Industrial and Organizational Psychology Help the Vulnerable

Serving the Underserved

W. Reichman

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137327727
• eBook ISBN: 9781137327734
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Industrial and Organizational Psychology Help the Vulnerable documents a new direction for industrial and organizational psychology. The chapters are written by psychologists who have used the methods, procedures and theories of industrial and organizational psychology to help the vulnerable people of the world.

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Industrial and Organizational Psychology Encounters the World

Walter Reichman

What industrial and organizational psychology can accomplish

Industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology has the potential to improve the world. The theories, procedures, practices, and research of I-O psychology can be used, should be used, and, to a limited extent, are being used to heal the wounds of our civilization. These wounds are found in the vulnerable people in our world. They have been underserved by what we believe is an ethical, humanitarian science that has the ability to help the vulnerable.

Vulnerability is not restricted to a certain group of people in a particular part of the world but is among us, and each of us can become a member of that vulnerable group with a twist of fate. An illness, a hurricane, an earthquake, a fire, and a mad man with a gun can suddenly turn a whole happy community into a vulnerable group. There are too many people who at no fault of their own find themselves living in areas of war, civil unrest, and poverty. The recent economic recession, for example, resulted in millions losing their jobs and not being able to find work to support themselves and their families. Many families have lost their homes as a result of losing their livelihood and found themselves living in shelters for the homeless. Psychologists have documented the negative psychological effects on the breadwinners and their families of prolonged unemployment (APA, 2014).

The damage to the lives of hundreds of thousands of people around the world, resulting from natural and weather-related events, has been documented by the media. We read daily of thousands of refugees leaving their homes and often their countries in the hope of keeping alive during civil wars and wars between countries. As individuals, we desire to help people who are suffering, and many of us offer some form of help and often wish we could do more.

As I-O psychologists, we often separate our profession and ourselves as professionals from the aid process. I have often thought, as I watched the catastrophes documented on television that if I were a physician, or a firefighter, or had the strength to search through the rubble of a collapsed building for survivors, then I could be of some use to those who were suffering. As an I-O psychologist, I have been an academic, a management consultant, and a representative to the United Nations (UN) from a non-governmental organization (NGO), the International Association of Applied Psychology (IAAP). In the latter capacity, I became familiar with the extent of suffering around the world resulting from poverty. I learned, for example, that three billion people, 50% of the world’s population, live on less than $2.50 a day and that one billion children are living in poverty and that 22,000 of them die each day as a result of poverty (World Bank, 2014). I also learned two other things. The first was that there were dedicated people fighting against poverty and that the number of people living in poverty had declined by 50% since the year 2000, as a result, in part, of the Millennium Development Goals established by the UN (Chandy and Gertz, 2011). I also learned that I-O psychologists were in the forefront of some of the most important efforts to bring about poverty reduction (Carr, 2013).

As I tried to align my professional activities with the plight of the vulnerable in the world, I learned that many of my colleagues were way ahead of me and found ways of applying I-O psychology and other psychological disciplines to help heal our world. These colleagues were academics, consultants to companies, internal company consultants, and graduate students who had come to I-O psychology to better help them serve the vulnerable and underserved in the world because they experienced the need for such an education to continue their life’s work. My pride and my joy in being a part of this discipline increased with each story I heard about the activities of these colleagues. I think the stories of their work should be made known to other I-O psychologists, as well as to those preparing for or considering a career in this field. This book will describe how I-O psychology is beginning to assume its responsibility to serve the needs of the vulnerable. It will present the stories of some of those people who have used I-O psychology to serve the needs of the vulnerable and thereby are showing the way to expand the boundaries of our field to include an option of using our science to help save our world. Each author was asked to tell the story of their work, what motivated them, the barriers they encountered, their successes, their failures, what they learned personally, how they used I-O principles and methods, and what I-O psychology can gain from their experiences to strengthen and expand our discipline.

In evaluating their work and its role in our discipline, it is important to remember that I-O psychology has been an independent field of psychology for fewer than 125 years. Its development was influenced by the school of Functionalism, which promoted the use of psychology to deal with problems faced by people as they attempted to survive, persevere, and prosper in the world in which they lived. Applied psychology owes its beginnings to the school of Functionalism that (Heidbreder, 1961). I-O psychology was developed to deal with the problems and issues faced by organizations, especially business organizations. Procedures and theories for selecting the “right” people for activities and jobs within the organization, training them, evaluating their performance, compensating them, motivating them, and managing them became the focus of I-O psychology. Our discipline was used most often to serve the needs of the business organization so as to improve their profitability. More peripheral elements such as job satisfaction/engagement, work– life balance, health, and safety were evaluated by the extent to which they served the goals of the organization, and only secondarily, if at all, as to whether they enhanced the well-being of the employee. As a result, I-O psychologists became known as the servants of business and the powerful (Lefkowitz, 1990). We were accused of neglecting the rights of workers by not being involved with unions; favoring white-majority men; and not being concerned with the well-being of racial and ethnic minorities, women, persons with disabilities, GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered), immigrants, etc. which resulted in these groups continuing to be marginalized in the world of work as businesses prospered in part due to our efforts. While we were reactive to government laws to prevent discrimination against such groups, we were not proactive. As a result, the actions of I-O psychologists were perceived as adjusting to the rules imposed on business in order to be sure that their profitability was kept intact. There is no doubt that promoting the goals of business and other organizations are legitimate aims of I-O psychologists, and there is no suggestion that they should not serve the interests of business organizations. However, when we recognize that the same methods, procedures, and theories can have a wider impact and can improve the lives of vulnerable people, it is appropriate to encourage the broader use of our skills. This is the direction that I-O psychology is now going.

Even while the majority of I-O psychologists were concerned with enhancing for-profit organizations, there were a number of psychologists who already had this wider view for using our science. Many of them are sharing their experiences by writing chapters for this book.

The experiences of the authors

Chapter 2 is written by a woman who at age 21 with a master’s degree in I-O psychology began working for the UN and in a short time found herself in Afghanistan just after the withdrawal of Soviet troops and at a time when warlords were fighting each other for control of the country. The UN was there to provide humanitarian aid and find ways to end the conflicts. Her job was to provide administrative support for the office of the UN representative and to train the local staff on new software equipment. She was, in part, acting as a human resources professional responsible for both Afghan and UN personnel in an ongoing conflict in a nation recovering from a devastating war. After completing this assignment, she was sent to Mozambique at the end of their civil war that left one million dead. Her assignment was to arrange the logistics for UN-supervised elections throughout the country with little if any infrastructure intact. Her use of I-O psychology and what she learned from her experiences affected the remainder of her career.

Chapter 3 is written by two young I-O psychologists who took upon themselves the task of improving education in two areas of the world where education was almost completely lacking and the literacy rate was extremely low. The first author describes his work in his own country Ghana, where he was given the task of developing the capacity of a community to assume responsibility to control and improve their schools. The second author describes his work in South Africa as a Peace Corps worker charged with designing a program to increase the motivation of teachers in a school system that was failing its students. Both young men persisted in the face of conflict with those they were supposed to help, despite the lack of resources, terrible environmental conditions, and danger to their lives. Their work and accomplishments not only affected the educational systems they were working to improve but also set the course of their own professional lives.

The Rift Valley of Kenya is the scene for a project designed to turn young murderers into responsible citizens. The Rift Valley was a place of horrific tribal warfare that caused death of thousands with 70% of the killers being adolescents and young men. The Center for Creative Leadership, a respected psychological organization in the United States, undertook the task of converting killers into responsible citizens and preventing other young people from becoming killers. The Center developed a leadership training procedure that was implemented by the authors of the third chapter in the Rift Valley. They used the theories, practices, and methods of developing and implementing training programs, the roots of which are in common with training that takes place in industry, to bring about change. In the Rift Valley, they changed young people who saw themselves as killers into young people who saw themselves as dedicated to peace and unity (Chapter 4).

The kingdom of Lesotho is a poor landlocked African country of extreme natural beauty that has one of the highest rates of HIV/AIDS in the world. Young women were particularly vulnerable to becoming HIV positive as a result of trading their bodies for money for their impoverished families which they often headed as a result of their parents having died from AIDS. At the behest of the First Lady of Lesotho, a multidisciplinary team consisting of an I-O psychologist, a clinician, and educational psychologist, along with the government of Lesotho, other aid organizations, the IAAP, and the government of Ireland developed, implemented, and evaluated a camp for vulnerable girls, designed to increase their empowerment, and enable them to develop income-generating activities to make them more financially independent and less vulnerable. The description of this endeavor supports the need for cooperation and collaboration among different psychology specialties as well as non-psychologists to bring the benefits of psychology to the vulnerable populations (Chapter 5).

It is generally accepted that the most effective way of reducing poverty in a country is to build profitable businesses that will employ workers and provide them with decent work and enough wages to adequately support their families. It takes entrepreneurs to build successful businesses. A question that has often been asked is whether entrepreneurship can be taught or whether it is an innate characteristic of the individual. Chapter 6 demonstrates that entrepreneurship can be successfully taught, and its principles can be acted upon to build successful businesses. The authors describe two cases from Uganda in which “job seekers were turned into job creators” as a result of participating in their unique training program. These authors not only developed and implemented an action-oriented entrepreneurial training program but also demonstrated that their training led to long-term business success. In this demonstration, they applied all the basic I-O psychology principles to turn the vulnerable into the successful.

There is probably nothing as motivating as a personal experience to set a goal for oneself, a research agenda and a program for activism. Chapter 7 is written by a psychologist who began teaching at a college in his own country and discovered that he was being paid less than others teaching the same type of courses. He discovered that the reason was a remnant law left since colonial times when foreigners were paid more money than local citizens for the same work. This unsettling discovery led him to research the effects of this dual salary system on motivation, productivity, social relationships, and mental and physical health. It provided a direction for his doctoral dissertation and for his advocacy efforts to change the system. You will see in later chapters that this dual salary system also has implications for effectively dealing with poverty reduction by organizations mandated to work to reduce poverty.

There are many organizations with explicit mandates to serve the vulnerable. They include such organizations as the Red Cross, Save the Children, UNICEF, and many more. Over the years, there has been criticism of many such NGOs for not delivering the aid they promised and at times for making matters worse for the people they intended to help. Aid organizations would probably benefit from having an organizational psychologist on their staff because they face the same problems that any business organization would face and probably a lot more. I-O psychologists could be of assistance to them. For this reason, there are a number of I-O psychologists who have researched the work of aid organizations and made suggestions to enhance their operations. One I-O psychologist with an interest in learning about the effectiveness of such organizations in helping vulnerable people after a disaster spent a year studying NGOs in Haiti. After the terrible earthquake of 2009 that wreaked havoc on the country, hundreds of aid agencies went to try to relieve the suffering. In Chapter 8, the author describes the good, the bad, and the ugly about aid organizations. His investigation also increased his appreciation for the role that I-O psychology can play in conducting humanitarian work.

Three of the most prolific researchers and theorists on poverty reduction and the operations of aid organizations as they endeavor to reduce poverty wrote Chapter 9. On the basis of their work, they conclude that the only way to reduce poverty is to empower poor people. The poor can be empowered by providing them decent work, education, and health care. In this chapter, they call upon I-O psychologists and business organizations to provide the power and the energy to bring about the needed change. They maintain that it is time for I-O community to “step up to the challenge of working with governments and organizations to achieve poverty reduction.” Among the specific recommendations to governments and aid organizations is that they end the dual salary system that was described in Chapter 7, prevent social dominance, end the brain drain, and encourage “task shifting” as a means of bringing services to the vulnerable. Their provocative chapter is likely to have reverberations among those professionals working to reduce poverty. It is a contribution from the I-O community to poverty reduction efforts.

An NGO headed by a social and an organizational psychologist that has encountered governments in an effort to reduce poverty in their country is the Centre for Socio-Eco-Nomic Development (CSEND). In Chapter 10, these psychologists describe their efforts to incorporate the provisions for Decent Work into the poverty reduction strategies of countries. Decent Work has been defined by the International Labour Organization (ILO) as creating jobs, guaranteeing rights at work, extending social protection, and providing social dialogue between employers and worker (ILO, 2013). Member nations of the ILO agree to abide by the ILO conventions and incorporate their mandates into their government policies. The World Bank is also involved in poverty reduction and mandates that each country that receives aid from the World Bank to reduce poverty write a document describing its strategy to reduce poverty in their nation. The psychologists from CSEND work with the governments to incorporate the Decent Work mandate within its poverty reduction strategy. The authors describe their efforts and the problems they encounter in accomplishing this goal. They also describe a relatively new professional activity for I-O psychologists as advocating, networking, negotiating, and educating to bring about the changes within governments that will benefit the vulnerable. Training in these activities may become a part of the future I-O educational curriculum. As the authors state, there is a call for a new diplomacy to change the attitudes of those in power to focus on humanitarian endeavors. It is likely that this will be a skill in demand for future I-O psychologists as they take their place among the ranks of professionals working to provide for the vulnerable.

So far, the chapters described deal with vulnerable people in developing countries mostly in Africa. To be sure, there is no lack of vulnerable people in developed countries who can utilize the expertise of I-O psychologists. For example, the global recession of 2008–2009 resulted in an increase of 34% of homeless people living in shelters in the United Kingdom (Chapter 11). Their homelessness was due to loss of employment and not to addiction or illness or anything else that can be attributed to their behavior. A very successful I-O psychology consulting firm Pearn Kandola decided to take action to bring help to some of the homeless shelters in their area. When they visited the shelter, they concluded that what people needed more than monetary donations was psychological services that an I-O psychologist could provide. They developed a unique training program to address what this vulnerable group needed: more confidence, greater resilience, and guidance in seeking employment. As part of the training, they invented a fictional character named Toki who finds himself in situations that are familiar to the homeless and unemployed. They build strategies to deal effectively with these situations. Training has always been an I-O activity to improve performance within an organization. This I-O psychologist adapted it to the needs of a vulnerable group to help develop them into effective employees who could build a good life for themselves and contribute to the well-being of their community.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Industrial and Organizational Psychology Encounters the World
• 2. Challenges of the Ultimate Messengers
• 3. International Development and I-O Psychology in Sub-Saharan Africa: Perspectives from Local and Expatriate Standpoints
• 4. Developing Young Leaders in Kenya’s Rift Valley
• 5. A Multidisciplinary Approach to Solving Global Problems: The Case of Psychologists Collaborating on a Girls Empowerment Program in Africa
• 6. Entrepreneurship Training in Developing Countries
• 7. Dual Salary and Workers’ Well-being in Papua New Guinea
• 8. Exploring Haiti from an Organizational Psychology Perspective: Lessons Learned along the Way
• 9. Servants of Empowerment
• 10. Designing Learning Systems for Poverty Reduction in Least Developed Countries
• 11. Increasing Resilience Among People Who Are Homeless
• 12. In the Wake of Disaster: Facilitating Business Recovery
• 13. Service Learning in Developing Nations
• 14. Industrial and Organizational Psychology and Community Service Involvement: Students Helping Locally
• Index