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.
Group psychotherapy or group therapy is a form of psychotherapy in which one or more therapists treat a small group of clients together as a group. The term can legitimately refer to any form of psychotherapy when delivered in a group format, including art therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy or interpersonal therapy, but it is usually applied to psychodynamic group therapy where the group context and group process is explicitly utilized as a mechanism of change by developing, exploring and examining interpersonal relationships within the group.
William Schutz was an American psychologist.
Organization development (OD) is the study and implementation of practices, systems, and techniques that affect organizational change. The goal of which is to modify a group's/organization's performance and/or culture. The organizational changes are typically initiated by the group's stakeholders. OD emerged from human relations studies in the 1930s, during which psychologists realized that organizational structures and processes influence worker behavior and motivation.
Social learning is a theory of learning process social behavior which proposes that new behaviors can be acquired by observing and imitating others. It states that learning is a cognitive process that takes place in a social context and can occur purely through observation or direct instruction, even in the absence of motor reproduction or direct reinforcement. In addition to the observation of behavior, learning also occurs through the observation of rewards and punishments, a process known as vicarious reinforcement. When a particular behavior is rewarded regularly, it will most likely persist; conversely, if a particular behavior is constantly punished, it will most likely desist. The theory expands on traditional behavioral theories, in which behavior is governed solely by reinforcements, by placing emphasis on the important roles of various internal processes in the learning individual.
Goal setting involves the development of an action plan designed in order to motivate and guide a person or group toward a goal. Goals are more deliberate than desires and momentary intentions. Therefore, setting goals means that a person has committed thought, emotion, and behavior towards attaining the goal. In doing so, the goal setter has established a desired future state which differs from their current state thus creating a mismatch which in turn spurs future actions. Goal setting can be guided by goal-setting criteria such as SMART criteria. Goal setting is a major component of personal-development and management literature. Studies by Edwin A. Locke and his colleagues, most notably, Gary Latham have shown that more specific and ambitious goals lead to more performance improvement than easy or general goals. Difficult goals should be set ideally at the 90th percentile of performance,assuming that motivation and not ability is limiting attainment of that level of performance. As long as the person accepts the goal, has the ability to attain it, and does not have conflicting goals, there is a positive linear relationship between goal difficulty and task performance.
Developmental robotics (DevRob), sometimes called epigenetic robotics, is a scientific field which aims at studying the developmental mechanisms, architectures and constraints that allow lifelong and open-ended learning of new skills and new knowledge in embodied machines. As in human children, learning is expected to be cumulative and of progressively increasing complexity, and to result from self-exploration of the world in combination with social interaction. The typical methodological approach consists in starting from theories of human and animal development elaborated in fields such as developmental psychology, neuroscience, developmental and evolutionary biology, and linguistics, then to formalize and implement them in robots, sometimes exploring extensions or variants of them. The experimentation of those models in robots allows researchers to confront them with reality, and as a consequence, developmental robotics also provides feedback and novel hypotheses on theories of human and animal development.
Cooperative learning is an educational approach which aims to organize classroom activities into academic and social learning experiences. There is much more to cooperative learning than merely arranging students into groups, and it has been described as "structuring positive interdependence." Students must work in groups to complete tasks collectively toward academic goals. Unlike individual learning, which can be competitive in nature, students learning cooperatively can capitalize on one another's resources and skills. Furthermore, the teacher's role changes from giving information to facilitating students' learning. Everyone succeeds when the group succeeds. Ross and Smyth (1995) describe successful cooperative learning tasks as intellectually demanding, creative, open-ended, and involve higher-order thinking tasks. Cooperative learning has also been linked to increased levels of student satisfaction.
Kurt Lewin was a German-American psychologist, known as one of the modern pioneers of social, organizational, and applied psychology in the United States. During his professional career Lewin applied himself to three general topics: applied research, action research, and group communication.
Meta-learning is a branch of metacognition concerned with learning about one's own learning and learning processes.
Sensitivity training is a form of training with the goal of making people more aware of their own goals as well as their prejudices, and more sensitive to others and to the dynamics of group interaction.
Kurt Lewin founded the National Training Laboratories Institute for Applied Behavioral Science, known as the NTL Institute, an American non-profit behavioral psychology center, in 1947. NTL became a major influence in modern corporate training programs, and in particular developed the T-groups methodology that remains in place today. Lewin died early on in the project, which was continued by co-founders Ron Lippitt, Lee Bradford, and Ken Benne, among others. The NTL Institute produced or influenced other notable and influential contributors to the human relations movement in post-World War II management though, notably Douglas McGregor, Chris Argyris, Edgar H. Schein, and Warren Bennis.
Practice is the act of rehearsing a behavior repeatedly, to help learn and eventually master a skill. The word derives from the Greek "πρακτική" (praktike), feminine of "πρακτικός" (praktikos), "fit for or concerned with action, practical", and that from the verb "πράσσω" (prasso), "to achieve, bring about, effect, accomplish".
Maintenance actions, historically referred to as socio-emotive actions, are those leadership actions taken by one or more members of a group to enhance the social relationships among group members. They tend to increase the overall effectiveness of the group and create a more positive atmosphere of interaction within the group.
Dynamic decision-making (DDM) is interdependent decision-making that takes place in an environment that changes over time either due to the previous actions of the decision maker or due to events that are outside of the control of the decision maker. In this sense, dynamic decisions, unlike simple and conventional one-time decisions, are typically more complex and occur in real-time and involve observing the extent to which people are able to use their experience to control a particular complex system, including the types of experience that lead to better decisions over time.
Human Systems Intervention (HSI) is the design and implementation of interventions in social settings where adults are confronted with the need to change their perspectives, attitudes, and actions. Depending on the philosophical and theoretical orientation of the intervener, the process can be approached as a planned, systematic, and collaborative activity.
William James Reddin also known as Bill Reddin was a British-born management behavioralist, theorist, writer, and consultant. His published works examined and explained how managers in profit and non-profit organizations behaved under certain situations and conditions. The focus of his work was to understand to what extent managers were effective in their role and successful in managing situations to have the right impact on the organization's objectives.
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.
The interpersonal gap is a model of communication developed by John L. Wallen, an educator and a pioneer in the fields of emotional intelligence and interpersonal communication. As Chinmaya and Vargo state in their 1979 paper on Wallen "Many people who conduct interpersonal relations laboratories have been influenced by the ideas of John Wallen, a social psychologist from Portland, Oregon. He has written a number of papers which identify the sources of difficulty in communication. In these writings, Wallen focuses on the process of communication, not the underlying motives, drives, traits, attitudes, or personality characteristics of the individual. Wallen's ideas are easily understandable to laymen and professional alike."
Samuel A. Culbert is a professor at UCLA Anderson School of Management, in the fields of organizational theory and applied behavioral science. He is known for his "trans-organizational" research methodology commentaries on workplace dynamics, identification of mismanagement practices, and theories on the sources of workplace-induced alienation.
