EDP 812 Module 1 The History of I/O Psychology Example

A Century of Studying Work: What I/O Psychology's History Offers a Contact Center

Student Name

Doctor of Education Program, Aspen University

EDP 812: Foundations of Industrial and Organizational Psychology

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

A Century of Studying Work: What I/O Psychology's History Offers a Contact Center

The contact center at a composite regional credit union in Boise, Idaho, employs about eighty member service representatives. Each year, about a third leave, many within six months of starting. Gabriel, the credit union's organizational development specialist and a doctoral student, noticed that hiring managers still choose representatives through unstructured conversations about "fit." He began asking what industrial and organizational psychology, a field that has studied hiring for more than a century, could offer. Gabriel and his employer are invented for teaching; what follows traces the field's history with his question in mind.

The Founding Years

Katzell and Austin (1992) traced the development of industrial and organizational psychology in the United States. In its first period, from about 1900 to World War I, psychologists applied the new experimental psychology to business problems: Walter Dill Scott studied advertising and the selection of salespeople, and Hugo Münsterberg, at Harvard, published Psychology and Industrial Efficiency in 1913, arguing that psychology could match workers to jobs, improve working conditions and influence consumers.

A Founder Reassessed

Landy (1992) examined why Münsterberg, despite his central role, was largely forgotten for decades. Münsterberg had laid out much of the agenda of the field, including the use of tests for selection and attention to fatigue and monotony. But he was an outspoken supporter of Germany before and during World War I, which made him unpopular in the United States, and his colleagues distanced themselves from him after his death in 1916. Landy concluded that Münsterberg was both a victim of his time and a visionary whose ideas anticipated the field's development. The reassessment is a reminder that histories of a field are shaped by who was remembered and why.

Testing and the World Wars

Katzell and Austin (1992) described World War I as a turning point. Psychologists led by Robert Yerkes developed the Army Alpha and Army Beta tests and used them to classify more than a million recruits, demonstrating that large-scale testing was feasible. After the war, consulting firms and university programs grew. World War II brought a second expansion, with psychologists developing selection and classification systems, training programs and studies of equipment design.

The Human Relations Turn

Between the wars, the Hawthorne studies at Western Electric's Hawthorne Works near Chicago drew attention to social factors at work. Studies originally designed to examine lighting and rest pauses were interpreted as showing that attention, group norms and supervision affected productivity. Katzell and Austin (1992) noted that the studies helped shift the field toward human relations, although later scholars questioned their methods and interpretations.

The Organizational Turn

From the 1950s and 1960s, the field broadened from individual selection and training toward organizations: motivation, leadership, job satisfaction and organizational development. Civil rights legislation and fair employment law in the 1960s and 1970s made the validity and fairness of selection methods a legal as well as scientific question. In 1973, the American Psychological Association division adopted the name Industrial and Organizational Psychology, reflecting the change (Katzell & Austin, 1992).

A Century of Selection Research

Schmidt and Hunter (1998) summarized eighty-five years of research on selection methods using meta-analysis. Tests of general mental ability had the highest validity of any single method for predicting job performance. Several methods added predictive value when combined with them, including work sample tests, integrity tests and structured interviews. Unstructured interviews were less valid than structured ones. Their summary represents the culmination of the thread that began with Scott and Münsterberg: selection as a measurable, improvable process.

What the History Means for the Credit Union

The history shows that the credit union's hiring problem is not new and that the field has developed tools for it, including job analysis, structured interviews and work samples. It also shows why evidence often fails to reach practice: hiring has always been shaped by managers' beliefs about fit, and the human relations tradition reminds us that people's experience of a process matters alongside its validity. Gabriel's task is therefore both scientific and organizational: to bring a century of evidence into a process that managers trust.

Revisiting the Hawthorne Story

The Hawthorne studies are among the best-known episodes in the field's history, and also among the most debated. The popular account holds that productivity rose whatever the researchers changed, because workers responded to being studied. Later scholars reanalyzed the data and questioned this reading, pointing to changes in personnel, pay incentives and the economic pressures of the Depression that could explain the results. Katzell and Austin (1992) presented the studies as a turning point in the field's attention to social factors, and that influence is real whatever the original data showed. For Gabriel, the lesson is double: supervision and group norms do matter for retention, and a field's founding stories deserve the same scrutiny as its current claims.

Law, Society and the Research Agenda

The field's agenda has always responded to outside pressures. War created demand for testing. The labor relations of the 1930s supported interest in human relations. Fair employment law from the 1960s required employers to show that selection methods were related to the job and did not unfairly exclude protected groups, and this pressure drove research on validity and fairness (Katzell & Austin, 1992). The credit union's unstructured interviews carry a risk the history makes plain: methods based on managers' sense of fit are harder to defend if challenged and more open to bias than structured methods based on job analysis.

Conclusion

Katzell and Austin's history traces the field from early testing through the human relations and organizational turns, Landy's reassessment shows how its founding story was shaped and Schmidt and Hunter's summary shows where selection research has arrived. For the credit union, the history offers tools and a warning: evidence alone does not change practice.

References

Katzell, R. A., & Austin, J. T. (1992). From then to now: The development of industrial-organizational psychology in the United States. Journal of Applied Psychology, 77(6), 803-835. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.77.6.803

Landy, F. J. (1992). Hugo Münsterberg: Victim or visionary? Journal of Applied Psychology, 77(6), 787-802. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.77.6.787

Schmidt, F. L., & Hunter, J. E. (1998). The validity and utility of selection methods in personnel psychology: Practical and theoretical implications of 85 years of research findings. Psychological Bulletin, 124(2), 262-274. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.124.2.262