Organizational and Institutional Psychology

Action regulation theory is a meta-theory on the regulation of goal-directed behavior. The theory explains how workers regulate their behavior through cognitive processes, including goal development and selection, internal and external orientation, planning, monitoring of execution, and feedback processing. Moreover, action regulation theory focuses on the links between these cognitive processes, behavior, the objective environment, and objective outcomes. The action regulation process occurs on multiple levels of action regulation, including the sensorimotor or skill level, the level of flexible action patterns, the intellectual or conscious level, and the meta-cognitive heuristic level. These levels range from unconscious and automatized control of actions to conscious thought, and from muscular action to thought processes. Action regulation at lower levels in this hierarchy is more situation specific and requires less cognitive effort than action regulation at higher levels. Workers further develop action-oriented mental models that include long-term cognitive representations of input conditions, goals, plans, and expected and prescribed results of action, as well as knowledge about the boundary conditions of action and the transformation procedures that turn goals into expected results. The accuracy and level of detail of such action-oriented mental models is closely associated with the efficiency and effectiveness of action regulation. One of three foci can be in the foreground of action regulation: task, social context, or self. A task focus is most strongly associated with high efficiency and effectiveness of action regulation, because it links task-related goals with relevant plans, behavior, and feedback. Action regulation theory has been applied to understand several phenomena in the field of industrial, work, and organizational psychology, including proactive work behavior, work-related learning and error management, entrepreneurship, occupational strain and well-being, reciprocal influences between personality and work, innovation, teamwork, career development, and successful aging at work.

The population is aging in most industrialized nations around the world, and this trend is anticipated to continue well into the future. This demographic shift impacts the workforce in that the average age of workers is increasing, and the workplace is becoming more age diverse, meaning different generations of employees are working side by side now more than ever before. Increasing age diversity can be problematic if misguided age-related attitudes, biases, and behaviors lead to ageism—the stigmatization of, and discrimination against, people based on age. Evidence of the impact of ageism in the workplace is being observed in increasing age-related discrimination claims as well as increased time for older people to find employment. Workplace ageism manifests from cognitive, affective, and behavioral components. Age stereotypes are associated with the cognitive component, age-related prejudice is related to the affective component, and age discrimination is aligned with the behavioral component. There is an abundance of research identifying age-related stereotypes and it is thought that these stereotypes influence how workplace decisions are made. Age-related prejudice research indicates that older workers are generally viewed more negatively than younger workers which can result in lower performance appraisals or older workers’ receiving harsher consequences for lower performance. Finally, age-discrimination research has identified that older workers struggle to find employment, to receive training and development opportunities, and to advance their careers. Although the majority of research on workplace ageism has focused on older individuals, younger workers also face challenges related to their age and this is a line of research that needs further exploration. Nevertheless, the accumulating evidence supports claims that workplace ageism has wide-ranging effects on individuals, groups/teams, organizations, and society.

The proportion of older people in the industrialized workforce is increasing owing to the aging of the baby-boom generation, improved health in industrialized countries, changing retirement laws, need for additional income by older workers, and entry of fewer younger people into the workforce in some countries. This “graying” trend of the workforce raises a number of issues such as the needs, motivation, job attitudes, and behaviors of older workers; how to manage age diversity issues at work; late career issues; and preparing the worker and the organization for retirement. Specifically, older worker issues as a research topic includes work-relevant changes taking place within individuals as they age (e.g., physical, cognitive, and personality changes); how older workers are affected by their physical and social environments; the sources of age stereotyping and discrimination and how to combat them; and how these factors affect outcomes such as older workers’ well-being, health, attitudes, motivation, performance, and desire to continue working.

At the end of the 20th century, psychologists reacted to what they perceived as a negative bias in their field by launching the positive psychology movement. This movement had influential effects on organization studies; much scholarly attention was devoted to studying positive organizational phenomena. The article provides a brief, selective introduction to some of the developments resulting from the early-21st century focus on positive work and organization (PWO) studies. Findings of PWO are described in six different domains: psychological capital, organizational virtue, positive relationships, leadership, positive states and outcomes, and positive practice. The article also describes some outstanding challenges and promising directions for future development, including the nature of positivity, construct clarity, and the risks of co-optation.

A starting point in examining job burnout is determining its definition. The burnout syndrome of exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy is at times distilled into a synonym for exhaustion, leading to some confusion in the research literature. Another critical issue is burnout as a clinical issue requiring treatment for individuals or burnout as a management problem requiring changes in the organization of work and workplaces. Considering burnout as a problem in the relationship of people with workplaces opens additional possibilities for action. Intervention research evaluating systems for alleviating or preventing burnout continue to be rare in the research literature. Furthermore, these studies are largely focused on building individual capacity to endure or thrive in workplaces rather than changing conditions that aggravate exhaustion, cynicism, or inefficacy.

The field of career studies primarily focuses on understanding people’s lifelong succession of work experiences, the structure of opportunity to work, and the relationship between careers and work and other aspects of life. Career research is conducted by scholars in a variety of disciplines, including psychology, management, and sociology. As such, it covers multiple levels of analysis and is informed by different theoretical frameworks, ranging from micro (i.e., individual) to macro (e.g., organizational, institutional, cultural). The most dominant theoretical perspectives that have been mobilized in career research are boundaryless and protean career theory, career construction theory, and social cognitive career theory. Other perspectives that have increasingly been adopted include sustainable careers, kaleidoscope careers, psychology of working theory, and theories from related disciplines, such as conservation of resources theory and social exchange theory. Key topics in the field of career studies include career self-management, career outcomes (e.g., career success, employability), career transitions and shocks, calling, and organizational career management. Research at the micro level with outcomes on the individual level has been dominant in the early 21st century, predominantly focusing on understanding individual career paths and outcomes. Thereby, however, contextual factors as either further important predictors or boundary conditions for career development are also considered as important research topics.

Communication serves a constitutive force in making organizations what they are. While communication can be viewed as merely occurring “within” the organization, communication itself is essential to the creation and maintenance of organizations. Modern research in organizational communication explores this constitutive force of communication as well as the ways downward, upward, and lateral communication patterns determine positive and negative outcomes for both organizations and their members. Supportive, adaptive, and ethical downward communication from organizational leadership enhances members’ productivity and satisfaction while reducing turnover. In addition, candid upward communication from members to management is crucial for detecting and correcting troubles while they remain small and resolvable. Lateral communication through which members make sense of organizational events is key to understanding members’ perceptions, decisions, and behaviors. Finally, new information communication technologies both enable distributed work but also create new and troubling issues for modern work life.

Creativity at work has long been acknowledged as a source of distinct competitive advantage as organizations seek to harness the ideas and suggestions of their employees. As such, it is not surprising that a considerable amount of research has accrued over the last 30 to 40 years in this field. Most commonly defined as the production of novel and useful ideas, research on creativity at work has focused on identifying different individual as well as contextual factors that shape employee creativity. This research has been driven by many different theoretical frameworks. Some of them focus on creativity as an outcome variable and suggest employee skills, expertise, and intrinsic motivation as the key drivers of employee creativity. The organizational context in terms of support and resources for creativity is also suggested as playing an important role in employee creative output according to these frameworks. Other models have considered creativity more from the process perspective, arguing that creativity involves a set of different stages that lead to creative output. These models focus on different creativity-related behaviors that employees engage in to generate novel and useful ideas, such as problem formulation, preparation or information gathering, idea generation, and idea evaluation. More recent developments in the field suggest that creativity could best be captured as both a process and an outcome of employee endeavors to improve their own work roles, team processes, and outcomes, and as a result, the overall organizational effectiveness. Drawing upon these different frameworks, a considerable amount of research has explored different individual and contextual antecedents of creativity at work. However, although this is a vibrant research area with a potential to contribute significant implications for different stakeholders, including employees, work teams, businesses, and wider societies, much more research is needed to address the complex interplay of various factors at different levels of analyses that impact creativity at work. Also, many questions remain to be answered in terms of how different ways of working, in increasingly global and diverse organizations, influence creativity in the workplace.

For the first half century of industrial, work, and organizational psychology’s (IWOP’s) existence, the role of culture has been ambiguous at best. Attention to culture in IWOP started to take form in the 1970s, and in the last 20 years culture has begun to be integrated into IWOP research more generally. This integration has led to explorations of culture in the workplace far beyond the initial focus on organizational management theories and practices to looking at cultures’ relationships with all aspects of organizational and employee experiences. Most cross-cultural studies in IWOP research clearly show the importance of understanding societal culture’s impact on organizations, institutions, work, and workers. Merely transferring existing theories and practices of IWOP to new contexts without a clear understanding of whether those theories and practices make sense across cultures is unlikely to be successful. Through globalization and the multiculturalization of workforces, employees are increasingly interacting with people of varying cultural backgrounds on a far more regular basis than in the past. This change has spurred attention to how culture has impacted theories, research, and practices in some key IWOP theoretical domains, including leadership; occupational safety, stress, and health; precarious and decent work; trust and trustworthiness; and diversity, equity, and inclusion in the multinational organization.

Dark Triad personality traits in the workplace comprise the traits narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. The Dark Triad, and its relationships with individual and organizational variables, has received increasing attention in organizational behavior research. These three traits share a lack of concern for others but also have idiosyncratic attributes. Narcissism is characterized by a sense of entitlement and self-absorption. Machiavellianism comprises a focus on instrumentality and willingness to engage in manipulation. Psychopathy, possibly the darkest of the three traits, renders individuals callous, impulsive, and displaying antisocial behavior. While Dark Triad traits may be adaptive in some regards (e.g., narcissism facilitates leadership emergence), the majority of empirical findings point to the damage that individuals high in those traits can do to other organizational members and effective organizational functioning.

People with disabilities have more problems in finding adequate employment than people without disabilities. In most countries, the law requires that people with disabilities have equal rights and opportunities to find a job. However, in the various stages of finding a job—selection and recruitment, hiring, and employment—there are hindrances that place people with disabilities in a disadvantaged position. There are various options in the application process (i.e. ‘open hiring’), or offering accommodations in the workplace that can help to overcome the barriers people with disabilities face. Making changes to the work processes and job design is a form of ‘workplace accommodations’ that can help to create a better fit between requirements of the job and the capabilities and competences of applicants with a disability. This generally works best if the focus is on human resources related problems and needs in organizations, and it is explored to what extent people with disabilities or chronic diseases can be part of the solution to these organizational human resources-related problems.

Diversity in the workplace, with a central focus on gender, sexual orientation, age, ethnicity, (dis)ability, and religious belief, has become a major issue in organizations worldwide since the 1990s. How these different diversity dimensions are defined and constructed, as well as by whom and in what context, determines organizational practices. In turn, this determines the transformation of organizations from exclusive to inclusive ones. The workplace is one context of social interaction, in which dimensions of diversity become highly relevant and visible. Depending on the organization’s perspective toward diversity in a managerial context, individual differences between employees can create value and foster innovation and creativity, or can lead to conflict. How diversity is constructed and reproduced within diversity management and inclusion determines how employees feel accepted and included and, thus, how they are able to realize their potential and to contribute to the organization’s vision and aims. However, legitimizing initiatives that foster diversity in the workplace only with potential profits it might generate – called the business case for diversity – and forgetting its roots in the moral case, has shortcomings and potential drawbacks on the aims of diversity management and inclusion. Research on diversity in the workplace can be found in different forms. Generally, there are two main groups. Mainstream diversity literature works within the positivist research tradition and focuses mostly on the performance aspects of diverse workforces by conducting quantitative empirical studies. Critical diversity literature aims at promoting social justice by deeply understanding, criticizing and developing possible solutions. Both research streams have contributed to comprehend diversity in the workplace, realize its potentials and support marginalized groups.

Beginning in the 1980s, interest in studying emotions in organizational psychology has been on the rise. Prior to 2003, however, researchers in organizational psychology and organizational behavior tended to focus on only one or two levels of analysis. Ashkanasy argued that emotions are more appropriately conceived of as spanning all levels of organizational analysis, and introduced a theory of emotions in organizations that spans five levels of analysis. Level 1 of the model refers to within-person temporal variations in mood and emotion, which employees experience in their everyday working lives. Level 2 refers to individual differences in emotional intelligence and trait affectivity (i.e., between-person emotional variables). Level 3 relates to the perception of emotions in dyadic interactions. Level 4 relates to the emotional states and process that take place between leaders and group members. Level 5 involves organization-wide variables. The article concludes with a discussion of how, via the concept of emotional intelligence, emotions at each level of the model form an integrated picture of emotions in organizational settings.

Business scandals in the early 2000s gave renewed rise to the question of how companies can be led ethically. Correspondingly, research on ethical leadership focuses on leaders as moral persons—but even more so as moral managers. This focus came with a more general shift within many Western societies toward issues of sustainability, social justice, and well-being, and it has simultaneously given rise to the development of related constructs such as servant, respectful, and authentic leadership. In general, ethical leadership research has contributed to a necessary debate about leaders’ roles and responsibilities. Nonetheless, recent meta-analyses and critical reviews have criticized the minimal to nonexistent incremental value of the current operationalization of ethical leadership beyond other leadership concepts, underscored the philosophically all too simplistic notion of ethics underlying the concept, and highlighted its construct redundancy with the domain of follower-focused leadership. As such, there appear to be fruitful avenues for further honing the construct and its operationalization so that research can meaningfully inform leadership practice.

Adequately appreciating any area of applied ethics necessarily begins with indispensable foundations from moral philosophy and moral psychology, which are the bases for understanding normative ethical principles. (Otherwise, one could be reduced to the rote memorization of a near-infinite list of “dos and don’ts.”) Personal and social values also are critical as they shape people’s conceptions of ethics and morality. (For example, what constitutes a harm or a wrong? What is the right thing to do?) Traditionally in moral philosophy there have been three ways of answering those normative questions: from deontology (determining what is permissible based on absolutist ethical principles of right and wrong); consequentialism (assessing which alternative is best because it produces the greatest good [or least harm] for all those affected); and virtue theory (being virtuous). Yet, they have all been shown to have weaknesses. For example, what happens when principles are contradictory? What counts as a good? Who determines what is a virtue? And situations sometimes lend themselves more readily to one or another approach, so prudence suggests understanding and being prepared to use all. A person experiences an ethical problem when faced with a choice that challenges one or more of their ethical principles, with potential significant impact on the well-being of others. Professionals often experience ethical dilemmas, which entail having to make uncomfortable choices—choices one would rather not have to make at all. It helps to be able to recognize the form or structure of the dilemma (e.g., contemplating a self-serving act that will harm others). What makes the situation painful is that the person is motivated to some appreciable degree to “do the right thing” (otherwise they wouldn’t be experiencing a “dilemma”). Professionals such as work and organizational psychologists (WOPs) encounter a variety of ethical challenges in the different venues in which they work—as educators, researchers, practitioners, and administrators. Recent empirical survey data concerning ethical situations experienced and reported by WOPs have become available, illustrating that variety. The process of ethics education and training ought to entail becoming familiar with one or more of the several decision-making models for facilitating ethical reasoning that are available in the professional literature.

Evidence-based practice originated in medicine in response to a science-practice gap and an overreliance on clinical expertise in clinical decision-making. The same gap persists in other fields including in management, work, and organizations. Incorporating evidence-based practice in these fields will enable more critical thinking and more trustworthy evidence usage from multiple sources, and provide a more structured approach to decision-making and practice. An evidence-based approach in organizations is needed to reduce uncertainty, de-bias managerial decision-making and judgment, reduce the uncritical emulation of “best practice,” and ameliorate the impacts of advice and prescriptions from management gurus and consultants. However, surprisingly few business schools’ leadership and management development programs are evidence-based or teach evidence-based practice in their curricula. While evidence-based practice is more prolific in industrial and organizational psychology as an allied field to management, it too has room for growth. Building on existing work, a more encompassing capabilities framework for evidence-based decision-making and practice (EDMP) in organizations, management, and allied fields including industrial and organizational psychology is proposed. This framework can be used to develop leadership and management curricula and help promote an understanding in academia and the broader business community of the limitations of the dominant “craft” model of logic and practice in organizations that results in uncritical emulation, decision neglect, and action bias.