Using Industrial-Organizational Psychology for the Greater Good

Helping Those Who Help Others

Julie B. Olson-Buchanan, Laura L. Koppes Bryan, Lori Foster Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781848729605
• eBook ISBN: 9781135085902
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie en psychologie

This SIOP Organizational Frontiers volume will be one of the first to show how the field of Industrial Organizational psychology can help address societal concerns, and help focus research on the greater good of society. Contributions from worldwide experts showcase the power the IO community has to foster, promote and encourage pro social efforts. Also included will be commentary from an eminent group of IO psychologists who give invaluable insights into the history and the future of IO psychology . By presenting the prosocial contributions, from personal satisfaction and career commitment to organizational effectiveness to societal development, the imperative and easibility of using I-O psychology for the greater good becomes increasingly compelling.

1

Values and Ethics of a Changing I-O Psychology: A Call to (Further) Action

Joel Lefkowitz

Is it psychologically possible to have docile, externally controlled workers in industry, who are yet free, intelligent and responsible members of a democracy outside it? … It is for us more than any other science to lend our knowledge for the re-creation, not only of industry, but of human society.

Susan Brierly

British Industrial Psychologist, 1920

Brierly’s concern for the quality of society and, more specifically, her belief that applied social science should play a role in promoting autonomous and responsible citizens, was a decidedly minority perspective among industrial psychologists in the US early in the last century. The first well-known U.S. industrial psychologists—Hugo Münsterberg, Walter Dill Scott, Walter Van Dyke Bingham, and Louis Thurstone—were interested primarily in demonstrating the value of applied psychology to the accomplishment of business objectives (Ferguson, 1962–1965). And Elton Mayo did not hide his disparaging opinion of workers and of democracy (cf. O’Connor, 1999). Indeed, by the middle of that century, “industrial psychology as management technique [wa]s well known and highly successful” (Kornhauser, 1947, p. 224). But Kornhauser’s observation was not made entirely approvingly; he went on to question, “Do we work on the problems of the businessman or on the problems of society?” (p. 224).

What is the topic of this book, really? Or, more to the point, what is the essential meaning and significance conveyed by the collection of topics and chapters comprising the overall presentation? Although manifestly about empirical and theoretical research, I submit that it is nothing less than that a dramatic change and expansion of the professional identity of the field of industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology potentially is taking place—for the second time in its history. If this observation is correct, it is a change not so much in substantive content or methodology, although it is comprised of some of that, but a change primarily in values orientation. The aims of this chapter are to place these putative changes in context, make them more salient, and encourage further similar efforts. The first major change took place almost 50 years ago. It was scientific and theoretical in nature, and was marked by the publication of two books: Edgar Schein’s (1980) Organizational Psychology in 1965 and Katz and Kahn’s (1978) The Social Psychology of Organizations in 1966. They began to provide refutation of the largely accurate charge that industrial psychology was atheoretical and unscientific (i.e., that few industrial social scientists were concerned with “making a contribution to knowledge”) (Baritz, 1960, p. 198).

But Baritz’s criticism of the field was not only with respect to its science—it also concerned the moral status of its professional practice as a mere “servant of power.” Yet it is only in the past approximately 20 years that this second aspect of the criticism has been addressed seriously—at least in part, culminating in the beginnings of an alternative model for the practice of I-O psychology. This model incorporates a humanitarian and broadly humanistic set of concerns, and introduces a normative (i.e., moral) perspective to accompany the long-standing scientific and instrumental perspectives. Fifty years hence, those looking back may view another two books—the current volume on The Greater Good and another on Humanitarian Work Psychology (Carr, MacLachlan, & Furnham, 2012)—as marking this second paradigm shift. Unlike the first change, which was instigated largely by external challenges to the field, this second change has actually been facilitated by corporate societal responsibility sensibilities that have been developing since the 1950s (Carroll, 1999). Those sensibilities have accelerated during the past 20 years, especially in reaction to the corporate scandals of the past several years. Moreover, much of our self-generated critiques and soul-searching regarding the professional identity of I-O psychology in recent years (see below) has been inward-looking and largely self-serving (e.g., focused on how we can be more successful in the marketplace). In contrast, this most recent shift represents a mature, moral stance concerned with doing good, and seems to justify the optimistic outlook presented here.

I-O Psychology from a Values Perspective

The Significance of Recurring Identity Crises

From time to time, leaders in the field have pointed to crises in our professional identity (e.g., Ryan, 2003). Perhaps this is to be expected in a young profession that currently is and/or historically has been known, in whole or in part, by as many as 11 names: industrial psychology, organizational psychology, industrial-organizational psychology, work psychology, work and organizational psychology, organizational behavior, organization development, occupational psychology, occupational/organizational psychology, vocational psychology, and most recently humanitarian work psychology. In the US, this has been accompanied by a formal change in the name of the profession and its professional association in 1970 (from I to I-O psychology), two more recent failed referenda seeking further name changes in 2003 and 2009, and in general a loss of several content domains represented by some of those rubrics.

I have previously enumerated five challenges to and/or explicit criticisms of our field that have been made over the years (Lefkowitz, 2010a). In addition to Baritz’s and Kornhauser’s societal concerns, noted above, about the new field of industrial psychology, we were threatened in the 1960s by the development of organizational psychology (OP) and organizational behavior (OB)—which, ironically, were themselves a constructive response to the earlier charge of industrial psychology being “unscientific.” We responded to the challenge by introjecting OP to form I-O psychology, and largely ignored OB while it developed in business schools. In the 1970s, the perceived challenge came from the newly emergent organization development (OD), with its values-based, process-consultation model. Our response was to denigrate the field as being unscientific (i.e., not being “value-free”), even to the awful extent of being “influenced by strong humanistic values” (Miner, 1992, p. 293). So OD was not, for the most part, welcomed into departments of psychology (nor even business schools, for that matter) and was relegated to free-standing professional schools. In the 1980s, many I-O psychologists felt threatened economically by an incursion of clinical psychologists into the corporate world. As licensed psychologists, these erstwhile colleagues could not easily be denigrated; eventually, the problem was dealt with by co-opting some of what they had to offer by our becoming “executive coaches.” The last salient perceived threat from the 1990s to the present has also involved competition for professional practice—this time from business school graduates and consultants (Ryan & Ford, 2010) from whom we apparently feel insufficiently distinguished.

As has been noted earlier:

These repeated identity crises (i.e., perceived threats) … have originated from different sources …; they constitute different sorts of characterizations … and they have been recurring over an extended period of time. Consequently, one might reasonably infer that these multiple manifest threats may be less the real issue and may be symptomatic of some more basic, underlying sense of deficiency. I submit that the culprit is [our] core [professional] identity … , that is, our central professional value system, which is inadequate.

(Lefkowitz, 2010a, p. 294)

I believe that our collective professional identity, as well as that of each of us as individual I-O psychologists, consists (or ought to consist) of one’s beliefs, goals, and meta-objectives concerning what it is we intend to accomplish in the organizations with which we work and how one prefers to go about accomplishing them. The closest we generally come to articulating a professional value system are rather vague statements concerning “good science and good practice”—reflecting the ubiquitous scientist-practitioner model, to which I will turn shortly.

However, most of our responses to these crises of confidence have mistakenly identified the problem as a content issue. For example, chronologically:

• “The vast majority of students receiving Ph.D.s in industrial or industrial-organizational psychology … are poorly trained theoretically and dangerously incompetent methodologically” (Naylor, 1971, p. 218);
• “graduate training [for the I-O practitioner] should revert to more emphasis on general psychology” (Stagner, 1982, p. 901);
• “The concern that we lay out in this paper is that I/O psychologists seem to be identifying less with psychology” (Highhouse & Zickar, 1997);
• Ryan (2003) asserted that “I-O psychology is on an identity quest,” by which she meant (among other things) “concerns about how well we are differentiated from other like disciplines” (p. 21). She advocated (among other things) “greater connections with psychology … [and] our scientific approach” (p. 24), concluding that we must define ourselves by “our knowledge base and our disciplinary core … Our identity derives from how we [conduct our professional practice], how we approach it, what we base it on … Our practice flows from our identity” (p. 25);
• Gasser, Butler, Waddilove, and Tan (2004) sought to determine, “How do we define ourselves as a profession that sets us apart [from business school-trained counterparts with the same amount of education] and makes others want to utilize our services?” They found that SIOP Fellows emphasized “greater familiarity with science and research … [and] a greater understanding of psychological theories and human behavior” (pp. 16, 17);
• “as I-O develops its own theories … the field has less in common with other areas in psychology” (Costanza, 2006);
• “identity claims of organizational psychologists must include knowledge distinctly associated with organizational psychology … [and] must have a distinct ‘what we know’ as a central professional identity referent” (Ryan & Ford, 2010, pp. 243–244).

What it Means to be a “Profession”

I do not mean to suggest that content issues are irrelevant or unimportant to defining any profession, and I do not disagree with the advice that we have much to gain by making our connections with general psychology more salient. But a profession is represented by three domains of expression: its content (i.e., its intellective, theoretical, perhaps scientific substance); the instrumental applications of that content (i.e., its professional practice); and its normative or moral position concerning its meta-objectives and involvement in the greater society. I think it is fair to characterize I-O psychology, perhaps until very recently, as having been focused mostly on the first two (“Is the test valid?”, “Is the program cost-effective?”) and less on the third: failing to emphasize questions such as “Is this the right thing for us to be doing?” or “Will anyone be harmed unnecessarily?” For example, this is how we in the US define and announce I-O psychology to the world on our professional organization’s website: “Industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology is the scientific study of the workplace. Rigor and methods of psychology are applied to issues of critical relevance to business, including talent management, coaching, assessment, selection, training, organizational development, performance, and work-life balance” (SIOP, 2012). Not mentioned are the ends to which our efforts are directed. Are those efforts restricted to only those things “of critical relevance to business”? Are we not concerned with things that may be of critical relevance to other constituencies or stakeholder groups, or to the commonweal?

It is instructive to note that the origin of the word profession is theological. In the Middle Ages, it denoted a “declaration, promise or vow made by one entering a religious order” (Kimball, 1992, p. 19) and eventually it came to stand for the group of people who made the vow (e.g., monks, nuns, and other professed people). By the 15th and 16th centuries, the term had expanded to include the learned professions—law, medicine, and education—and by the 19th century, science had become prominent as well. Lipartito and Miranti (1998) point out that “many occupations … have risen in status … because of their function in the modern business system. These include the older professions of law, engineering, and accountancy, and such newer professions as advertising, public relations, and management” (p. 302). However, Donaldson (1982) points out that, unlike the traditional professions, the newer

technocratic professions often lack [a spirit of altruism or service] and thus raise special problems of moral responsibility … The old professions have frequently failed to apply the moral standards articulated in statements of their professional goals; but the new professions fail, it seems, because they do not even attempt to articulate moral standards.

(p. 113)

It is disquieting to reflect on the extent to which I-O psychology has developed as one of these “technocratic” professions.

Moreover, the overly “scientistic” nature of I-O psychology (Lefkowitz, 2008), including an antipathy to acknowledging the role played by implicit values perspectives in applied social science and especially professional practice has contributed to our misidentifying relevant values issues as entirely disciplinary content issues. Conflict over whether, and the extent to which, personal and social values play a role in the conduct of social science research, and whether they ought to be involved, has a long history. The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, in particular, has forthrightly focused on the tension between scientific objectivity and political advocacy (Rutherford, Cherry, & Unger, 2011). The issue is complex and goes beyond the bounds of what can be considered here (for a critique, cf. Lefkowitz, 2003, Chapter 9), but we should attend to the wisdom and warning of the philosopher of social science, Alexander Rosenberg (1995):

The way in which a social scientist selects problems to work on, the factors cited to explain behavior, and the evidence sought to substantiate these explana...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Series Foreword
• Preface
• About the Editors
• About the Contributors
• About the Commentators
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Values and Ethics of a Changing I-O Psychology: A Call to (Further) Action
• Section I: Relevance of I-O Psychology to Societal Well-Being in the Corporate Domain
• Section II: I-O Psychology in the Nonprofit Domain
• Section III: Non-Traditional Domains: I-O Psychology Without Borders
• Commentary
• Commentary: Homo Economicus, Industrial Psychology, and the Greater Good
• Commentary
• Commentary: Answering the Call: Advancing a Prosocial Organizational Psychology
• Author Index
• Subject Index