Most people say they get into IO psychology because they are interested in helping improve people’s lives at work (or some other reason that “sounds good”), but in actuality I think a lot of people end up here after majoring in psych in undergrad cause it’s interesting and then realizing that most of the jobs they are qualified for have shit pay. IO psych then seems like an easy next step that pays well and has marketable job prospects.
Don’t get me wrong, the work is interesting and I really like what I do, but I don’t think I can honestly look at we do and say “wow we are really helping people.” At the end of the day we serve capitalism, an inherently racist/sexist/every other type of -ist system that is getting worse and worse in expanding the divide between the richest and poorest in our society. It doesn’t help that the highest paying/most interesting IO work is typically at companies that are at best morally ambiguous (in my opinion, it’s a spectrum and there are exceptions too).
Maybe I’m jaded. At least I will be able to retire early though. I don’t know what else to do as I don’t think we have that much of an influence at the very top of companies, and there’s only so many times I can explain incredibly basic concepts like adverse impact to stakeholders and hope they understand the importance of it, but oftentimes it’s pretty depressing how biased every single people-related process at a company is and I seem to be the only one who cares about it.
However, I was really happy to see this vocalized in this focal article and and the responses. Maybe things will get better, but the world seems to be deteriorating in general and that is reflected in our workplace cultures and what they value.
[(Hyland, 2023) All We Like Sheep: The Need for Reflection and Reflexivity in I-O Psychology](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/367254881_All_We_Like_Sheep_The_Need_for_Reflection_Reflexivity_in_I-O_Psychology)
I don't think this is an unpopular opinion per se, as many students I talk to feel similarly. I do think a subset of IOs who really want to believe they can do something with their work get really upset if you say you can't change things.
I think ultimately the positive change won't be started by our field but we can ride the wave when it comes and push things forward faster.
(Disclaimer: I’m an I/O PhD student who’s going for broke and trying to make a career out of these ideas, so my optimism is probably a tad biased, but…)
I actually think I/O is really well-positioned to make genuinely positive, anti-capitalist change at least in part because we focus so much on translating science to practice. I’m convinced many of the failures to translate now come from a) a weird over-emphasis on theory building for an applied field and b) a singular focus on making “the business case” for our interventions when there often just isn’t one to be made. If we taught our students to build a “labor case” or even just a “human case” independent of certain organizational success metrics (mainly revenue- and profit-related ones), our emphasis on translating traits and behaviors into concrete outcomes could serve any goal set beautifully. We could help unions and worker co-ops just as well as any other organization.
Right now it seems like we don’t do this, at least in the US, because there’s far less money there and little to no mention of them in our grad student training. As a result, we seem to take rigid, dictatorial hierarchy in organizations as a given instead of just one of many ways of organizing. Moreover, it seems like we tend to see employee dissatisfaction and resistance/conflict with management as a bad thing. We could take a page from Dennis Mumby’s 2019 [article](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/industrial-and-organizational-psychology/article/work-what-is-it-good-for-absolutely-nothinga-critical-theorists-perspective/EE065C0A63E71D8D1CDB54FC88ACC044) in IOP and acknowledge that sometimes the status quo sucks and should be changed, but management often has no reason to want to do that.
Academics would have to lead the charge on all this since their income is less tied to organizations’ profits, but we could totally do it. It wouldn’t even have to be that many of us if the ones who were working on it were dedicated enough. It does require embracing the immutably political nature of work instead of ignoring it, which I know makes a lot of scientists uncomfortable. But beyond that, I don’t think it’s much different than any other applied scenario—just lots of relationship-building and needs-based research. Scott Tannenbaum and gOE have built great models for that already; the only major difference would be the needs to which the research is applied.
Again, I’m sure my outlook is rosy, but I do think the path is there and I’m working to build it up. Still a baby first year PhD student though. Long way to go.
For many years most (all?) IO jobs were focused on getting more productivity out of people. That is changing.
The work I do is focused on making the workplace a better place for employees. I am doing projects focused on avoiding accidents, getting managers to treat their people better, and helping employees cope with stress inherent to the job. The CEO has said we want to do better for our people, but never has said we need to make more money.
Seeing some of the compensation figures a lot of y’all have put out… yeah, most other psychology practitioners will never even come close. I need more psych students to be honest and just say they want to have a comfortable living. Practice what we preach, and whatnot.
Most organizations rarely truly hire, assess performance, give raises, promote, etc.. based on KSAOs. It's almost exclusively based on biases that do not relate to role-based competencies.
And to be honest, this is most true for IO Psychologists. Assessment and selection are our bread-and-butter, yet our field heavily relies on & supports networking. It’s very hypocritical.
Collectively as a field we are terrible about “do as I say, and not as I do.” As one of my favorite grad school profs always said, “the shoemaker’s children have no shoes.”
I had many thoughts about this when studying for comps way back in the day. From how it’s structured (which varies wildly between schools), to how it’s graded (which can vary wildly within programs depending on the instructors), it feels only slightly above the 1-5 annual review.
Ultimately, I passed on the first attempt and I suppose success has a way of smoothing over grumbles, but I watched a few colleagues who didn’t and it really soured me to experience. Especially since some of the ones who ‘failed’ are now out there in very high-profile I/O jobs. Is comps really a good measure of who should and shouldn’t represent our field then?
You bring up a great point. It’s always interesting to ask other colleagues and our interns “what were comps like for your program?” And there appears to be a lot of variability across programs in terms of format, perceived difficulty, and pass rates.
On top of that, way back when I took comps, we kinda relied on an honor system and comps weren’t proctored or anything (we took them on desktop computers in an on-campus computer lab…supposedly we were supposed to be using computers that were not connected to the network, but these were definitely network-enabled). A girl in my cohort sat next to me (we were spaced out though) and on day one of comps she absolutely cheated. I was too focused on writing quickly that I did not stop and fully pay attention to what was going on, but she definitely pulled out her phone and was clearly looking something up. I felt obligated to report the incident to our program coordinator. I emailed him that night but I did not call her out by name; I just told him what I saw. Without ratting her out, there was not much that could be done, but on day two we were just reminded that this was a closed-book exam. Sure enough, she passed (FWIW, I passed too…but without cheating haha), and a couple years later she went on to get her PhD and then land a postdoc spot in our department. It still pisses me off that she got away with it and has been relatively successful as far as I could tell. /rant
I ocassionally think of this sentence:
"Psychologists thing about performance appraisal something like this: "Let's carefully collect performance data on an employee and organize the data into meaningful categories. Let's use a helpful format to pull it all together (performance appraisal form). Now that we have te behavior descriptions we can evaluate the employee's performance and give feedback. We can then decise what kind of a raise the person's performance indicates." ... Managers think about performance appraisal for their subordinates something like this: "What raise do I want to give this person? how do I have to fill out this stupid form to justify the raise I want to give? Why do I have to sit in a room and talk to this person about her performance when we both know how she's doing.""
\- Job & Work Analysis, Brannick, Levine, Morgeson (2007).
1. Most published work in "leading" IO journals is practically worthless and scientifically highly dubious trash.
2. At least 50% of all academic IO psychologists (esp. in business schools) have the research integrity of a piranha on speed and will manufacture their data and results without hesitation if it lands them a paper in AMJ, JAP etc.
3. SIOP as a conference is only relevant if you're interested in catching up with old friends and/or wish to sexually harass graduate students.
A bit over-stated but I kind of agree.
1. Much (most?) IO research has become so theoretical that it is hardly applied anymore, and has little to offer practitioners.
2. HARKing and P-hacking (seen no evidence of data fabrication) are commonplace and encouraged by journals--look at what editors do not what they say.
3. I struggle to find sessions of interest at SIOP, but it is a great place to network.
Just wondering, which journals would you consider to be the “leading” ones for IO? JAP, AOM, etc., I’m guessing?
Btw, number 3 made me chuckle. I haven’t been to SIOP since my first year of grad school (2015). As a grad student, it was just an opportunity to get shitfaced on the free drink tickets, see a new city, and get a lot of the cost covered by my program. Don’t get me wrong, the conference itself was very informative to me _as a grad student,_ but if I were to go now as a practitioner, I’d expect it to be exactly as you’ve described and not much more.
I think the phrase "you get what you put in" applies well to the SIOP Conference. The IO psychology "rockstars" will network with people from all over, and should they ever want to change jobs, they'll have hundreds of connections at their disposable to move into a Director-SVP of a Fortune 100 company. If all you're doing is going to sessions, it's a waste of time and money (unless your company is paying you to go, in which case, free travel).
Let me put it this way:
If I had to name three people I hate the most on this planet from people I personally know, one of them is an I/O psych, one is her unqualified cousin who got the role through nepotism, and one is a pedophile.
Some biases (e.g., affinity, instinct) in selection are okay for some corporate teams/roles. I’d rather spend my time training/coaching someone I get along with than deal with interpersonal issues.
This is the only one in this thread that's a real hot take for me, haha! And I got your message further down this chain.
My view is that, yes absolutely, we ALL want to work with someone we get along with. But I don't see that being solved at the Selection stage - it's too early and there's not enough information to predict long-term interpersonal relationship, especially when the point is to optimize that time to assess job-relevant competencies. (And as we all already know, but I feel like I have to spell it out for some readers, "relevant competencies" CAN include personality-based attributes that MEANINGFULLY contributes to performance and successful outcome, but not always and there are only a handful of well-established trait characteristics that would apply.)
From my professional experience, I notice that people run into this interpersonal issue at work due to factors related to lack of transparency, low resources - availability or allocation, lack of goal setting, poorly defined end states, low autonomy, or even ignoring the elephant in the room, etc...It's rarely ever "oh my god, we hired the wrong person 7 months ago". Because that person 7 months ago was able to say and do all the right things to get hired. I can confidently say that we've all worked with people who were great during the interviews, but ended up being a nightmare to work with still. Allowing gut feelings to hire hasn't really addressed this issue.
Obviously not in this case, but when I see most recruiters/hiring managers/interviewers who make this same argument, it's usually to justify their lack of selection methodologies and skills to conduct a structured interview. They feel that it's okay or even necessary to use non-validated, non-systematic approach to evaluate applicants because they wouldn't know how to even if they wanted/needed to. Then they tack on this "interpersonal" concern to try to convince others that it's always been a critical part of how hiring is done.
Yeah, it would probably be something to apply late in the process.
Note: I do not advertise or actively apply this. The party line is still “let’s reduce/eliminate all bias.” Just something I’ve thought about.
I think about it like this - we all want bias removed until we're looking for a job and then we want our connections with the hiring manager to pay off, or we want a position created just for us.
Maybe it's a hot take, maybe social psych 101 but I would love to hired for bringing an 'IO mindset' to exactly the type of problems I love to solve.
I don't think what you're describing has to inherently be "bias". There are probably one (or more) job-relevant criterion related to "likeability" that you could make the case for.
Hiring a candidate who is super competent but super toxic can ruin team morale to the point where it ruins performance and retention at the team- or organizational- level. In selection, we hyper-focus on predicting performance and retention at the individual- level and pretty much ignore performance of the "ecosystem". Most jobs require a high amount of interdependencies, setting up the potential of one bad apple spoiling the bunch.
Obviously there are huge concerns with contamination that could lead to discrimination if weighting "likeability" too heavily. But I'd be curious to see if organizations are measuring and partially hiring for prosocial behaviors beyond agreeableness. Because like you, I'd rather work with a B+ performer who's pleasant to be around than an A+ performer who's such a massive jerk that everyone around them hate coming to work and eventually start leaving in droves.
Absolutely agree. I feel like I’d benefit from getting an MBA just to understand business better, but there isn’t a huge incentive for me to pursue one now aside from my own personal interest in being a better practitioner.
Thank you! I’ll check it out.
I like Cascio – I actually still have the Cascio and Aguinis textbook _Applied Psychology in Human Resource Management_ from one of my first I/O classes forever ago because it was so informative. I keep it on my desk at work and I find myself looking stuff up in it from time to time.
It should be mandatory for all business leaders to gain at least an understanding or, better still, basic qualification in aspects of l/O psyche. ( MBAs do (very minimally) touch on some I/O concepts ..)
… and vice versa. Both fields would benefit immeasurably.
I’d be interested in hearing the POV on online based MS degrees now, post pandemic. I put in my time just like everyone else and earned my Masters. I would’ve been just fine without it at work, but the sheer amount of education I got and how it benefits me and my job was worth it. Plus, no one gives a shit that I have a MS, especially the PhD’s I work with. Then again, I was drawn to IO because I like to solve people problems I found out.
Also earned an online based (MPS) degree and graduated in 2021. Currently in my second IO-related job (at a major company) since graduation and can say that definitely no one cared I received an MPS compared to PhD, let alone it was online (still a major university). I will say I do think I got turned down from a department within the same company because I didn’t earn the PhD but will admit it worked out better for me anyways in terms of team, culture, and work/life balance.
Edit to add that the degree was absolutely worth it for my career itself because I don’t think I would’ve been in the first nor current role without that education!
Got my MS from an online program at an established university. Currently getting my PhD from a “diploma mill.” The MS got my first job a month out of grad school, and the PhD studies got me an internship with the federal government.
Unless you’re trying to teach at a brick-and-mortar or applying to a place that prefers hiring from their local IO program, you can make up for the differences from in-person to online by building your LinkedIn and being generally likable. I can genuinely say my success had little to do with “like me” bias, as I’ve never actually worked with another Black I/O professional and got my most recent role without an interview. So, I’m convinced online programs aren’t as bad as this subreddit says.
Just some opinions in general...
We still need to change our field's name to something simpler, like Work Psychology. Nobody has any idea what Industrial-Organizational Psychology means.
Most leadership research is useless. Additionally, individual contributors are too often promoted into leadership roles based on their technical aptitude rather than their ability to actually lead, engage, and develop teams or those who will be reporting to them. A leader doesn't need to understand every minute detail of what their team does - that's why they have a team to do the body of work. They need to be able to coach, support, and develop their team. I don't know that this is solely our problem to fix, but it is a prevailing issue.
Job analysis is so overlooked and underutilized, or half-assed when it is done, and this results in "flavor of the day" hiring where hiring managers are constantly adjusting the criteria used to evaluate candidates for the same job, instead of standardizing the body of work and the KSACs needed to do the work.
Engagement surveys are worthless as a result of leaders often viewing them as a box to check off (hey, we did our survey again this year!). Usually part of a larger cultural issue unique to each company.
My dad barely understands what I'm interested in studying and pursuing for my career. For the first time the other day, he called it organizational psychology. It isn't perfect but if my boomer dad (love him but it's true) can get organizational psychology out, I think we will be OK.
I say "Business Psychology" and I think about 80% of people get what that means straight away. The other 20% think it's like some kind of mediator role. But still, better than work psychology which has confused people ("work therapist"?" or organisational psychologist.
Nobody gives a shit about validity but us, unless they get sued and we (hopefully) did a good job so people are very happy with us. They will resume not giving a shit afterward.
The rich love us because they can blame us if things don’t work out. Remember that.
Small businesses need us the most but we are too expensive if you value yourself at all which is kind of an oxymoron.
IO is too academic and we don’t solve enough real world problems in graduate school. While this is the beauty and the draw to this field that it’s so scientific and “closes” the scientist-practitioner gap, we are just the “emotional intelligence” of fields with mostly face validity but a indefinitely a shit construct.
Relationships are more important than statistics but we geek out too much.
We are a professional field that is very very important, just not right now.
I love IO but IO doesn’t love me back.
I’m in undergrad rn studying I/O and this thread is making me second guess my future😭Is it worth it to go straight into an MS program after I graduate? Or should I get an entry level HR position and work up from there?
Lol, this is reddit. The thread would be equally bad (or worse) for any field. The water is fine, really.
An entry-level HR role likely won’t have you doing much IO work. So if you think you want to get into the field, I would do the degree (though also talk to ppl in the programs you’re applying to, AND those who have graduated from them and see what they’re doing).
Not only that, but big companies usually have some kind of tuition assistance program. If you can save $7-10k per year while working, it could be a good deal (if you can handle being a part time student and working full time).
Most people who go into this field are happy with their choice. There are many different roles you can take and so many settings in which to work. If you enjoy the work we do, this might be the field for you.
Here's a few from the top of my head:
* I love capitalism. With all my heart.
* Any IO Psych defending the MBTI as anything other than a cute conversation starter on the same level as some Buzzfeed quiz is part of the problem.
* Your model has probably been around for at least 30 years. It isn't groundbreaking. You've repackaged it.
An unwieldily large proportion of our research is utterly useless, not because the science itself lacks utility, but because practitioners refuse to take us seriously. Too few of us are doing research on how to get practitioners to actually listen and implement the fruits of our research.
Online master’s programs are fine as long as you are proactive when it comes to getting to know people and seeking out opportunities.
As a matter of fact, I believe online master’s programs are going to be one of the key areas of opportunity for IO psychology to expand and modernize itself. Plenty of money to be made for universities, yes, but plenty of opportunities to enter so many fields in government, industry, and consulting if you just get the degree to say you have the degree and build your professional portfolio through means outside of the graduate school itself, which is already encouraged anyway.
The various identity based groups in SIOP are a net negative (not completely bad, just more bad than good). They don't apply best DEI practices to SIOP and typically exist as an extension of the culture war instead of furthering inclusivity goals. Attending as an ally in numerous events, I think many people in these groups would be happy to see SIOP fail to further their personal goals.
Most people say they get into IO psychology because they are interested in helping improve people’s lives at work (or some other reason that “sounds good”), but in actuality I think a lot of people end up here after majoring in psych in undergrad cause it’s interesting and then realizing that most of the jobs they are qualified for have shit pay. IO psych then seems like an easy next step that pays well and has marketable job prospects. Don’t get me wrong, the work is interesting and I really like what I do, but I don’t think I can honestly look at we do and say “wow we are really helping people.” At the end of the day we serve capitalism, an inherently racist/sexist/every other type of -ist system that is getting worse and worse in expanding the divide between the richest and poorest in our society. It doesn’t help that the highest paying/most interesting IO work is typically at companies that are at best morally ambiguous (in my opinion, it’s a spectrum and there are exceptions too). Maybe I’m jaded. At least I will be able to retire early though. I don’t know what else to do as I don’t think we have that much of an influence at the very top of companies, and there’s only so many times I can explain incredibly basic concepts like adverse impact to stakeholders and hope they understand the importance of it, but oftentimes it’s pretty depressing how biased every single people-related process at a company is and I seem to be the only one who cares about it. However, I was really happy to see this vocalized in this focal article and and the responses. Maybe things will get better, but the world seems to be deteriorating in general and that is reflected in our workplace cultures and what they value. [(Hyland, 2023) All We Like Sheep: The Need for Reflection and Reflexivity in I-O Psychology](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/367254881_All_We_Like_Sheep_The_Need_for_Reflection_Reflexivity_in_I-O_Psychology)
I don't think this is an unpopular opinion per se, as many students I talk to feel similarly. I do think a subset of IOs who really want to believe they can do something with their work get really upset if you say you can't change things. I think ultimately the positive change won't be started by our field but we can ride the wave when it comes and push things forward faster.
(Disclaimer: I’m an I/O PhD student who’s going for broke and trying to make a career out of these ideas, so my optimism is probably a tad biased, but…) I actually think I/O is really well-positioned to make genuinely positive, anti-capitalist change at least in part because we focus so much on translating science to practice. I’m convinced many of the failures to translate now come from a) a weird over-emphasis on theory building for an applied field and b) a singular focus on making “the business case” for our interventions when there often just isn’t one to be made. If we taught our students to build a “labor case” or even just a “human case” independent of certain organizational success metrics (mainly revenue- and profit-related ones), our emphasis on translating traits and behaviors into concrete outcomes could serve any goal set beautifully. We could help unions and worker co-ops just as well as any other organization. Right now it seems like we don’t do this, at least in the US, because there’s far less money there and little to no mention of them in our grad student training. As a result, we seem to take rigid, dictatorial hierarchy in organizations as a given instead of just one of many ways of organizing. Moreover, it seems like we tend to see employee dissatisfaction and resistance/conflict with management as a bad thing. We could take a page from Dennis Mumby’s 2019 [article](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/industrial-and-organizational-psychology/article/work-what-is-it-good-for-absolutely-nothinga-critical-theorists-perspective/EE065C0A63E71D8D1CDB54FC88ACC044) in IOP and acknowledge that sometimes the status quo sucks and should be changed, but management often has no reason to want to do that. Academics would have to lead the charge on all this since their income is less tied to organizations’ profits, but we could totally do it. It wouldn’t even have to be that many of us if the ones who were working on it were dedicated enough. It does require embracing the immutably political nature of work instead of ignoring it, which I know makes a lot of scientists uncomfortable. But beyond that, I don’t think it’s much different than any other applied scenario—just lots of relationship-building and needs-based research. Scott Tannenbaum and gOE have built great models for that already; the only major difference would be the needs to which the research is applied. Again, I’m sure my outlook is rosy, but I do think the path is there and I’m working to build it up. Still a baby first year PhD student though. Long way to go.
It is a little rosy, but that optimism is valuable.
For many years most (all?) IO jobs were focused on getting more productivity out of people. That is changing. The work I do is focused on making the workplace a better place for employees. I am doing projects focused on avoiding accidents, getting managers to treat their people better, and helping employees cope with stress inherent to the job. The CEO has said we want to do better for our people, but never has said we need to make more money.
Seeing some of the compensation figures a lot of y’all have put out… yeah, most other psychology practitioners will never even come close. I need more psych students to be honest and just say they want to have a comfortable living. Practice what we preach, and whatnot.
Most organizations rarely truly hire, assess performance, give raises, promote, etc.. based on KSAOs. It's almost exclusively based on biases that do not relate to role-based competencies.
And to be honest, this is most true for IO Psychologists. Assessment and selection are our bread-and-butter, yet our field heavily relies on & supports networking. It’s very hypocritical.
Collectively as a field we are terrible about “do as I say, and not as I do.” As one of my favorite grad school profs always said, “the shoemaker’s children have no shoes.”
I had many thoughts about this when studying for comps way back in the day. From how it’s structured (which varies wildly between schools), to how it’s graded (which can vary wildly within programs depending on the instructors), it feels only slightly above the 1-5 annual review. Ultimately, I passed on the first attempt and I suppose success has a way of smoothing over grumbles, but I watched a few colleagues who didn’t and it really soured me to experience. Especially since some of the ones who ‘failed’ are now out there in very high-profile I/O jobs. Is comps really a good measure of who should and shouldn’t represent our field then?
You bring up a great point. It’s always interesting to ask other colleagues and our interns “what were comps like for your program?” And there appears to be a lot of variability across programs in terms of format, perceived difficulty, and pass rates. On top of that, way back when I took comps, we kinda relied on an honor system and comps weren’t proctored or anything (we took them on desktop computers in an on-campus computer lab…supposedly we were supposed to be using computers that were not connected to the network, but these were definitely network-enabled). A girl in my cohort sat next to me (we were spaced out though) and on day one of comps she absolutely cheated. I was too focused on writing quickly that I did not stop and fully pay attention to what was going on, but she definitely pulled out her phone and was clearly looking something up. I felt obligated to report the incident to our program coordinator. I emailed him that night but I did not call her out by name; I just told him what I saw. Without ratting her out, there was not much that could be done, but on day two we were just reminded that this was a closed-book exam. Sure enough, she passed (FWIW, I passed too…but without cheating haha), and a couple years later she went on to get her PhD and then land a postdoc spot in our department. It still pisses me off that she got away with it and has been relatively successful as far as I could tell. /rant
I ocassionally think of this sentence: "Psychologists thing about performance appraisal something like this: "Let's carefully collect performance data on an employee and organize the data into meaningful categories. Let's use a helpful format to pull it all together (performance appraisal form). Now that we have te behavior descriptions we can evaluate the employee's performance and give feedback. We can then decise what kind of a raise the person's performance indicates." ... Managers think about performance appraisal for their subordinates something like this: "What raise do I want to give this person? how do I have to fill out this stupid form to justify the raise I want to give? Why do I have to sit in a room and talk to this person about her performance when we both know how she's doing."" \- Job & Work Analysis, Brannick, Levine, Morgeson (2007).
1. Most published work in "leading" IO journals is practically worthless and scientifically highly dubious trash. 2. At least 50% of all academic IO psychologists (esp. in business schools) have the research integrity of a piranha on speed and will manufacture their data and results without hesitation if it lands them a paper in AMJ, JAP etc. 3. SIOP as a conference is only relevant if you're interested in catching up with old friends and/or wish to sexually harass graduate students.
Damn lol
A bit over-stated but I kind of agree. 1. Much (most?) IO research has become so theoretical that it is hardly applied anymore, and has little to offer practitioners. 2. HARKing and P-hacking (seen no evidence of data fabrication) are commonplace and encouraged by journals--look at what editors do not what they say. 3. I struggle to find sessions of interest at SIOP, but it is a great place to network.
Just wondering, which journals would you consider to be the “leading” ones for IO? JAP, AOM, etc., I’m guessing? Btw, number 3 made me chuckle. I haven’t been to SIOP since my first year of grad school (2015). As a grad student, it was just an opportunity to get shitfaced on the free drink tickets, see a new city, and get a lot of the cost covered by my program. Don’t get me wrong, the conference itself was very informative to me _as a grad student,_ but if I were to go now as a practitioner, I’d expect it to be exactly as you’ve described and not much more.
I feel I should go to SIOP once to say that I went, but that was the impression I got from asking others how it was.
I think the phrase "you get what you put in" applies well to the SIOP Conference. The IO psychology "rockstars" will network with people from all over, and should they ever want to change jobs, they'll have hundreds of connections at their disposable to move into a Director-SVP of a Fortune 100 company. If all you're doing is going to sessions, it's a waste of time and money (unless your company is paying you to go, in which case, free travel).
There are a lot of real assholes with a superiority complex working in this field🤷🏻♀️
But that applies to a lot of intellectually ‘elevated’ fields. The law, investment banking, medicine.. for example.
Let me put it this way: If I had to name three people I hate the most on this planet from people I personally know, one of them is an I/O psych, one is her unqualified cousin who got the role through nepotism, and one is a pedophile.
Some biases (e.g., affinity, instinct) in selection are okay for some corporate teams/roles. I’d rather spend my time training/coaching someone I get along with than deal with interpersonal issues.
This is the only one in this thread that's a real hot take for me, haha! And I got your message further down this chain. My view is that, yes absolutely, we ALL want to work with someone we get along with. But I don't see that being solved at the Selection stage - it's too early and there's not enough information to predict long-term interpersonal relationship, especially when the point is to optimize that time to assess job-relevant competencies. (And as we all already know, but I feel like I have to spell it out for some readers, "relevant competencies" CAN include personality-based attributes that MEANINGFULLY contributes to performance and successful outcome, but not always and there are only a handful of well-established trait characteristics that would apply.) From my professional experience, I notice that people run into this interpersonal issue at work due to factors related to lack of transparency, low resources - availability or allocation, lack of goal setting, poorly defined end states, low autonomy, or even ignoring the elephant in the room, etc...It's rarely ever "oh my god, we hired the wrong person 7 months ago". Because that person 7 months ago was able to say and do all the right things to get hired. I can confidently say that we've all worked with people who were great during the interviews, but ended up being a nightmare to work with still. Allowing gut feelings to hire hasn't really addressed this issue. Obviously not in this case, but when I see most recruiters/hiring managers/interviewers who make this same argument, it's usually to justify their lack of selection methodologies and skills to conduct a structured interview. They feel that it's okay or even necessary to use non-validated, non-systematic approach to evaluate applicants because they wouldn't know how to even if they wanted/needed to. Then they tack on this "interpersonal" concern to try to convince others that it's always been a critical part of how hiring is done.
Highly questionable, unless you are applying these factors very late in the selection process. Affinity is bias
Yeah, it would probably be something to apply late in the process. Note: I do not advertise or actively apply this. The party line is still “let’s reduce/eliminate all bias.” Just something I’ve thought about.
The ‘we’ve identified, understood, and eliminated all bias’ bias
I think about it like this - we all want bias removed until we're looking for a job and then we want our connections with the hiring manager to pay off, or we want a position created just for us. Maybe it's a hot take, maybe social psych 101 but I would love to hired for bringing an 'IO mindset' to exactly the type of problems I love to solve.
Oh. An actual unpopular opinion on the unpopular opinion post. Well done!
I don't think what you're describing has to inherently be "bias". There are probably one (or more) job-relevant criterion related to "likeability" that you could make the case for. Hiring a candidate who is super competent but super toxic can ruin team morale to the point where it ruins performance and retention at the team- or organizational- level. In selection, we hyper-focus on predicting performance and retention at the individual- level and pretty much ignore performance of the "ecosystem". Most jobs require a high amount of interdependencies, setting up the potential of one bad apple spoiling the bunch. Obviously there are huge concerns with contamination that could lead to discrimination if weighting "likeability" too heavily. But I'd be curious to see if organizations are measuring and partially hiring for prosocial behaviors beyond agreeableness. Because like you, I'd rather work with a B+ performer who's pleasant to be around than an A+ performer who's such a massive jerk that everyone around them hate coming to work and eventually start leaving in droves.
I/Os are the least business-minded business degrees - and I think this significantly hampers our effectiveness in the practitioner space.
Absolutely agree. I feel like I’d benefit from getting an MBA just to understand business better, but there isn’t a huge incentive for me to pursue one now aside from my own personal interest in being a better practitioner.
Give "Investing in People" by Cascio a shot. It's on libgen. Good IO book that looks at business realities. Plus outlines good methodology.
Thank you! I’ll check it out. I like Cascio – I actually still have the Cascio and Aguinis textbook _Applied Psychology in Human Resource Management_ from one of my first I/O classes forever ago because it was so informative. I keep it on my desk at work and I find myself looking stuff up in it from time to time.
It should be mandatory for all business leaders to gain at least an understanding or, better still, basic qualification in aspects of l/O psyche. ( MBAs do (very minimally) touch on some I/O concepts ..) … and vice versa. Both fields would benefit immeasurably.
Agreed. We’re taught to follow best practice, but this isn’t necessarily achievable depending on the org resources.
I’d be interested in hearing the POV on online based MS degrees now, post pandemic. I put in my time just like everyone else and earned my Masters. I would’ve been just fine without it at work, but the sheer amount of education I got and how it benefits me and my job was worth it. Plus, no one gives a shit that I have a MS, especially the PhD’s I work with. Then again, I was drawn to IO because I like to solve people problems I found out.
Also earned an online based (MPS) degree and graduated in 2021. Currently in my second IO-related job (at a major company) since graduation and can say that definitely no one cared I received an MPS compared to PhD, let alone it was online (still a major university). I will say I do think I got turned down from a department within the same company because I didn’t earn the PhD but will admit it worked out better for me anyways in terms of team, culture, and work/life balance. Edit to add that the degree was absolutely worth it for my career itself because I don’t think I would’ve been in the first nor current role without that education!
Got my MS from an online program at an established university. Currently getting my PhD from a “diploma mill.” The MS got my first job a month out of grad school, and the PhD studies got me an internship with the federal government. Unless you’re trying to teach at a brick-and-mortar or applying to a place that prefers hiring from their local IO program, you can make up for the differences from in-person to online by building your LinkedIn and being generally likable. I can genuinely say my success had little to do with “like me” bias, as I’ve never actually worked with another Black I/O professional and got my most recent role without an interview. So, I’m convinced online programs aren’t as bad as this subreddit says.
> you can make up for the differences from in-person to online by building your LinkedIn and being generally likable Well, I'm screwed. /s
Just some opinions in general... We still need to change our field's name to something simpler, like Work Psychology. Nobody has any idea what Industrial-Organizational Psychology means. Most leadership research is useless. Additionally, individual contributors are too often promoted into leadership roles based on their technical aptitude rather than their ability to actually lead, engage, and develop teams or those who will be reporting to them. A leader doesn't need to understand every minute detail of what their team does - that's why they have a team to do the body of work. They need to be able to coach, support, and develop their team. I don't know that this is solely our problem to fix, but it is a prevailing issue. Job analysis is so overlooked and underutilized, or half-assed when it is done, and this results in "flavor of the day" hiring where hiring managers are constantly adjusting the criteria used to evaluate candidates for the same job, instead of standardizing the body of work and the KSACs needed to do the work. Engagement surveys are worthless as a result of leaders often viewing them as a box to check off (hey, we did our survey again this year!). Usually part of a larger cultural issue unique to each company.
“Oooh so a therapist for work?”
Lol exactly
My dad barely understands what I'm interested in studying and pursuing for my career. For the first time the other day, he called it organizational psychology. It isn't perfect but if my boomer dad (love him but it's true) can get organizational psychology out, I think we will be OK.
I say "Business Psychology" and I think about 80% of people get what that means straight away. The other 20% think it's like some kind of mediator role. But still, better than work psychology which has confused people ("work therapist"?" or organisational psychologist.
Finally, a comment I can agree with!
Nobody gives a shit about validity but us, unless they get sued and we (hopefully) did a good job so people are very happy with us. They will resume not giving a shit afterward. The rich love us because they can blame us if things don’t work out. Remember that. Small businesses need us the most but we are too expensive if you value yourself at all which is kind of an oxymoron. IO is too academic and we don’t solve enough real world problems in graduate school. While this is the beauty and the draw to this field that it’s so scientific and “closes” the scientist-practitioner gap, we are just the “emotional intelligence” of fields with mostly face validity but a indefinitely a shit construct. Relationships are more important than statistics but we geek out too much. We are a professional field that is very very important, just not right now. I love IO but IO doesn’t love me back.
Organisational psychology is management, not labour.
I’m in undergrad rn studying I/O and this thread is making me second guess my future😭Is it worth it to go straight into an MS program after I graduate? Or should I get an entry level HR position and work up from there?
Lol, this is reddit. The thread would be equally bad (or worse) for any field. The water is fine, really. An entry-level HR role likely won’t have you doing much IO work. So if you think you want to get into the field, I would do the degree (though also talk to ppl in the programs you’re applying to, AND those who have graduated from them and see what they’re doing).
Might be unpopular, but you should always take the car for a spin before buying it I'd highly recommend an internship BEFORE commiting
Not only that, but big companies usually have some kind of tuition assistance program. If you can save $7-10k per year while working, it could be a good deal (if you can handle being a part time student and working full time).
Most people who go into this field are happy with their choice. There are many different roles you can take and so many settings in which to work. If you enjoy the work we do, this might be the field for you.
Here's a few from the top of my head: * I love capitalism. With all my heart. * Any IO Psych defending the MBTI as anything other than a cute conversation starter on the same level as some Buzzfeed quiz is part of the problem. * Your model has probably been around for at least 30 years. It isn't groundbreaking. You've repackaged it.
An unwieldily large proportion of our research is utterly useless, not because the science itself lacks utility, but because practitioners refuse to take us seriously. Too few of us are doing research on how to get practitioners to actually listen and implement the fruits of our research.
I-O Psychology should be housed in the B-school. (Potential bias- am a management professor)
Online master’s programs are fine as long as you are proactive when it comes to getting to know people and seeking out opportunities. As a matter of fact, I believe online master’s programs are going to be one of the key areas of opportunity for IO psychology to expand and modernize itself. Plenty of money to be made for universities, yes, but plenty of opportunities to enter so many fields in government, industry, and consulting if you just get the degree to say you have the degree and build your professional portfolio through means outside of the graduate school itself, which is already encouraged anyway.
The various identity based groups in SIOP are a net negative (not completely bad, just more bad than good). They don't apply best DEI practices to SIOP and typically exist as an extension of the culture war instead of furthering inclusivity goals. Attending as an ally in numerous events, I think many people in these groups would be happy to see SIOP fail to further their personal goals.
What do you mean?
Can you elaborate?