Industrial Psychology

1. Industrial/Organizational
Psychology
DR. NICOLAS T. MALLARI

2. What is IO Psychology
• is the application of psychological principles and
theories to the workplace.
• the attitudes and behaviors of employees and
employers; interpersonal relationships at work; the
structure of organizations and organizational policies;
the complex processes of motivation and leadership;
both individual and organizational performance; the
context, culture, and climate of organizations; and the
match between people and jobs.

3. • For example, principles of learning are used to develop
training programs and incentive plans, principles of
social psychology are used to form work groups and
understand employee conflict, and principles of
motivation and emotion are used to motivate and satisfy
employees.
• Thus, it makes sense that people who are happy with
and productive at their jobs will lead more fulfilling lives
than people unhappy with their jobs. If a person is
unhappy at work for hours a day, the residual effects
of this unhappiness will affect the quality of that
person’s family and leisure life as well.

4. • Traditionally, industrial psychology and organizational
psychology have been distinguished from each other
based on their respective content areas. Industrial
psychology(sometimes called personnel psychology,
which shouldn’t be confused with personal or
personality psychology) has long been associated with
job analysis, training, selection, and performance
measurement/appraisal.
• Whereas organizational psychology deals with
motivation, work attitudes, and leadership, as well as
the structure, culture, and processes of organizations.

5. IO PSYCHOLOGISTS IN THE WORKPLACE
Sample Job Titles
Director of personnel
Vice president of personnel
Manager of human resources
Organizational development specialist
Personnel psychologist
Senior consultant
Compensation analyst
Project manager
Senior scientist
Management consultant
Research scientist
Behavioral
Sample of Companies with Tradition
of Employing I/O Psychologists
British Petroleum
United Airlines
Frito-Lay
IBM
Xerox
AT&T
Johnson & Johnson
Goodyear Tire & Rubber
Ford Motor Company
Dow Chemical
S.C. Johnson Wax
Wells Fargo

6. Conducting Research in IO Psychology
• Ideas, Hypotheses, and Theories
• Hypothesis—an educated prediction about the answer
to a question.
• Theories are used to provide a model for
understanding human thoughts, emotions, and
behaviors

7. Laboratory versus Field Research
Laboratory research. Experiments that are conducted in
the laboratory setting.
Disadvantage: external validity and generalizability
Field Research.
• has a problem opposite to that of laboratory research. What
field research obviously gains in external validity it loses in
control of extraneous variables that are not of interest to the
researcher (internal validity).

8. The Experiment
• the experimental method is the most powerful of all
research methods because it is the only one that can
determine cause- and- ef fect relationships. Thus, if it is
important to know whether one variable produces or causes
another variable to change, then the experiment is the only
method that should be used.
• Examples, the effect of incentive on job performance.
Does illumination affect productivity?
Can music improve concentration?

9. The Independent and Dependent Variables
1. Independent variable. Is a variable intentionally manipulated
by the experimenter.
2. Dependent variable. Is considered to be the measured
variable.
Examples: Feedback improves retention
Music enhances productivity
Supervisory style affects motivation

10. Extraneous variables and Confounding
1. Extraneous variables indicate variables that are not
the focus in the experiment but may contaminate the
experiment if they are properly controlled.
2. Confounding variable indicates the value of
extraneous variable changes systematically across the
treatment conditions.

11. Types of Experimental Designs
1. Two-randomized-groups design
2. Two-matched-groups design
3. Repeated treatments design
4. More-than-two-randomized groups design
5. More-than-one-independent variable design

12. Quasi-experiments
• Quasi-experiments are often used to evaluate the results of a
new program implemented by an organization. For example,
an organization that had instituted a child-care center
wanted to see whether the center had any effect on
employee absenteeism. To find the answer, the organization
compared absenteeism levels from the year before the
center was introduced with the absenteeism levels for the
year following the implementation; the organization found
that both absenteeism and turnover had decreased.

13. Archival Research
• Archival research involves using previously collected dataor
records to answer a research question. For example, if we want
to know what distinguishes good workers from poor workers,
we could look in the personnel files to see whether the
backgrounds of good workers have common characteristics not
shared by poor workers.
• Or, if we want to see if people on the night shift had more
turnover than people on the day shift, we could get information
on shift and turnover from the company records

14. Survey
• Another method of conducting research is to ask people their
opinion on some topic. Surveys might ask employees about
their attitudes toward the organization, HR directors about their
opinions regarding the best recruitment method, or managers
about the success of their child-care centers.
• Surveys can be conducted by mail, personal interviews, phone,
fax, email, Internet, or magazines. The method chosen depends
on such factors as sample size, budget, amount of time
available to conduct the study, and need for a representative
sample.

15. Correlation method
• Correlation coefficients (r) are used as the effect size
when researchers are interested in the relationship
between two variables, and the majority of studies use
correlation as their statistical test. Examples include
studies looking at the relationship between personality
and job performance, integrity test scores and employee
theft, and the relationship between job satisfaction and
performance

16. Statistical Analysis
1. Descriptive Statistics. These are used to describe the
basic features of the data in a study. They provide simple
summaries about the sample and the measures.
Together with simple graphics analysis, they form the
basis of virtually every quantitative analysis of data.
2. Inferential statistics takes data from a sample and
makes inferences about the larger population from which
the sample was drawn.