Industrial and organizational psychology

Industrial and organizational psychology (also known as occupational psychology, work psychology and business psychology) is the scientific study of human behavior in the workplace and applies psychological theories and principles to organizations and individuals in their workplace.

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Quotes are arranged alphabetically by author

• Social workers help people increase their capacities for problem solving and coping, and they help them obtain needed resources, facilitate interactions between individuals and between people and their environments, make organizations responsible to people, and influence social policies.
  • Barker (2003, p. 410), cited in Charles Zastrow The practice of social work. (1995) p. 2

• The study of human relations in business and the study of the technology of operating are bound up together.
  • Attributed to Mary Parker Follett in: Business: The Ultimate Resource, 2001. p. 904.

• Psychology of Management, as here used, means, the effect of the mind that is directing work upon that work which is directed, and the effect of this undirected and directed work upon the mind of the worker.
  • Lillian Gilbreth, (1914). Psychology of management. New York: Sturgis and Walton. p. 1

• By far the most difficult skill I learned as a C.E.O. was the ability to manage my own psychology. Organizational design, process design, metrics, hiring and firing were all relatively straightforward skills to master compared with keeping my mind in check.
  • Ben Horowitz "What’s The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology." at bhorowitz.com, March 31, 2011.

• In the most general sense, organizational psychology is the scientific study of individual and group behavior in formal organizational settings. Katz and Kahn, in their classic work, The Social Psychology of Organizations (1978), stated that the essence of an organization is “patterned” human behavior. When behavior is patterned, some structure is imposed on individuals. This structure typically comes in the form of roles (normative standards governing behavior) as well as a guiding set of values. An organization cannot exist when people just “do their own thing” without any awareness of the behavior of others.
  • Steve M. Jex, ‎Thomas W. Britt (2002). Organizational Psychology: A Scientist-Practitioner Approach. John Wiley & Sons, p. 2

• The role expectations held for a certain person by some member of his or her role set will reflect that member's conception of the person's office and his or her abilities. The content of these expectations may include preferences with respect to specific acts and personal characteristics or styles; they may deal with what the person should do, what kind of person he should be, what he should think, or believe, and how he should relate to others.
  • Robert L. Kahn, et al. Organizational stress: Studies in role conflict and ambiguity, 1964. p. 14

• Social organizations are flagrantly open systems in that the input of energies and the conversion of output into further energy input consists of transactions between the organization and its environment.
  • Daniel Katz & Robert L. Kahn (1966), The Social Psychology of Organizations. p. 16-17

• Reducing complexity by order formation is the number one skill needed by all leaders in the twenty-first century
  • Peter Kruse in: "Soft Values, Hard Facts" Google's Think Quarterly, March 2011.

• Conflict is viewed as the active striving for one's own preferred outcome which, if attained, precludes the attainment by others of their own preferred outcome, thereby producing hostility.
  • Rensis Likert, and Jane G. Likert. New ways of managing conflict. McGraw-Hill, 1976. p. 7.

• The more evolved and psychologically healthy people get, the more will enlightened management policy be necessary in order to survive in competition and the more handicapped will be an enterprise with an authoritarian policy.
  • Abraham Maslow The Maslow Business Reader.

• Luck is the residue of design.
  • Branch Rickey, as quoted in Psychology Applied to Work : An Introduction to Industrial and Organizational Psychology (1982) by Paul M. Muchinsky, p. 482; this has often become paraphrased as : "Luck is the residue of hard work and design".

• Managers today come up against a few more communication barriers. One is the pressure of time. Listening carefully takes time, and managers have little of that to spare. In today’s business culture especially, with its emphasis on speed, already pressed managers may give short shrift to the slower art of one-on-one communication.
  • Carl Rogers, and Fritz Roethlisberger. "Barriers and gateways to communication." Harvard Business Review, 1952.

• The capacity of the human mind for formulating and solving complex problems is very small compared with the size of the problems whose solution is required for objectively rational behavior in the real world—or even for a reasonable approximation to such objective rationality.
  • Herbert Simon (1957) Models of Man. p. 198

• Edgar H. Schein is considered one of the founders of the field of organizational psychology.
  • J. Thomas Wren (2013), The Leader's Companion: Insights on Leadership Through the Ages. p. 271

• Human relations movement
• Job performance
• Motivation
• Organizational theory
• Social psychology

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Industrial and organizational psychology