Industrial-Organizational Psychology: Selection, Teams, Leadership, and Work Design
Psychology at Work
Work as a psychological system
Industrial-organizational psychology studies selection, training, motivation, teams, leadership, job design, and organizational justice. Its challenge is to optimize performance while preserving fairness, well-being, and legal and ethical standards.
Selection warning
High predictive validity is not sufficient if a selection process is unfair, opaque, or produces harmful disparate outcomes.
Selection and Prediction
Selection tools
Structured interview
- Improves reliability and validity
- Can be standardized
- Requires trained raters
Cognitive ability test
- Strong predictor of performance
- Efficient and scalable
- Must address fairness and adverse impact
Why are structured interviews generally preferred over unstructured interviews?
Structured interviews standardize questions and scoring, improving psychometric quality.
Correct answer: They provide greater reliability and predictive validity
What is organizational justice?
Justice perceptions influence commitment, trust, turnover, and performance.
Correct answer: Perceived fairness in procedures, outcomes, and interpersonal treatment.
Teams, leadership, and work design
Modern I-O research focuses on team cognition, psychological safety, distributed work, remote collaboration, and algorithmic management. An open frontier is understanding how AI systems reshape supervision, autonomy, performance monitoring, and employee identity.
Psychological safety refers to
Psychological safety supports learning, voice, and team adaptation.
Correct answer: the belief that one can speak up without fear of humiliation or punishment
Name one key tradeoff in work design.
Design decisions often involve performance, quality control, and employee well-being tradeoffs.
Correct answer: Balancing autonomy with coordination or standardization.