Intro to I/O Psychology, History and Research Methods

What is I/O Psychology?

• A branch of psychology that applies the principles of psychology to the workplace (Aamodt, 2023)

• Industrial-organizational psychologists are able to apply psychological theories to explain and enhance the effectiveness of human behaviour in the workplace (Canadian Psychological Association)

• I/O psychologists "enhance the dignity and performance of human beings, and the organizations they work in, by advancing the science and knowledge of human behaviour" (Rucci, 2008)

• I/O focuses more on individual outcomes (employee outcomes) (what changes employee behaviour)

• Psychology is the study of humans and behaviour (cognition, emotion, motivation)

  • Experimental/basic research

  • Practical application

• Scientist-practitioner approach (scientists in research who collect data, conduct research, and also need to interact with the field to understand and solve recent problems)

• Influence of personality on work behaviour

• Personnel psychology

• Organizational psychology

• Human engineering (human factors psychology) 

I/O has Two Divisions

• Efficiency/productivity of organizations (I)

• Satisfaction/well-being of employees (O)

Efficiency/productivity of organizations (I)

• All about how we can use employees in a better way (personnel [industrial] psychology)

• Human resources

• Recruitment, better recruitment techniques, better assessment techniques

• Performance appraisal, training

Satisfaction/well-being of employees (O)

• More related to employee behaviours

Development and application of the science of psychology to the workplace

• Not to be confused with clinical psychology

• I/O psychology is an applied field concerned with the development and application of scientific principles to the workplace

Not only work setting

• Home-family responsibilities

• Cultural values

• Non-work events

Common Areas of Concentration for I-O Psychologists

• Selection and Placement

• Training and development

• Organizational development

• Performance measurement

• Quality of work life

• Engineering psychology

Selection and Placement

• Developing tests

• Validating tests

• Analyzing job content

• Identifying management potential

• Defending tests against legal challenge

Training and Development

• Identifying training and development needs

• Forming and implementing technical and managerial training programs

• Evaluating training effectiveness

• Career planning

Organizational Development

• Analyzing organizational structure

• Maximizing satisfaction and effectiveness of employees

• Facilitating organizational change

Performance Measurement

• Developing measures of performance

• Measuring the economic benefit of performance

• Introducing performance evaluation systems

Quality of Work Life

• Identifying factors associated with job satisfaction

• Reducing stress in the workplace

• Redesigning jobs to make them more meaningful

Engineering Psychology

• Designing work environments

• Optimizing person-machine effectiveness

• Making workplaces safer

Terms Used by Researchers

• Applied psychology

• Business psychology

• Industrial psychology

• I/O psychology

• Occupational psychology

• Organizational behaviour

• Organizational psychology

• Vocational psychology

• Work psychology

A Brief History of I/O Psychology - 1876-1930

• Hugo Munsterberg

• James McKeen Cattell

• Walter DIll Scott

• Walter Van Dyke Bingham

• Lilliam Gilbreth

• **Testing and placement of people in the army. Army Alpha (reading and writing) and Army Beta (made for people who didn’t know English) tests of mental ability  (intelligence tests used to select soldiers)

Hugo Munsterberg

• Wrote The Psychology of Industrial Efficiency (1913)

• Goal of improving worker efficiency

• Used tests to measure skills and match workers to jobs

• Conducted research in the workplace

James McKeen Cattell

• Studied the importance of differences between individuals to predict behaviour

Walter Dill Scott

• First to apply psychology to advertising, employee selection, & management

• Wrote Theory and Practice of Advertising (1903)

• Formed first industrial psychology consulting company

Lillian Gilbreth

• One of the first PhD in industrial psychology

• Time and motion specialist

F.W. Taylor

• an engineer, studied productivity. He developed scientific management, an approach to handling production workers in factories

Taylor (1911) suggested the following:

• Each job should be carefully analyzed so that the optimal way of doing tasks can be specified

• Employees should be selected (hired) according to characteristics that are related to job performance

• Managers should study existing employees to find out what personal characteristics are important

• Employees should be carefully trained to do their job tasks

• Employees should be rewarded for their productivity to encourage high levels of performance

1930-1964

• Elton Mayo

• Western Electric

• Roethlisberger and Dickson - Investigation of lighting effects

• World War II: Human engineering applied to solve aircraft accidents

• In 1945 I-O psychology becomes Division 14 of the APA

• 1950 explosion of commercial tests

• 1960 Civil Rights Act of 1964

Western Electric

• Hawthorne Studies

  • The study began with the study question 'the impact of various incentives on productivity'

  • Around 29000 employees

  • Improvements to levels of lighting (brighter or darker lighting) (hypothesis: brighter = higher performance) (results: Both groups increased in performance [Hawthorne Effect])

  • Other incentives payment incentives and rest pauses

  • Whatever experimentation was applied output went up

  • Mayo suggested the workers be interviewed to see what was going on

    • Workers attitudes actually played a role in productivity

  • Hawthorne Effect

Hawthorne Effect

• The change in behaviour that results from researchers paying attention to the workers (participants know they are being watched/researched, so they change their behaviour)

1960 Civil Rights ACt of 1964

• Mid 1960s the name changed from industrial psychology to industrial and organizational psychology

1900-1920

• 1903 - Walter Dill Scott publishes The Theory of Advertising

• 1911 - Walter Dill Scott publishes Increasing Human Efficiency in Business. Frederick Winslow Taylor publishes The Principles of Scientific Management

• 1913 - Hugo Munsterberg publishes Psychology and Industrial Efficiency

• 1917 - Journal of Applied Psychology first published

• 1918 - WWI provides I/O psychologists with the first opportunity for large-scale employee testing and selection

1920-1940

• 1945 - Society for industrial and Business Psychology established as Division 14 of the APA with 130 members

• 1951 - Marion Bills elected as first woman president of Division 14

• 1960 - Division 14 renamed as Society for Industrial Psychology, membership exceeds 700

1940-1960

• 1945 - Society for industrial and Business Psychology established as Division 14 of the APA with 130 members

• 1951 - Marion Bills elected as first woman president of Division 14

• 1960 - Division 14 renamed as Society for Industrial Psychology, membership exceeds 700

1960-1980

• 1963 - Equal Pay Act passed

• 1964 - Civil Rights Act passed. First issue of The Industrial-Organizational Psychologist published

• 1970 - Division 14 membership exceeds 1100

• 1971 - B.F. Skinner publishes Beyond Freedom and Dignity

• 1980 - Division 14 membership exceeds 1800

1980-2000

• 1982 - Division 14 renamed Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP)

• 1986 - SIOP holds first annual national conference separate from APA meeting

• 1989 - Supreme Court sets conservative trend and becomes more "employer friendly"

• 1990 - Americans with Disabilities Act passed. SIOP membership exceeds 2800

• 1991 - Civil Rights Act of 1991 passed to overcome 1989 conservative Supreme Court decisions

• 1997 - SIOP celebrates golden anniversary at its annual conference in St. Louis

• 2000 - SIOP membership exceeds 5700

2000-2020

• 2005 - Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) become more aggressive in fighting systematic discrimination

• 2008 - The journal Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice begins publication as an official journal of SIOP

• 2009 - Lily Ledbetter Fair Play Act  and Americans with Disabilities Act Amendment Act (ADAAA) passed

• 2010 - SIOP membership exceeds 8000

• 2013 - OFCCP issues new regulations affecting the hiring of military veterans and individuals with disabilities

• 2020 - SIOP membership exceeds 7500

 

Why Conduct Research?

• Answering questions and making decisions

• Research and everyday life

• Common sense is often wrong

Study

• Ideas

• Hypotheses - an educated prediction about the answer to a question

• Theories - systematic sets of assumptions regarding the nature and cause of particular events

• Examples

  • Does all this noise affect my employees’ performance? Idea or question

  • High levels of noise will increase the number of errors made in assembling electronic components. Hypothesis or prediction (What will happen?)

  • Noise causes a distraction, making it difficult to concentrate. Theory or explanation (Why it will happen?)

  • What employee recruitment source is best?

    • Employee referrals will result in employees who stay with the company longer than will the other recruitment methods.

    • 1. Realistic job preview theory 2. Differential recruitment-source theory 3. Personality similarity theory 4. Socialization theory

The Location of the Study

• Locations

  • Laboratory research (more controlled, more artificial, looking for the manipulation and how it changes the outcome)

  • Field research (more natural observation)

• Issues

  • Informed consent

  • Institutional review boards

• Not many differences in terms of outcomes, we observe both**

The Research Method to be Used

• Experiments

• Quasi-experiments

• Archival research

• Surveys

• Meta-analysis

Experiments

• Independent variable is manipulated {and}

• Subjects are randomly assigned to conditions

• Measure changes in the dependent variable

Quasi-Experiments

• Independent variable is not manipulated {or}

• Subjects are not randomly assigned to conditions

• Used when experiments are not practical or when manipulating a variable may not be ethical

• A study is a quasi-experiment rather than an experiment when

  • The independent variable is not manipulated {or}

  • Subjects are not randomly assigned to conditions

• Cannot determine cause-effect relationships

Independent and Dependent Variables

• Independent Variable

  • Experimental group

  • Control group

• Dependent Variable

Survey Design

• Questions are easy to understand

• Simple language

• Avoid hypothetical situations

• Keep questions relatively short in length

Increasing Response Rates (Anseel et al., 2010) in Surveys

• Notifying participants in advance that they will be receiving a survey

• Providing monetary or non-monetary incentives

• Personalizing the survey via an original signature or a cover letter

• Ensuring that survey responses will be anonymous by using identification numbers

• Having a university sponsor the survey

• Distributing the survey in person rather than through the mail

Where Do I Get My Subjects? Who Will Participate?

• Size

• Students vs "real world"

• Sampling Methods

Students vs "real world"

• Does it Matter?

  • If you were investigating whether the length of time it took for an employee to report sexual harassment (1 day versus 3 months) influenced jurors’ decisions, would students as subjects be different from having people from the community?

Sampling Methods

• Random sampling (everyone in the population should have the same chance of being in the study)

• Convenience (sample is selected based on proximity for convenience [people that are already right there])

• Random assignment

Running the Study

• Collect data

• Debrief

How do I Analyze my Data?

• Number will always be different

Significance

• Are they different by chance or by something true?

• Probability levels (p < 0.05)

Statistics Showing Relationship Correlation

• Does not show causation

• Intervening variable

• Correlation coefficient

  • Direction

    • Positive (variables change in the same direction [when one goes up the other goes up])

    • Negative (variables change in different directions [when one goes up the other goes down])