Overview
What is I/O Psychology?
Industrial/Organizational Psychology is a scientist-practitioner discipline within Psychology dealing with human behavior in the workplace. I/O Psychologists are:
- Scientists who derive principles of individual, group, and organizational behavior through research;
- Consultants and staff psychologists who develop scientific knowledge and apply it to the solution of problems at work; and
- Professors who train students in the research and application of I/O Psychology.
I/O Psychologists work on a variety of functional activities within organizations: selection and placement, training and development, organizational development and change, performance measurement and evaluation, quality of worklife, consumer psychology, human factors psychology, and more.
Last Spring an article about the I/O program at IUPUI came out in the IU
Research and Creative Activity publication. "How a Workplace Behaves" by Tracy James focuses on how to hire the best people for the job and how to deal with destructive influences at work. This article provides a clear representation of what the I/O psychology team strives for and how theory comes to life in the workplace.
To learn more about I/O Psychology, visit the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) web site.