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Work & Organizational Psychology

• Work Psychology: Human Recourse Management

(HRM)/Industrial Psychology
• It is concerned with issues that are more molecular in nature,

• Organizational Psychology: Organizational Behavior

(OB)
• It is concerned with issues that are more molar in nature

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• Organization: An organization is more than a formal
arrangement of functions, more than an organization chart,
more than a vision statement, more than a set of accounts. An
organization consists of people and so it is also a social system.
• Organizational and work psychologists are involved in research
on employees and the application of psychological principles of
that research to the workplace to help to optimize an
organization’s success.

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Major Fields of I/O Psychology
• Personnel Psychology
• I/O psychologists and HRM professionals involved in personnel psychology study
and practice in such areas as analyzing jobs, recruiting applicants, selecting
employees, determining salary levels, training employees, and evaluating
employee performance.
• Organizational Psychology
• Psychologists involved in organizational psychology are concerned with the
issues of leadership, job satisfaction, employee motivation, organizational
communication, conflict management, organizational change, and group
processes within an organization.
• Human Factors/Ergonomics
• Psychologists in the area of human factors concentrate on workplace design,
human machine interaction, ergonomics, and physical fatigue and stress
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 Organizational
Work Psychology
Psychology
Job analysis motivation

Recruitment & selection communication

Job satisfaction Leadership

job stress Group dynamics

Occupational health Organization culture

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So, what is work & organizational
psychology
1. Personnel selection and assessment
2. Training
3. Performance appraisal and career development
4. Organizational development and change
5. Human–machine interaction
6. Counselling and personal development
7. Design of environments and work – health and safety
8. Employee relations and motivation

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The development of the field of organizational and
work psychology
• Early contributions
• Scientific management
• Classical organization theory
• The hawthorn studies
• The human relations movement
• Integrative perspective
• Contingency theory

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Early contributions
• Industrial Revolution
• Here, the emphasis was on the job being performed, not the
person performing the job.
• Focus was on machines
• Efficiency problems led to focus on humans

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Scientific management
• Frederick Winslow Taylor
• Focus was on maximizing efficiency and getting the
highest possible production out of employees.
• This approach emphasized the design of jobs.
• Goal of scientific management was to get more output
from employees

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Classical organization theory
• How large numbers of workers and managers could be
effectively organized into an overall organizational
structure.
• Max Weber
• bureaucratic form

• Mary Parker Follett

• Management should be democratic

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The Hawthorne studies
1. Study to investigate the effects of different levels of lighting on
productivity Luthans, 1992).
2. Relay Room studies: to study the the impact of 13 different factors on
productivity was examined (Baron and Greenberg, 1990).
3. Bank Wiring Room study.
• ‘Hawthorne effect’,
• because they knew they were being studied,
• because of the novelty of the situation and
• because of the attention they

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The human relations movement
• People respond primarily to their social environment, motivation
depends more on social needs than on economic needs, and
satisfied employees work harder than dissatisfied workers
(Moorhead and Griffin, 1989).
• Douglas McGregor (1960)
• Theory Y represents an optimistic and a positive view of human
nature.
• Theory X, which represents a much more negative and
pessimistic view of human nature.

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Integrative perspectives
1. The socio-technical systems approach
• Technology
• Human factor

2. Systems theory
• organization interacts with environmental forces and factors.
• A system has four characteristics, namely:
1. It comprises a number of interdependent and interrelated
subsystems
2. It is open and dynamic.
3. It strives for equilibrium.
4. It has multiple purposes, objectives and functions.
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Contingency theory
• Organizational processes and the characteristics
of the situation.
• Burns and Stalker (1961)
• mechanistic
• organic.

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 Brief History
1903 Walter Dill Scott publishes The Theory of Advertising
1911 Walter Dill Scott publishes Increasing Human Efficiency in Business
1913 Hugo Münsterberg publishes Psychology and Industrial Efficiency
1917 Journal of Applied Psychology first published
1918 World War I provides I/O psychologists with first opportunity for large-scale employee testing
and selection
1933 Hawthorne studies published
1937 American Association for Applied Psychology established
1945 Society for Industrial and Business Psychology established as Division 14 of APA with 130
members

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1960 Division 14 renamed as Society for Industrial Psychology, membership exceeds 700
1963 Equal Pay Act passed
1964 Civil Rights Act passed
1980 Division 14 membership exceeds 1,800
1986 Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) holds first annual national
conference separate from APA meeting
2000 SIOP membership exceeds 5,700
2008 The journal Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice
begins publication as an official journal of SIOP
2010 SIOP membership exceeds 8,000; SIOP members narrowly vote to keep the name Society
for Industrial Organizational Psychology rather than change the name to the Society for
Organizational Psychology

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Thankyou ….

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