The birth of organizational psychology has been viewed by many as marked by

3.1 Handbooks Summarize the Field

The first handbook of industrial psychology was by May Smith (1944), and included no chapters with cross-cultural material. Dunnette in the Handbook of Industrial and Organizational Psychology (1976, reprinted in 1983) included an excellent chapter by Barrett and Bass (1976) that covered theoretical and methodological problems. This chapter examined motivation, values, job satisfaction, managerial goals, cultural differences in attitudes toward compensation, motives and economic development. It also explored the match of organizational and cultural values. An important focus was on management and supervision (including management styles, authoritarianism), and preferences for different kinds of supervisors in different cultures. An important topic was participation of workers in job design (J. R. P. French). As an illustration of a finding of cross-cultural industrial psychology, French and others found that in the United States participation of employees in work design increases their productivity. But this was not the case in Puerto Rico or Norway. Puerto Rico is a more hierarchical culture than the United States, so that workers found it embarrassing when their supervisors asked for their ideas about how the work should be done. Norway had norms about how decisions are to be divided between labor unions and management, and asking the workers how the work should be done did not conform to those norms.

Barrett and Bass also reviewed various studies that included clusterings of countries (e.g., European countries are closer to each other in managerial attitudes than is Japan). It did an excellent job of examining factors in employee selection, and factors that increase the success of expatriates such as cross-cultural training.

Dubin's handbook (1976) included a section on work in different social systems, with chapters on labor movements (Landsberger), industrial relations in Japan (Karsh), work and management in Poland (Matejko), industrialization in Israel (Weinshall), and the self-management of Yugoslav enterprises (Jerovsek).

Drenth, Thierry, Willems, and de Wolff in the Handbook of Work and Organizational Psychology (1984) included one chapter on cross-cultural perspectives (Drenth and Groenendijk 1984). Bass and Drenth in Advances in Organizational Psychology (1987) edited chapters that included, among other parts, reports with cross-cultural data from India and Spain (Filella), decision making (Heller and Misumi), participation and industrial democracy (Wilpert), and comparative management (Ronen and Kumar).

The second edition of the Dunnette Handbook of Industrial and Organizational Psychology included a whole volume (Triandis, Dunnette, and Hough 1994) containing international material. It included a chapter by Triandis that provided an overview of the cross-cultural industrial and organizational psychology field, and discussed dimensions of cultural variation and the definitions of culture. This volume examined employee selection across cultures (also discussed by Levy-Leboyer), organizational cultures, motivation in different cultures (also discussed by Ronen), employee control of the organization, job design (also discussed by Hesketh and Bochner), organizational development, and conflict resolution.

This volume of the handbook also had chapters on action theory (Frese and Zapf), time and work behavior (Thierry), leadership (Graen), and aging and work (Forteza and Prieto, as well as Warr). In that volume also, Erez presented a model of industrial and organizational cross-cultural psychology. Culture-specific chapters included chapters by Kashima and Callan (the Japanese work group), Redding, Norman, and Schlander (the nature of individual attachment to the organization: a review of East Asian variations), Wang (culture, economic reform, and the role of industrial and organizational psychology in China), and Sinha (culture embeddedness and the developmental role of industrial organizations in India). Finally, there was a chapter on dealing with cultural diversity in the USA (Triandis, Kurowski, and Gelfand).

The Handbook of Cross-Cultural Psychology (H. C. Triandis, General Editor) was published in 1980–1. Volume 5 of that handbook included an organizational psychology chapter by A. S. Tannenbaum. The three-volume second edition of that handbook (edited by J. W. Berry) appeared in 1997. The third volume of this edition examined applications and included a chapter by Hui and Luk (industrial/organizational psychology). That volume also included some other chapters that are relevant to cross-cultural industrial and organizational psychology, such as those of Kagitcibasi (individualism and collectivism), Gudykunst and Bond (intergroup relations), Best and Williams (sex, gender, and culture), Berry and Sam (acculturation and adaptation), and Brislin and Horvath (cross-cultural training and multicultural education).

10.15.3 Individual and Change

In South African organizational psychology today, professionals are as much concerned with the psychological well-being of individuals within organizations as with the organizations themselves. It is not surprising that clinical psychologists find themselves working in institutions and organizations and that there is a demand for clinical skills from organizational psychologists.

What is at play when looking at the individual and change, from a clinical perspective? In order to tackle resistance and assist people seeking personal transformation in the context of diversity, one has to focus on the obstacles and problems related to change. It is one thing to consider the theoretical background of societal transformation. It is another to examine the foreground of personal interactions and behaviors as it presents itself in workshops and training sessions with employees and staff members.

The clinical psychologist working with diversity is confronted with reactions of people under threat. As coping with conflict, vulnerability, and exposure are called upon, issues of safety come to the fore. There is a risk of possible repercussions at the workplace connected to making disclosure in diversity management workshops after the encouraging and supporting psychologists have long gone. We also underestimate the resilience and power of stereotypes working against disclosure. Whites might fail to disclose because of their feeling that blacks are not good enough or sufficiently like them to appreciate them, warts and all. Similarly, blacks fail to disclose because of their feeling that whites cannot be trusted to operate on a basis of equality. Thus, when under pressure and scrutiny, the defense mechanisms of one's choice flare up (Duckitt, 1992). The challenge remains to enable individuals to disclose and to promote self-confidence, such that people cannot only take the risks of change in the workshop, but have the courage to try what they have discovered outside in the real world.

2.8 The Behavioral Sciences

The behavioral science approach to managing people is an outgrowth of the human relations studies, although it embraces a wider base of academic and applied disciplines and is concerned with a wider range of problems. The term behavioral sciences refers to the social and biological sciences concerned with the study of human behavior. Much of the knowledge of HRM and many of its practical applications have come from such behavioral science disciplines as the following:

(a)

Industrial/organizational psychology: the study of the behavior of people at work (see Industrial–Organizational Psychology: Science and Practice).

Social psychology: the study of how people affect and are affected by one another.

Organization theory: basic philosophies about why organizations exist, how they function, how they should be designed, and how they can be effective.

Organizational behavior: the study of the causes of individual and group behavior, and of how this knowledge can be used to make people more productive and satisfied in organizational settings.

Sociology: the study of society, social institutions, and social relationships.

We now know that the ways people behave in organizations cannot be explained simply by human relationships. The organization itself, through its unique ‘culture,’ molds, constrains, and modifies human performance. The way the organization is structured, the authority attached to different positions, and job and technology requirements clearly affect behavior. Even though the present understanding of the determinants and effects of behavior is incomplete, there is a better sense of the ways in which separate influences interact with each other to affect individuals.

Another area that has exerted a considerable influence on HRM theory and practice is general systems theory. Systems theory has developed from such fields as biology, physics, and cybernetics (the study of mechanical–electrical communications systems and devices). It has been applied and elaborated in every behavioral science field.

A special discipline of work psychology, military psychology applies psychological principles and methods to innumerable, unique work environments in military settings. Its foundation derives from the work of thousands of psychologists who performed research, did aptitude and attitude measurements, experimentation, and applications work to resolve issues of testing, selection, placement, and training of millions of young men for uniformed military service in World Wars I and II. Military psychologists in hospital clinics boosted clinical roles of practice psychologists. Research on leadership, social studies of small groups, assessments of performance under extreme stress, applications of human factors engineering, and cross-cultural operations work all made great strides as psychologists pioneered such efforts to meet military needs. Modern military psychologists, working in government or university settings, conduct laboratory and field research. They work in schools of medicine or at military installation outpatient mental health and family counseling clinics. Uniformed psychologists work in troop units on field assignments where they deploy on dangerous military missions. As pace setters on topics of importance to the military, often military psychologists' work has far-reaching implications for the civilian populace, and for psychology as a whole. Hot topics involve adapting women combatants into male-dominated workplaces, maintaining military recruitment goals, and dealing with computerization of jobs on the battlefield. It also means implementing numerous social–psychological programs such as integration of diverse personnel into the military workplace and making military lifestyles exciting and enticing, while conforming to governmental norms, but retaining large numbers of personnel to sustain all volunteer military forces.

Diversity and climate assessment

Kyrillidou and Baughman discuss the 1999 work of Paul Hanges, the University of Maryland (UM) Libraries, and the UM Industrial and Organizational Psychology program to develop an assessment of the climate and culture of the library system, with an emphasis on diversity.3 This assessment instrument, now known as ClimateQUAL+, is used in a number of libraries, and it is one of the methods considered by the Cook Library. The Cornell University Library (CUL) used ClimateQUAL+ to assess the workplace environment and test the premise that a healthy organization shows a strong concern for employees as well as its customers. Xin and Bryan stated that CUL consistently received very high user satisfaction scores in LibQUAL+, the survey of library service quality developed by the Association of Research Libraries. Overall, employees gave CUL high scores in climate issues related to diversity, work empowerment, and emphasis on service. Weaknesses were revealed in areas related to uniform procedures for rewards and recognition and diversity among employees of different rank. Several actions were taken to increase teamwork, shared governance, and career development opportunities for all employees.4

Another survey instrument for climate assessment was originally created in 1995 by the Pennsylvania State University Libraries and later modified by other libraries for various climate assessment projects.5 Virginia Fairfax County Public Library revised the Pennsylvania State instrument for their survey in 1997.6 Next, the Fairfax County questionnaire was a model for a survey that University of Tennessee (UT) Libraries developed as preface to a diversity initiative. While these surveys were intended to assess the diversity climate, UT also found that support staff were less satisfied than librarians in areas of recognition, training opportunities, and hiring practices. Royse et al. also suggest a possible relationship between job satisfaction and openness to diversity, and conclude that addressing job satisfaction issues for all can improve the diversity climate.7

6 Current Issues and Future Directions

Interest in job design, which peaked during the 1970s, making it then one of the most prominent topics of inquiry within industrial and organizational psychology, waned during the 1980s. However, at the start of the twenty-first century it is resurfacing in response to new strategies, practices and technologies emerging in manufacturing and elsewhere. Organizations see improved quality, flexibility, and responsiveness to customer demand as the route to greater competitiveness, as well as cutting costs, and are supporting this through the use of computer-based technology, just-in-time inventory control, total quality management, business process re-engineering, delayering, and other initiatives. It is widely appreciated that the success of these depends on their being supported by appropriate job designs.

This renewed emphasis on job design has been further strengthened by other developments, and in particular by more general proposals for ‘high performance work systems,’ ‘high involvement organizations,’ and ‘empowerment’ (e.g., Lawler 1992, Hardy and Leiba-O'Sullivan 1998). These proposals incorporate the traditional core principles of job design, inasmuch as they recommend that employees take on a wider range of tasks and be given much more autonomy and discretion in their work. At the same time they adopt a wider perspective than that usually encompassed within job design theory and research. In so doing they help to make explicit the limitations of existing knowledge and clarify directions for future development.

Several areas of development are high on the agenda (Parker and Wall 1998). The first concerns the relationship between job design and performance. Traditional job design theory, and its manifestation within the broader notions of high-involvement organizations and empowerment, is implicitly universalistic in this regard. It assumes positive effects of increased autonomy on performance irrespective of external circumstances. Yet, as noted above, evidence shows the impact of job redesign on performance is variable. Such inconsistency points to the existence of unspecified contingencies that need to be identified. One such contingency, suggested by organizational theory and recent research findings, is that of ‘operational uncertainty.’ It is likely that providing autonomy for employees benefits performance most under changing and unpredictable work conditions, but yields less benefit as requirements become more standard and predictable (Wall and Jackson 1995).

A second line of development concerns the need to investigate the effect of job design on a wider range of outcomes. Most studies focus on outcomes such as job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and mental health. Considerably less attention has been given to the consequences of job designs for health and safety (e.g., accidents, overexertion injuries, incidents of violence), employee learning and development (e.g., the development of knowledge, personal initiative), and outside-work outcomes (e.g., leisure activities, family relationships).

A third area for development is to broaden the range of work characteristics encompassed. At present the job characteristics considered are those stemming from traditional forms of work, in particular simplified jobs within manufacturing settings. The growth of service and knowledge work, the emergence of new computer-based technologies, and the opportunities being opened up by telecommunications suggest that a range of other job properties likely to affect employee well-being and performance will come into play. For example: many computer-based systems can substantially reduce the physical demands of work, but enhance learning and problem-solving demands; teleworking can accentuate social isolation; modern manufacturing initiatives such as lean production can increase employee work load and time pressure; and new forms of ‘contingent working’ (e.g., short-term, project-based contracts) raise questions of security and employment continuity. Job design theory will need to adapt to such changes.

What study marked the rise of organizational psychology?

Who is the founder of organizational psychology?

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When was Organisational psychology invented?