A little bit on Organizational Psychology

Organizational Psychology Defined


A company or organization behaves similar to the human body. Like doctors, company decision-makers need diagnostic information about their organization or entity within their organization. Diagnostic information is necessary prior to making decisions on how to run a company or organization. The following work discusses the meaning of organizational psychology along with its uses. This post paper also explores various applications and attempts to describe the utility of organizational psychology as a science.

What is Organizational Psychology?

Organizational Psychology is defined as a scientific study of individual and group behavior in formal organizational settings. Formal organizations are not only companies but also can be nonprofit organizations, military units, and even clubs and fraternal organizations. This science is part of a larger group called Industrial/Organizational Psychology. Industrial Psychology focuses on the classic Human Resources (HR) functions of the organization, such as performance appraisals, pay and compensation, hiring and firing, and training.

Organizational Psychology focuses on things like motivation, socialization, organizational development, leadership, and team dynamics. Each of these issues can help or impair a manager’s ability to run a company or an organization. Motivation is important, because organizational success relies on the individual workers doing their job well. Socializations and team dynamics are important because working in groups is often times more effective. Leadership is important because it is the foundation of any good company. Leadership is the soul of an organization.

Research and Statistics

Research is necessary because leadership teams cannot make good decisions about how to run a company or organization without accurate information. Making a decision without acquiring as much information as possible is tantamount to a Medical Doctor writing a prescription without asking any questions or running any tests. It is virtually equal to a car mechanic replacing parts, without diagnosing the actual problem.

As discussed above, leadership teams need information to make decisions. The quality of the information that the team receives, hinges upon the quality of the data collection methods, the accuracy of the analysis, and the quality of the report. Statistics make the research accurate because, typically statistical research is more structured and controlled, and therefore more valuable to a decision maker. Statistical research can also test specific correlations between organizational changes and employee sentiment and attitudes. Performing surveys at some periodicity is good for determining the health of the organization as well as the health trend of the organization. Sometimes, the trend in response rates can actually help determine a degrading culture. A lowering response rate from year to year, would be indicative of a loss of confidence in the ability of leadership to resolve problems that have been identified for years, but haven’t been addressed.

Organizational Psychology – What’s it for?

Simply put, Organizational Psychology can be used to help organizations perform better in two major ways. The first way is by researching and reporting on existing problems within the organization. The second is by solving the problems that were found during the research or other means. Some examples of problems to be solved are things like, safety culture, problems with working hours, lack of organizational focus, and overall employee morale. These problems can be addressed and solved by, leadership development, changes in compensation, team building, and restructuring of workflow. Jex and Britt (2008) discuss the process of “organizational development” in chapter 15 of the text. This process is what a practitioner can use to help an organization enact sweeping changes. The organizational development process gathers data from research, and works with the company to develop new structures, goals, and core processes.

Conclusion

Organization Psychology is a science that is used to study and improve organizations. Practitioners can help companies improve through the organizational development process. By performing organizational assessments, a company can determine where they are with respect to where they want to go. By performing leadership training and by developing employees, a company can improve their results, making them more competitive, increasing profits, and even improve employee morale and retention.



Jarrod Clavelle


References
Jex, S. M., & Britt, T. W. (2008). Organizational psychology: a scientist-practitioner approach (2nd ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc

Cooper, D. R., & Schindler, P. S. (2006). Business research methods (9th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw Hill/Irwin.