1. Definition & History I/O Psychology

2. What is I/O Psychology?
• Industrial and Organizational (I/O) Psychology = application
of psychology to the workplace
• Scientific study of thinking and behavior at work
What is it that I/O psychologists do?
• Study and help implement behavior in organizations, such
as selection, training, appraisal as well as programs that
improve motivation and work attitudes
• Approximately ½ of all I/O psychologists work in academic
or research settings and ½ in work settings or full-time
practice

3. Industrial vs. Organizational
• Industrial psychology • Organizational
focuses on psychology is more
measurement of job theoretical considering
requirements and processes such as
individuals’ motivation and work
knowledge, skills, attitudes, group and
abilities, and organizational climate as
performance so as to well as organizational
match individuals with change and
suitable jobs development.

4. Categorized Competencies
Studying phenomena at higher levels of analysis or
focus is called macro research while studying
phenomenon that occur at an individual level is
called micro research

5. Scientist vs. Practitioner Model
One goal is to blend science and practice, but this is difficult to
do because the goals, loyalties, and jargon of those in
academic (scientific) positions often differ from those of
practitioners

6. What is the goal?

7. History of I/O Psychology

8. History of I/O Psychology
• Many of the issues important to I/O psychology had
been discussed long before the birth of Psychology
– Aristotle, in Politics
– Medieval European guilds

9. History of I/O Psychology
– Thomas Hobbes (1651)
advocated strong centralized
leadership as a means for
bringing "order to the chaos
created by man"
– John Locke (1690) outlined
the philosophical justification
later manifested in the U.S.
Declaration of Independence
– Adam Smith (1776), in The
Wealth of Nations
revolutionized economic and
organizational thought

10. The Early Years (Pre-WW1)
• Ironically, the beginnings of the organizational side of
the field can largely be traced to the work of several
non psychologists
• Best known of these (1883) Frederick W. Taylor
began experiments at the Midvale and Bethlehem
Steel plant, which later led to the development of his
"scientific management" philosophy

11. Frederick Winslow Taylor:
Father of Scientific Management
• Developed interest in work
methods and procedures—an
interest leading to
development of Scientific
Management.
• Worked for several other
organizations, and ultimately
became one of the first
management consultants.
• Published Principles of
Scientific Management in 1911
• Died in 1915 at the age of 59

12. Taylorism or Scientific Management
• Taylor observed that workers purposely
operated well below their capacity, called
soldiering
– Almost universally held belief among workers that
if they became more productive, fewer would be
needed & jobs would be eliminated
– Non-incentive wage systems encourage low
productivity
– Fear that a good pace will become the new
standard
– Reliance on rule of thumb methods rather than
optimal work methods determined from study

13. Time & Motion Studies
• Timing sequenced
motions with goal of
determining one best
way to perform a job
• Pig Iron studies
– Taking breaks key to productivity
– Workers should be selected according to job fit
• Science of Shoveling
- Optimal tools for optimal results

14. Principles
1. Replace rule-of-thumb work methods based on
a scientific study of the tasks (empirical study &
specialization)
2. Scientifically select, train, and develop each
worker rather than passively leaving them tot
rain themselves (recruitment & training)
3. Cooperate with workers to ensure that the
scientifically developed methods are being
followed (assessment/ evaluation)
4. Those who perform work tasks should be
separate from those who design work tasks
(division of labor)

15. Impact to the 20th Century
• At the root of a global revival in theories of
scientific management under the moniker of
'corporate reengineering'
• Goal being the eventual elimination of
industry's need for unskilled, and later
perhaps, even most skilled labor in any form
(commoditization)

16. Scientific Management
• Scientifically design work methods for
efficiency
• Select the best workers and train in new
methods
• Train workers in “one best way”
• Reward them for the “one best way”

17. Biggest Impact
• Pig iron experiments
• Taylor showed that workers
who handled heavy iron ingots
could be more productive if they
had rest – increased efficiency
of work.
• As a consequence – it was
charged that Taylor exploited
workers

18. Application of Scientific Management

20. Fordism
• Modern model of mass
production
• The assembly line
increased labor
productivity tenfold and
permitting stunning
price cuts
• Involved standardizing a product and
manufacturing it by mass means at a price so
low that the common man could afford to
buy it

21. Fordism
• Displaced predominantly craft-based production in
which skilled laborers exercised substantial control
over their conditions of work
• Intensified industrial division of labor
• Increased mechanization and coordination of large
scale manufacturing processes (sequential machining
operations and converging assembly lines)
• Shift toward the use of less skilled labor performing,
tasks minutely specified by management
• Potential for heightened capitalist control over the
pace and intensity of work

23. “Strengths” of Scientific Management
• One of the first formal divisions between workers and
managers.
• Contribution to efficient production methods, leading to a
major global increase of living standards.
• Focus on the individual task and worker level
• Direct reward mechanisms for workers rather than
pointless end-of-year profit sharing schemes
• Systematic. Early proponent of quality standards
• Suggestion schemes for workers, who should be rewarded
by cash premiums
• Emphasis on measuring. Measurement enables
improvement
• Pragmatic and useful in times and circumstances of
significant change

24. Limitations of Scientific Management
• Taylorism can easily be abused to exploit human beings
• Not useful to deal with groups or teams.
• Leaves no room for individual preference or initiative.
• Overemphasis on measuring. No attention to “soft
factors.”
• Mechanistic. Treating people as machines.
• Separation of planning function and doing.
• Loss of skill level and autonomy at worker level. Not
very useful in current worker in current knowledge
worker environments (except as antithesis).

25. Applying Scientific Management

26. The Nameless Psychology
• I/O Psych was nameless at first.
– W. L. Bryan…
• Stressed importance of studying “concrete
activities and functions as they appear in
daily life.”
• But not really considered father of I/O Psych
because he was a precursor, before the field
was established
28

27. When was the nameless named?
• Frank and Lillian Gilbreth
– Interested in improving productivity and
efficiency of industrial engineers.
– Argued for the use of psychology in the work
lives of industrial engineers.
– Led to the merger of psychology with
applied interests.
–The nameless was crowned industrial
psychology in 1910.
– The “organizational” bit came in the 1970s

28. Max Weber: Pioneer in the
study of Organizational design
• Weber completed influential
essays on methods and
procedures for studying social
behavior, as well as the
Protestant ethic.
• Followed by a series of
studies on legal institutions,
religious systems, political
economy, and authority
relations
• For organizational psychology,
the studies of authority
relations were especially
significant because out of
these came the well-known
“principles of bureaucracy.”

29. Ideal Bureaucracy
• Fixed and official jurisdictional areas
• Firmly ordered hierarchy of super & subordination
• Management based on written records
• Thorough and expert training
• Official activity taking priority over other activities
and that management of a given organization
follows stable, knowable rules
• Envisioned as a large machine for attaining its goals
in the most efficient manner possible

30. "…the more fully realized, the more bureaucracy
"depersonalizes" itself, i.e., the more completely
it succeeds in achieving the exclusion of love,
hatred, and every purely personal, especially
irrational and incalculable, feeling from the
execution of official tasks"
or
"By it the performance of each individual worker
is mathematically measured, each man becomes
a little cog in the machine and aware of this, his
one preoccupation is whether he can become a
bigger cog."

31. History of Organizational
Psychology: 1900s
• Based on most historical accounts of the development
of the field of I/O psychology, the industrial side of the
field was much quicker to develop than the
organizational side
• Chronologically, the beginnings of the field of I/O
psychology can be traced to work, during the early part
of the twentieth century, by pioneers such as Hugo
Munsterberg, Walter Dill Scott, and Walter Bingham.
• Most of the work at that time dealt with topics such as
skill acquisition and personnel selection
• Very little work dealing with the organizational side of
the field was conducted

32. Hugo Munsterberg
Pioneer I/O & Clinical Psychology
• Considered as "the father of
industrial psychology" pioneered
application of psychological
findings from laboratory
experiments to practical matters
• Influenced applied psychology,
especially clinical, forensic &
industrial psychology
– In 1911 cautioned managers to be
concerned with “questions of the
mind...like fatigue, monotony, interest,
learning, work satisfaction, and rewards.“
– In 1913 his book Psychology and Industrial
Efficiency addressed personnel selection
and equipment design

33. Hugo Munsterberg
Boston Trolley Car Studies

34. Hugo Munsterberg
Psychology and Industrial Efficiency (1913)

36. Contributions
• Psychology and Industrial Efficiency (1913), which included
theories directly related to Taylor's scientific management. The
book contained three parts
1. “Best possible man," was a study of the demand jobs made on people,
and the importance of finding people whose mental capabilities made
them well-matched for the work
2. “Best possible work," described the psychological conditions under
which the greatest output might be obtained from every worker
3. “Best possible effect," examined the necessity of creating the
influences on human needs that were desirable for the interests of
business.
• Munsterberg's proposals were based on his own evidence from
studies involving telephone operators, trolley drivers, and naval
officers.

37. Motivation & Office Behavior

38. Walter Dill Scott
• First to apply principles of
psychology to motivation &
productivity in the workplace
• Pioneered applying concepts,
knowledge and controlled
experimental method of
psychology to business problems
• Worked with businessmen on
problems of salesmanship &
personnel
• Instrumental in the application of
personnel procedures within the
army
• Constructed system used by US
Army in WW1 to classify & assign
300K men

39. Contributions
• Introduced psychology as an important element in advertising in
his book The Psychology of Advertising in Theory and
Practice(1902). He questioned consumers about reactions to
various advertisements — (beginning of market research) people
were highly suggestible & obedient.
• Two advertising techniques, which involved commands and
coupons:
1. Stating a direct command i.e. “Use such and such beauty product”
2. Asking consumers to complete a coupon and mail it into the
company
• No scientific evidence to support the effectiveness of Scott’s
advertising techniques (there were testimonials), he was critical
in psychology’s participation in advertising

40. Contributions
• Scott was interested in employee attitudes and
motivation in production and devised a system,
adopted by the army, for classifying personnel and
testing officer candidates
• From March 1910 to October 1911, Scott wrote a
series of articles entitled The Psychology of Business
• Represented one of the earliest applications of the
principles of psychology to motivation and
productivity in industry
• Also became instrumental in the application of
personnel procedures within the army during World
War I

41. Robert Yerkes
• Most influential in getting
psychology into the war
– proposed ways of screening
recruits for mental deficiency
and assigning selected recruits
to army jobs
• Investigated soldier
motivation, morale,
psychological problems of
physical incapacity &
discipline
• Developed a general
intelligence test for
assessment of new recruits

42. WW I (1917-1918)
WWI: Testing and Selection
• Yerkes – most influential
in involving psychologists
in war.
• Assessment of recruits:
Army Alpha & Army Beta
• Scott was researching
how to place soldiers in
jobs
• Journal of Applied
Psychology began

43. World War I - I/O field catalyst
• Robert Yerkes and Walter Dill Scott:
– Screening recruits for mental deficiency—Army
Alpha and Beta intelligence tests developed.
– Classification of selected recruits into jobs
– Performance evaluations of officers
– Job Analysis
– soldier motivation and morale
– Discipline
• (1917): Journal of Applied Psychology began
publication

44. Contribution
• Members of the Committee on the Psychological Examination
of Recruits that constructed five alternate forms of the verbal
test, (Army Alpha & Army Beta) and a nonverbal test for
illiterate and non-English speaking recruits (Dahlstrom, 1985)
1. Provided psychometricians with the first group
intelligence tests.
2. The publicity it generated popularized intelligence testing
in the public and private sectors
3. The program provided vast amounts of data to serve as
fuel for future controversies over apparent racial
differences in intelligence test scores and the supposed
decline of America's "national intelligence" (Fancher, 1985)

45. Walter V. Bingham
• With team that made Army Alpha
and Beta tests as an Army
psychologist during WWI
• Designed a series of aptitude
tests as Chairman of the Army
National Research Council on
Classification of Military
Personnel during WWII
• Founded first university
department of Applied
Psychology (Carnegie Institute of
Technology, 1915)
• Helped to popularize intelligence
and aptitude testing in industry

46. Aptitude Tests
• Could be used to help businesses increase the
efficiency of their workforce and to help teachers and
counselors direct their students and clients to careers
that would make them happy. (Bingham, 1937, p. vii)
• Useful for identifying the types of jobs at which
mentally retarded people could be successful
(Bingham, 1937 p. 55)
• For example, if it was found that individuals with a
mental age of 7 are successful at job X, then test
scores could be used to prescreen potential workers
(1937, p. 55-56).

47. Contributions
• Aptitude tests that served several purposes:
1. [sifting] the new arrivals into a few broad groupings with respect to their
ability to learn quickly the duties and responsibilities of a soldier
2. selecting men for training as officers
3. simplifications of officer-efficiency reporting
4. improvement of standardized occupational interviews and tests of
proficiency in a trade
5. supplementary [testing] of aptitudes for work which calls for mechanical
ingenuity or other special talents (Quoted from Bingham, 1941, p. 222)
• After WWII, the group intelligence test model was embraced by
civilian industry, and the new field of industrial psychology
gained popularity
• Business leaders were enthusiastic about the possible fiscal
benefits of using standardized tests to select the best workers for
each type of job

48. History of Organizational Psychology:
1920s “The Beginning”
• Despite the early work of Taylor and Weber, and
others, the vast majority of effort in “Industrial”
psychology in the early twentieth century was
focused on what were described earlier as
industrial topics.
• The event that changed that—an event many see
as the beginning of organizational psychology—
was the Hawthorne studies

49. Elton Mayo
• First significant call for human
relations movement in the
Hawthorne studies
– Existence of informal employee
groups & effects on production,
importance of employee
attitudes, value of a sympathetic
and understanding supervisor, &
need to treat people as people --
not simply as human capital
– One of the benchmark events in
the development of industrial
psychology
• 1939 the definitive account of
the Hawthorne studies was
published

50. Hawthorne Studies
• Definition: A series of experiments in which the
output of the workers was observed to increase as a
result of improved treatment by their managers
• Named for their site, at the Western Electric
Company plant in Hawthorne, Illinois
• Purpose: To examine what effect monotony and
fatigue had on productivity and how to control them
with variables such as illumination, rest breaks, work
hours, temperature, and humidity

51. Hawthorne Studies
• Collaborative effort between the Western Electric Company and
a group of researchers from Harvard University (1927 and 1932)
• Results:
– Showed no clear correlation between light level and
productivity the experiments then started looking at other
factors.
– Productivity went up at each change.
– Finally the women were put back to their original hours and
conditions, and they set a productivity record
• Given the time period in which the Hawthorne studies were
initiated (early 1920s), these topics were central to the
dominant mode of managerial thought at the time: scientific
management

52. Contradictory to Taylorism
• Disproved Taylor's beliefs in three ways:
1. The women had become a team and that the social
dynamics of the team were a stronger force on productivity
than doing things "the one best way.”
2. The women would vary their work methods to avoid
boredom without harming overall productivity
3. The group was not strongly supervised by management, but
instead had a great deal of freedom
• Group dynamics and social makeup of an organization were an
important force either for or against higher productivity
• Caused the call for greater participation for the workers, greater
trust and openness in the working environment & a greater
attention to teams and groups in the work place (Human
Relations Movement)

53. Hawthorne Studies: Importance
• What made the Hawthorne studies so important to
the field of organizational psychology were the
unexpected, serendipitous findings that came out of
the series of investigations
• Best known were the findings that came from the
illumination experiments:
– Specifically, the Hawthorne researchers found that
productivity increased regardless of the changes in level of
illumination.
– This became the basis for what is termed the Hawthorne
effect, or the idea that people will respond positively to
any novel change in the work environment

54. Hawthorne Effect
• A positive change in behavior that occurs at the
onset of an intervention followed by a gradual
decline, often to the original level of the behavior
prior to the intervention
• Subject will improve or
modify an aspect of behavior
in response to being studied
or watched and not in
response to any part of the
actual study

55. Hawthorne Effect
• May occur when a relatively trivial change is made in a
person’s job, and that person initially responds to this
change very positively but the effect does not last long.
• Hawthorne researchers discovered
that work groups established and
enforced production norms.
• Found that those who did not
adhere to production norms met
with very negative consequences
from other members, and that
employees responded very
differently to various methods of
supervision

56. Hawthorne Effect
• Overall implication of the
Hawthorne studies, which later
formed the impetus for
organizational psychology, was
that social factors impact
behavior in organizational
settings
• Increase in worker productivity
produced by the psychological
stimulus of being singled out
and made to feel important

57. Hawthorne Studies: 4 Conclusions
1. Aptitudes of individuals (Bingham) are imperfect predictors of
job performance. Although they give some indication of physical
and mental potential of the individual, amount produced is
strongly influenced by social factors
2. Informal organization affects productivity = group life among
the workers. Studies also showed that the relations supervisors
develop with workers tend to influence the manner in which the
workers carry out directives
3. Work-group norms affect productivity: not the first to recognize
that work groups tend to arrive at norms of what is a fair day's
work; however, they provided the best systematic description
and interpretation of this phenomenon.
4. The workplace is a social system made up of interdependent
parts

58. Hawthorne Effect: Real World
• Workers improve their productivity when they
believe management is concerned with their
welfare and pay particular attention to them
• Productivity can also be explained by paying
attention to the workers’ social environment and
informal groupings

59. History of Organizational Psychology:
1930s-1950s
• World War II (1941-1945) -- tremendous impact on the
growth of organizational psychology
• Women were needed to fill many of the positions in factories
that were vacated by the men called into military service.
• After World War II in 1948, President Harry S. Truman made
the decision to pursue racial integration of the military
• Both events were extremely important because they
represented initial attempts to understand the impact of
diversity on the workplace
• World War II also served as the impetus for major studies of
morale and leadership styles.

60. Kurt Lewin:
The Practical theorist
• Developed an interest in the
application of psychology to
applied problems such as
agricultural labor, production
efficiency, and the design of jobs.
• Became interested in scientific
management, particularly the
impact of this system on workers
• His ideas continue to influence
the study of a number of areas
such as employee motivation,
leadership, group dynamics, and
organizational development

61. Contributions – Leadership styles
• Exploration of different styles or types of leadership on
group structure and member behavior
• 3 classic group leadership models:
1. Democratic
• Superior results were found with the basis that as all
individuals can participate and become an identifiable part of
the group, change is more easily accepted
• More originality, group-mindedness and friendliness
2. Autocratic/ Authoritarian
• Authoritarian structures were found to be more rigid,
hindered creativity and lead to dysfunctional decision making
processes
3. Laissez-faire styles were found to be very inefficient and
unproductive

64. Contributions – Leadership styles
• Other observations
– Aggression, hostility, scape-goating and discontent in
laissez-faire and autocratic groups
– Difference in behavior in autocratic, democratic and
laissez-faire situations is not, on the whole, a result
of individual differences
– Democracy could not be imposed on people, that it had
to be learned by a process of voluntary and responsible
participation

65. Contributions – T-Groups
• Training group facilitation and experienced from
leadership & group dynamics activity (Connecticut State
Interracial Commission 1946)
• 2-week program that looked to encourage group
discussion and decision-making, and where participants
(including staff) could treat each other as peers
• Trainers and researchers collected detailed observations
and recordings of group activities
• Resulting in active dialogue about differences of
interpretation and observation by those who participated
in them

66. Contributions – T-Groups
• Discovery: learning is best facilitated in an
environment where there is dialectic tension and
conflict between immediate, concrete experience
and analytic detachment.
• By bringing together the immediate experiences
of the trainees and the conceptual models of the
staff in an open atmosphere where inputs from
each perspective could challenge and stimulate
the other, a learning environment occurred with
remarkable vitality and creativity

67. Contributions – T-Groups
• Establishment of the first National Training Laboratory
in Group Development
• Central feature of the laboratory “basic skills training”
– An observer reported on group processes at set intervals
– Skills to be achieved were intended to help an individual
function in the role of “change agent”
– Facilitating communication and useful feedback
– He was also to be a paragon who was aware of the need
for change, could diagnose the problems involved, and
could plan for change, implement the plans, and evaluate
the results
– To become an effective change agent, an understanding of
the dynamics of groups was believed necessary

68. Contributions – T-Groups
• Origin of T-group theory and ‘laboratory
method’
– Initially small discussion groups known as ‘basic
skill training groups’
– By 1949 shortened to T-group
– In 1950 a sponsoring organization, the National
Training Laboratories (NTL) was set up

69. 4 Elements – T Groups
1. Feedback
– Borrowed term from electrical engineering and
applied it to the behavioral sciences
– Broadly used to describe adjustment of a process
informed by information about its results or effects
– Difference between the desired and actual result.
– Became a key ingredient of T-groups and was found
to be most effective when
• Stemmed from here-and-now observations
• Followed the generating event as closely as possible
• The recipient checked with other group members to
establish its validity and reduce perceptual distortion’
(Yalom 1995: 489).

70. 4 Elements – T Groups
2. Unfreezing
– Taken directly from Kurt Lewin’s change theory
– Describes the process of disconfirming a person’s former
belief system
– ‘Motivation for change must be generated before change
can occur. One must be helped to re-examine many
cherished assumptions about oneself and one’s relations
to others’ (op. cit.)
– Trainers sought to create an environment in which values
and beliefs could be challenged

71. 4 Elements – T Groups
3. Participant observation
– Members had to participate emotionally in the
group as well as observe themselves and the
group objectively’ (op. cit.)
– Connecting concrete (emotional) experience and
analytical detachment
– Liable to be resisted by many participants, but it
was seen as a essential if people were to learn
and develop

72. 4 Elements – T Groups
4. Cognitive aids
– Drawn from developments in psycho-educational and
cognitive-behavioral group therapy
– Entailed provision of models or organizing ideas through
the medium brief lectures and handouts (and later things
like film clips or video)
– Best known of these was the Johari Window (named after,
and developed by, Joe Luft and Harry Ingram)
– The use of cognitive aids, lectures, reading assignments,
and theory sessions demonstrates that the basic allegiance
of the T-group was to the classroom rather than the
consulting room
– Participants were considered students; the task of the T-
group was to facilitate learning for its members’.

74. Industrial Psychology and WWII
• Advancements in technology created a critical
demand for human factors psychologists and more
sophisticated training techniques
• AGCT (Army General Classification Test ): used to
sort recruits into jobs
• OSS (Office of Strategic Services ): assessed
candidates for military intelligence units and pilots
to fly warplanes.
• Other new issues included team development
strategies, performance appraisal procedures, and
attitude change (morale) methods
• Methods used in private industry

75. World War II and shortly thereafter
• Selection and classification work continued in the
Army
• Henceforth, use of employment tests increased in
industry.
– Industrial psychologists proved useful for
selection, training and machine design.
– Industrial leaders interested in applying social
psychology.
• Measures of attitudes and morale, now used in
industry

76. Toward Specialization (1946-1963)
• I/O became legitimate field
• 1946: Division 14: Industrial Psychology
• Formation of subspecialties: engineering
psychology, personnel psychology, human
relations
• Took on stronger organizational flavor

77. Modern Era (1964-present)
Legislation
• 1964: Civil Rights Act
• 1978: Uniform Guidelines
• 1990: Americans with
Disabilities Act
• 1991 Civil Rights Act

78. Modern Era (1964-present)
Events:
• 1973: Division 14: I/O Psychology
• 1976: First I/O Handbook
• 1980: Project A
• 1990: First set of I/O Handbooks
• 1992: 100th Anniversary of APA

79. Cross Cultural I/O Psychology
I/O psychologists must examine cross-
cultural factors in work behavior.
– Cultural diversity
– Work environment
– Mergers/acquisitions/joint ventures
– Technological advancements

80. Mandate of I/O Psychology
I/O psychology must increase the fit
between the workforce and the workplace
at a time when the composition of both is
rapidly changing.

81. Future Perspectives – Change
• Changing nature of employees:
– More women (2/3 of entry-level)
– More minorities (1/3 of entry-level)
– More temporary workers
• Changing nature of organizations:
– Mergers and acquisitions; failures and downsizing--layoffs-
-more work, less manpower.
– Smaller organizations, employing fewer people. Cynical
workers/job security.
– Greater focus on work teams (flatter management
hierarchy)
88

82. Future Perspective - Technology
Growing importance of technology:
• Technology-mediated communication
– Workers can work anywhere (from home, etc)
– Loss of direct human contact--impact on social
relationships, mental health, etc.
• Human-technology interaction
– New jobs in maintenance of technology
• Replace manufacturing operatives as “worker elite”
– Greater focus on decision-making and coordination of
activities by humans
• Because jobs are becoming more technologically
complex

83. Future Perspective - Redefinitions
• Redefinition of “job”:
– less emphasis on job as a fixed bundle of tasks
– emphasis on constantly changing tasks
• 1. Requires constant learning
• 2. More higher-order thinking
• 3. Less “9 to 5”
• Changing nature of pay:
– 1. *Tied less to position or tenure in organization
– 2. Tied more to market value of person’s KSAOs
(Knowledge, Skills, Abilities and Other characteristics).