Industrial and organizational psychology "focuses the lens of psychological science on a key aspect of human life, namely, their work lives. In general, the goals of I-O psychology are to better understand and optimize the effectiveness, health, and well-being of both individuals and organizations." It is an applied discipline within psychology and is an international profession. I-O psychology is also known as occupational psychology in the United Kingdom, organisational psychology in Australia and New Zealand, and work and organizational (WO) psychology throughout Europe and Brazil. Industrial, work, and organizational (IWO) psychology is the broader, more global term for the science and profession.
Work design is an area of research and practice within industrial and organizational psychology, and is concerned with the "content and organization of one's work tasks, activities, relationships, and responsibilities" (p. 662). Research has demonstrated that work design has important implications for individual employees, teams, organisations, and society.
Anger management is a psycho-therapeutic program for anger prevention and control. It has been described as deploying anger successfully. Anger is frequently a result of frustration, or of feeling blocked or thwarted from something the subject feels is important. Anger can also be a defensive response to underlying fear or feelings of vulnerability or powerlessness. Anger management programs consider anger to be a motivation caused by an identifiable reason which can be logically analyzed and addressed.
In industrial and organizational psychology, organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) is a person's voluntary commitment within an organization or company that is not part of his or her contractual tasks. Organizational citizenship behavior has been studied since the late 1970s. Over the past three decades, interest in these behaviors has increased substantially.
Relational aggression, alternative aggression, or relational bullying is a type of aggression in which harm is caused by damaging someone's relationships or social status.
Onboarding or organizational socialization is the American term for the mechanism through which new employees acquire the necessary knowledge, skills, and behaviors to become effective organizational members and insiders. In standard English, this is referred to as "induction". In the United States, up to 25% of workers are organizational newcomers engaged in onboarding process.
Greenberg (1987) introduced the concept of organizational justice with regard to how an employee judges the behavior of the organization and the employee's resulting attitude and behaviour. For example, if a firm makes redundant half of the workers, an employee may feel a sense of injustice with a resulting change in attitude and a drop in productivity.
Emotional exhaustion is symptom of burnout, a chronic state of physical and emotional depletion that results from excessive work or personal demands, or continuous stress. It describes a feeling of being emotionally overextended and exhausted by one's work. It is manifested by both physical fatigue and a sense of feeling psychologically and emotionally "drained".
Counterproductive norms are group norms that prevent a group, organization, or other collective entities from performing or accomplishing its originally stated function by working oppositely to how they were initially intended. Group norms are typically enforced to facilitate group survival, to make group member behaviour predictable, to help avoid embarrassing interpersonal interactions, or to clarify distinctive aspects of the group’s identity. Counterproductive norms exist despite the fact that they cause opposite outcomes of the intended prosocial functions.
Human performance technology (HPT), also known as human performance improvement (HPI), or human performance assessment (HPA), is a field of study related to process improvement methodologies such as organization development, motivation, instructional technology, human factors, learning, performance support systems, knowledge management, and training. It is focused on improving performance at the societal, organizational, process, and individual performer levels.
Occupational health psychology (OHP) is an interdisciplinary area of psychology that is concerned with the health and safety of workers. OHP addresses a number of major topic areas including the impact of occupational stressors on physical and mental health, the impact of involuntary unemployment on physical and mental health, work-family balance, workplace violence and other forms of mistreatment, psychosocial workplace factors that affect accident risk and safety, and interventions designed to improve and/or protect worker health. Although OHP emerged from two distinct disciplines within applied psychology, namely, health psychology and industrial and organizational psychology, for a long time the psychology establishment, including leaders of industrial/organizational psychology, rarely dealt with occupational stress and employee health, creating a need for the emergence of OHP. OHP has also been informed by other disciplines, including occupational medicine, sociology, industrial engineering, and economics, as well as preventive medicine and public health. OHP is thus concerned with the relationship of psychosocial workplace factors to the development, maintenance, and promotion of workers' health and that of their families. The World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization estimate that exposure to long working hours causes an estimated 745,000 workers to die from ischemic heart disease and stroke in 2016, mediated by occupational stress.
Contextual performance is defined as the activities that employees carry out to contribute to the social and psychological functionality of an organisation. It is a component of an individual's job performance. There is a perspective proficiency in a specific task is not sufficient and employees may be selected based on their competencies that may contribute to the wider functionality of an organisation.
Work engagement is the "harnessing of organization member's selves to their work roles: in engagement, people employ and express themselves physically, cognitively, emotionally and mentally during role performances". Three aspects of work motivation are cognitive, emotional and physical engagement.
Counterproductive work behavior (CWB) is employee's behavior that goes against the legitimate interests of an organization. This behavior can harm the organization, other people within it, and other people and organizations outside it, including employers, other employees, suppliers, clients, patients and citizens. It has been proposed that a person-by-environment interaction (the relationship between a person's psychological and physical capacities and the demands placed on those capacities by the person's social and physical environment.) can be utilized to explain a variety of counterproductive behaviors. For instance, an employee who is high on trait anger is more likely to respond to a stressful incident at work with CWB.
Civic virtue is one of the five dimensions of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) identified in Dennis Organ's prominent 1988 definition of the construct. Originally, Smith, Organ, and Near (1983) first proposed two dimensions: altruism and general compliance. Later, Organ (1988) deconstructed the dimension of general compliance and added additional dimensions of OCB. This resulted in a five-factor model consisting of altruism, courtesy, conscientiousness, sportsmanship, and civic virtue.
Positive psychology is defined as a method of building on what is good and what is already working instead of attempting to stimulate improvement by focusing on the weak links in an individual, a group, or in this case, a company. Implementing positive psychology in the workplace means creating an environment that is more enjoyable, productive, and values individual employees. This also means creating a work schedule that does not lead to emotional and physical distress.
Adaptive performance in the work environment refers to adjusting to and understanding change in the workplace. An employee who is versatile is valued and important in the success of an organization. Employers seek employees with high adaptability, due to the positive outcomes that follow, such as excellent work performance, work attitude, and ability to handle stress. Employees, who display high adaptive performance in an organization, tend to have more advantages in career opportunities unlike employees who are not adaptable to change. In previous literature, Pulakos and colleagues established eight dimensions of adaptive performance.
Personal initiative (PI) is self-starting and proactive behavior that overcomes barriers to achieve a goal. The concept was developed by Michael Frese and coworkers in the 1990s.
Job crafting is an individually-driven work design process which refers to self-initiated, proactive strategies to change the characteristics of one's job to better align the job with personal needs, goals, and skills. Individuals engage in job crafting as a means to experience greater meaning at work, a positive work identity, better work-related well-being, and better job performance. As a topic of scientific inquiry, job crafting was built on research that suggests employees do not always enact the job descriptions that are formally assigned to them, but instead actively shape and utilize their jobs to fit their needs, values, and preferences. Classic job design theory typically focuses on the ways in which managers design jobs for their employees. As a work design strategy, job crafting represents a departure from this thinking in that the redesign is driven by employees, is not negotiated with the employer and may not even be noticed by the manager. This idea also distinguishes job crafting from other 'bottom-up' redesign approaches such as idiosyncratic ideals (i-deals) which explicitly involve negotiation between the employee and employer.
Sharon Kaye Parker is an Australian academic and John Curtin Distinguished Professor in organisational behaviour at Curtin University. Parker is best known for her research in the field of work design, as well as other topics such as proactivity, mental health and job performance. She is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Organisational Psychology, and in 2016 received the Kathleen Fitzpatrick Australian Laureate Fellowship. Parker's research has been cited over 28,000 times internationally and she has been recognised as one of the world's most influential scientists in the 2019 Highly Cited Researchers list by Clarivate, as well as the 2020 World's Top 2% Scientists list by Stanford University.
