INDUSTRIAL/ORGANIZATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY

Fundamental Concepts of Industrial/Organizational Psychology

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Fundamental Concepts of Industrial/Organizational Psychology

Introduction

Industrial/Organizational psychology is an exciting field and has become one of the major applied specialties in psychology world. I/O psychology has two aspects. First, it is the science of people at work. This aspect studies the psychology of human, such as social and cognitive. Second, I/O psychology is the application of psychological principles prevailing in organizational work settings. These aspects of psychology are further explained in the paper, that how society can benefit from the study of I/O psychology (Spector, 2008).DiscussionEvolution of industrial/organizational psychology

Aamodt (2009) in 1960s several laws focused attention to HR professionals on the development of efficient and fair hiring techniques. As a result, the need for I/O psychologists greatly increased. Then in 1970s many organizational psychology issues were catered that involved employee satisfaction and motivation.

The 1990s brought four changes in the field of I/O psychology. The first one involved the development of complex statistical techniques for analysis. It is evident if we compare the I/O psychology articles published in 1960s from articles published in 1990.

A second change involves the new application of cognitive psychology to industry. Performance appraisal used to only describe the methods to evaluate employee performance. In early, 1990s the approach to performance appraisal was examined by the thought process which was conducted by managers.

The third change in this field was the development of interest in the effects of work on family life and leisure activities. The stress had been a common topic in the field of psychology but, employee stress was never been addressed before.

The fourth and final change was that the I/O psychologists took a great deal of interest in developing methods to hire employees, as the laws of selecting employees became less strict. Various selection instruments were developed, like cognitive ability ...