What is industrial and organizational psychology?

Introduction

Industrial and organizational psychology (often shortened to I/O psychology) is a somewhat deceptive title for the field. Even when industrial psychology alone was used to label it, practitioners were involved with issues and activities far beyond solving industrial problems—for example, designing procedures for selecting salespeople, advertising methods, and reducing accidents on public transportation. “Organizational” suggests the application of knowledge to organizations, but the intended meaning is closer to “the study of forces that influence how people and their activities at work are organized.”

In colleges and universities, I/O psychology is a long-recognized discipline. Graduate programs leading to the MA and, more commonly, PhD degrees in this field are most typically offered within psychology departments, sometimes in collaboration with departments of business; occasionally they are offered by business departments alone. In most cases, students working toward graduate degrees in I/O psychology first study a wide range of psychological topics, then study, in even greater detail, those that make up the I/O specialty. The study of research methods, statistical tools for evaluating findings, motivation, personality, and so on forms a base from which psychological testing, interviewing, job analysis, and performance evaluation are studied in depth.

Evolution of Study

Psychologists were certainly not the first to study work settings and suggest changes or even the first to apply the scientific method to the enterprise. For example, Frederick Winslow Taylor
and Frank Gilbreth
were industrial engineers who considered workers not too different from cogs in the machines also involved in industry. Their time and motion studies sought to discover how workers could most efficiently carry out their parts of the enterprise. Although their conclusions are often now cited as examples of inhumane manipulation of workers for companies’ benefits, Taylor and Gilbreth envisioned that both workers and employers were to gain from increases in efficiency. Not surprisingly, most of what industrial engineering studied was appropriated by industrial psychology and remains part of I/O psychology—usually under the designations of job design and human factors engineering in the United States, or the designation ergonomics elsewhere.

Early psychologists had an advantage over the others studying and offering advice about work. They were popularly identified as people experts, and for the many problems thought to be based on human characteristics or limitations, their expertise was acknowledged even while it was very modest. The advantage of being expected to make valuable contributions was put to good use, and within the first two decades of the twentieth century, industrial psychology became a recognized discipline with the ability to deliver most of what was expected of it.

Ironically, wars materially aided the early development of industrial and organizational psychology. World War I provided psychologists unprecedented opportunities to try intelligence testing on a very large scale and to develop and implement a very large personnel program. Robert Yerkes directed the intelligence testing of more than one million men between 1917 and 1919, and Walter Dill Scott and Walter Van Dyke Bingham interviewed and classified more than three million men before the war ended.

Testing, interviewing, and classification were also part of industrial psychologists’ efforts during World War II, and many other lines of research and application were also pursued. For example, human factors engineering, which emphasized machine design tailored to the people who would use the device, was greatly advanced by the necessity that people be able to control aircraft and other sophisticated weapons.

Following each war, some of the psychologists who had successfully worked together chose to continue to do so. Major consulting firms grew out of their associations and remain a source of employment for many I/O psychologists.

Methods of Research

Industrial and organizational psychology borrowed much from many other areas of psychology during its growth and has retained the strong research orientation common to them, along with many of the research methods each has developed and many of the findings that each has generated. Bringing psychological methods to work settings where experts from many other disciplines are studying some of the same problems results in conflicts, but it also produces a richness of information beyond the scope of any one of the disciplines.

In most cases, the most feasible approach to data collection for I/O psychologists is field research, an approach in which evidence is gathered in a “natural” setting, such as the workplace; by contrast, laboratory research involves an artificial, contrived setting. Systematic observation of ongoing work can often give a psychologist needed information without greatly disturbing the workers involved. Generally, they will be told that data are being gathered, but when the known presence of an observer likely would change what is being studied, unobtrusive methods might be used. Information from hidden cameras, or observations from researchers pretending to be workers and actually engaging in whatever must be done, can be used when justified.

Again, studying within the actual work setting, I/O psychologists may sometimes take advantage of natural experiments, situations in which a change not deliberately introduced may be studied for its effect on some important outcome. If, for example, very extreme, unseasonable temperatures resulted in uncontrollably high, or low, temperatures in an office setting, a psychologist could assess the effects on employee discomfort, absenteeism, or productivity.

Still, studying within the actual work setting, an I/O psychologist may arrange a quasi-experiment, a situation in which the researcher changes some factor to assess its effect while having only partial control over other factors that might influence that change. For example, the psychologist might study the effects of different work schedules by assigning one schedule to one department of a company, a second schedule to a second department, and a third schedule to a third department. The departments, the people, and the differences in the work itself would prevent the strategy from being a true experiment, but it still could produce some useful data.

An experiment, as psychology and other sciences define it, is difficult to arrange within work settings, but it may be worth the effort to evaluate information gathered by other methods. In the simplest form of experiment, the researcher randomly assigns the people studied into two groups and, while holding constant all other factors that might influence the experiment’s outcome, presents some condition (known as an independent variable) to one group of subjects (the experimental group) and withholds it from another (the control group). Finally, the researcher measures the outcome (the dependent variable) for both groups.

Carrying out a true experiment almost always requires taking the people involved away from their typical activities into a setting obviously designed for study (usually called the laboratory, even though it may bear little resemblance to a laboratory of, say, a chemist). The need to establish a new, artificial setting and the need to pull workers away from their work to gather information are both troublesome, as is the risk that what is learned in the laboratory setting may not hold true back in the natural work setting.

Correlational methods, borrowed from psychometrics, complement the observational and experimental techniques just described. Correlation is a mathematical technique for comparing the similarity of two sets of data (literally, to determine their co-relation). An important example of the I/O psychologist’s seeking information on relationships is found in the process of hiring-test validation, answering the question of the extent to which test scores and eventual work performance are correlated. To establish validity, a researcher must demonstrate a substantial relationship between scores and performance, evidence that the test is measuring what is intended.

Applications in the Workplace

Industrial and organizational psychology, as the term implies, focuses on two broad areas; Linda Jewell and Marc Siegall, in their Contemporary Industrial/Organizational Psychology (3d ed., 1998), demonstrate this by their arrangement of topics. Industrial topics include testing; job analysis and evaluation; recruitment, selection, and placement of applicants; employee training and socialization; evaluation of employee job performance; job design; working conditions; health and safety; and motivation. Organizational topics include a company’s social system and communication, groups within organizations, leadership, and organizational change and development. Topics of overlap of the two areas include absenteeism, turnover, job commitment, job satisfaction, employee development, and quality of work life.

Testing in I/O psychology most often is done to assess people’s aptitudes or abilities as a basis for making selection, placement, or promotion decisions about them. It may also be used for other purposes—for example, to judge the quality of training programs. The tests used range from ones of general aptitude (IQ, or intelligence quotient, tests) through tests of specific aptitudes, interests, and personality, although use of IQ and personality tests remains controversial. Aptitude for success in academically related activity (as might be related to one’s IQ) is often of only modest importance in work settings, but the folk wisdom “the best person is the most intelligent person” can lead to giving IQ tests routinely to applicants. Personality is a troublesome concept within psychology. Tests of it can be useful to clinicians working with mental health issues but are rarely useful as bases for employment-related decisions. When outcomes from personality testing are specific enough to be useful—for example, when they reveal serious personality problems—the same information is usually obtainable from reviews of work history or from interviews.

Along with other procedures related to making decisions about people in work settings, testing is often targeted as being unfair to some groups—for example, African Americans or women. If the use of a particular test results in decision making that even suggests unfair discrimination, companies must have available solid evidence that this is not the case if they choose to continue using the test.

Job analysis determines what tasks must be carried out in a job. It serves as the major basis for deciding what skills successful job applicants must have or what training to provide unskilled applicants. The evaluation of job performances of individual employees must be based on what they should be doing, revealed by job analysis. Dismissal, retention, promotion, and wage increases may all be related to job analysis information. It is also a basis for job evaluation, the determining of what is appropriate pay for the job, although evaluation often must also be based on the availability of applicants, average wages in a geographic area, and other factors.

Recruiting, selecting, and placing refer to sequential steps in filling positions. Although some companies can let prospective employees come to them, many prefer actively to seek applicants. Recruiting may involve little more than announcing that a position is open or as much as sending trained representatives to find promising people and encourage them to apply for work. At least two considerations make vigorous recruiting attractive. First, it is often possible for companies to reduce training costs greatly by finding already-proficient applicants. Second, when minority-group employees are needed to achieve fair balance in an organization, recruiting can often focus on, for example, African Americans or women.

Although training
may be unnecessary if a company is able to hire already-skilled people, training is generally advantageous after hiring and periodically over a worker’s tenure. Promotion may be based on success in training, or training may follow promotion based on other considerations. Although“training” suggests the development or enhancement of job skills, it often also includes socialization, the bringing of new employees into the “family” of the company and the teaching of values, goals, and expectations that extend beyond carrying out a specific work assignment. Job design, working conditions, health and safety, and motivation are usually given separate chapters in texts, but often in work settings they must be considered as a set. For example, if a job, as designed, forces or even encourages workers to put their health or safety at risk, their working conditions are unsatisfactory, and when they recognize the nature of the situation, their motivation is likely to be impaired.

Legal and Ethical Requirements

When industrial psychologists of the early twentieth century recommended hiring or promotion, designed training, or carried out any other of their responsibilities, they had only to satisfy their employers’ demands. Since the late 1960s, I/O psychologists have also had to satisfy legal and ethical requirements pertaining to a host of problem areas such as racism, sexism, age discrimination, and discrimination against the handicapped. More than good intentions are necessary here. The psychologists must work to balance the societal demands for fairness in work settings (the basing of decisions about workers’ hiring, salary, promotion, and so on entirely on work-relevant considerations and not on race, sex, age, or other personal characteristics) and the practical interests of employers, sometimes having to endure criticism for even the most ingenious of solutions.

For example, if an employer finds the company must increase its number of Latino workers, vigorous recruiting is an excellent first step, yet it may prove expensive enough to aggravate the employer. If recruiting is not successful because would-be applicants doubt the employer’s sincerity, both they and the employer will be unhappy. If recruiting is successful in generating interest, but many interested individuals are unqualified, providing them special training could be a reasonable solution. Applicants might feel it degrading, however, to be required to undergo more training than others before them, or the employer might balk at the extra cost involved.

The first industrial psychologists needed little more than solid training in their discipline to achieve success. Their successors need, beyond training in a discipline that has enlarged enormously, the talents of diplomats.

Bibliography

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Hilgard, Ernest Ropiequet. Psychology in America: A Historical Survey. San Diego: Harcourt, 1987. Print.

Jewell, Linda N., and Marc Siegall. Contemporary Industrial/Organizational Psychology. 3d ed. Belmont: Wadsworth, 1998. Print.

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