, the Netherlands,and eastern European countries such as Romania However, many foreign countries do not have a published English-language account of their development of I-O psychology. The roots of I-O psychology trace back nearly to the beginning of psychology as a science when Wilhelm Wundt founded one of the first psychological laboratories in 1876 in Leipzig, Germany. In the mid 1880s, Wundt trained two psychologists who had a major influence on the eventual emergence of I-O Psychology:Hugo Munsterbergand James McKeen Cattell. Instead of viewing differences as “errors”, Cattell was one of the first to recognize the importance of these differences among individuals as a way of predicting and better understanding their behavior. Walter Dill Scott, who was a contemporary of Cattell, was elected President of the American Psychological Association (APA) in 1919, was arguably the most prominent I–O psychologist of his time. Scott, along with Walter Van Dyke Bingham worked at the Carnegie Institute developing methods for selecting and training sales personnel. The "industrial" side of I–O psychology has its historical origins in research on individual differences, assessment, and the prediction of work performance. This branch crystallized during World War I, in response to the need to rapidly assign new troops to duty stations. Scott and Bingham volunteered to help with the testing and placement of more than a million army recruits. In 1917, together, along with other prominent psychologists, adapted a well-known intelligence test, (theStanford-Binet test, designed for testing one individual at a time) to make it suitable for mass group testing. This new test form was called the Army Alpha. After the War, the growing industrial base in the US added impetus to I–O psychology. The private industry set out to emulate the successful testing of army personnel, and mental ability testing soon became a commonplace in the work setting. Industrial psychology began to gain prominence when Elton Mayo arrived in the United States in 1924. Mayo was fascinated by not the efficiency of workers, but their emotions and how work may cause workers to act in particular pathological ways. These observations of workers’ thoughts and emotions were studied to see how prone employees would be to resist management attempts to increase productivity and how sympathetic to labor unions they would become. These studies are known as Hawthorne studies. The results of these studies ushered in a radically new movement known as the Human Relations Movement. This movement was interested in the more complicated theories of motivation, the emotional world of the worker, job satisfaction, and interviews with workers.
World War II brought in new problems that led to I-O Psychology's continued development. The war brought renewed interest in ability testing (to accurately place recruits in these new technologically advanced military jobs), the introduction of the assessment center, concern with morale and fatigue of war industry workers, and military intelligence. Post-Second World War years were a boom time for industry with many jobs to be filled and applicants to be tested. Interestingly, however, when the war ended and the soldiers came back to work, there was an increasing trend towards labor unrest with rising numbers of authorized and unauthorized work stoppages staged by unions and workers. This caused management to grow concern about work productivity and worker attitude surveys became of much interest in the field. Following Industrial Organizational Psychology's admission into Division 14 of the American Psychological Association, there continued to be an influx of new tests for selection, productivity, and workforce stability. This influx continued unabated until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Section,Title VII dealt with employment discrimination and required employers to justify and show relevance for the use of tests for selection.
The mid-1960s seemed to mark a line of demarcation between "classic" and "modern" thinking. During this period, the name changed from just industrial psychology to industrial and organizational psychology. The earlier periods addressed work behavior from the individual perspective, examining performance and attitudes of individual workers. Although this was a valuable approach, it became clear that there were other, broader influences not only on individual, but also on group behavior in the work place. Thus, in 1973, "organizational" was added to the name to emphasize the fact that when an individual joins an organization (e.g., the organization that hired him or her), he or she will be exposed to a common goal and a common set of operating procedures.
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