Eduation & Training in I-O Psychology:  SIOP Presidents on Education and Training in I-O

David Costanza
The George Washington University

Jennifer Kissamore
University of Oklahoma-Tulsa

Over the past 2 years, our goal for the Education and Training column has been to focus on different models and approaches for the teaching of I-O psychology. Jennifer and I have tried to present a variety of ideas about how and where I-O psychology should be taught. Given the diversity of perspectives presented in these pages, it is obvious that there is no one agreed upon way to teach I-O. Although this variety of approaches has drawbacks in that it reflects some of the broader identity and definitional problems with which SIOP and its members are struggling, this diversity of perspectives is good for two reasons. First, the discussion of these issues itself indicates that SIOP and its members are thinking about them and committed to doing something about them. Reflection, self-assessment and continued development are good things. Second, I-O psychology has a diverse and multidisciplinary history and has always benefited from this diversity of perspective. That this diversity would be reflected in different ideas and approaches about the discipline and its teaching is not surprising. Thus, we would argue that such a debate about identity and definition of I-O was inevitable. What the previous columns and numerous other pieces in TIP have shown is that this discussion is, and should be, ongoing.

In this, our final column as E&T co-editors, Jennifer and I interviewed three SIOP presidents: the current President, Jeff McHenry, the immediate Past President, Leaetta Hough, and the President-Elect, Lois Tetrick, about these issues. Over the course of a fascinating and lively hour-and-a-half interview, these three discussed critical issues and shared their thoughts and opinions about the current and future states of the teaching of I-O psychology and the field in general. The full transcript of the interview extended over 15 pages!  What follows are key excerpts from that discussion. We have added information in brackets as needed for clarification. We thank Jeff, Leaetta, and Lois for their time, their thoughtful discussion, and their service to SIOP and its members.

E&T: When we first contacted the three of you about being interviewed for TIP, we sent you some sample questions. All three of you responded with some variation on: “Wow, those are really hard questions, let me think about it.” That suggests to us that these are very important issues that people are thinking about in SIOP. We want to start off by asking: Where should I-O psychology be taught? Should it be in psychology departments or elsewhere? Both?  If it were to go elsewhere, do we need to change our name?

Jeff: So you’re starting with an easy one? [laughter from all] Well, I have pretty strong feelings that we should be part of psychology. I think fundamentally that we are about individuals and understanding individuals in organizational settings. I think there are different types of variables that we might study, some at an organizational level, some at an individual level, some at a group level and between, but I still think we are passionate about understanding individuals and individual behavior and that makes us psychologists. I think we belong in psychology departments. The primary source of our theories, the primary source of our methodologies, all derived from a tradition in psychology. I would hate to see it move out of psychology.

Lois: I agree with Jeff. The day after I got your questions, I was having a meeting with the graduate committee and we were talking about different courses and when they were being offered. It came to me that what differentiates us [I-O psychologists] from a lot of other people that are doing management type things is that we do have a grounding in psychology and I think that is something that we need to keep.

Leaetta: I agree passionately with what both Jeff and Lois have said. But I don’t want us to preclude people from being in business schools as well. I do feel passionately that we need to stay in psychology. It is our foundation.

E&T follow-up:  Can we not be psychologists but in another department?  What about the Organizational Sciences program at UNC-Charlotte or I-O psychology in the business program at Tennessee, or my department [David’s department at GWU] where I-O psychology is in Organizational Sciences and Communication?
Leaetta: Yes, you as an individual can, but it becomes difficult to provide a full range of psychological training to students if you are not at least very closely aligned with the psychology department. And the reason, beyond the courses students take, is that they interact with graduate students in social and clinical, and other areas of psychology. If you are not closely aligned with a psychology department, I think those conversations are rare.

Jeff: I love the idea of I-O psychology being part of many different departments and I think that we can contribute using our methods and our theoretical base to the understanding of management, organizational behavior, organizational communication, and a wide variety of disciplines that are closely related. From a training perspective, I think it would be challenging, not impossible, but very challenging to have people trained in I-O psychology outside of a psychology department.

Lois: I agree 100%. Psychological foundation and training is critically important.

Jeff: And I love the idea that we have I-O psychologists who are deans of business schools. I think that is great so I don’t want to preclude any of that. I think that demonstrates the type of versatility of the field that we can bring our methodology to so many different problems that are very closely related.

E&T:  Obviously, there is a very strong sense that grounding in psychology is important to all three of you. So how does I-O then benefit from interdisciplinarity? And how does this in turn influence the field as well as the training of I-O psychologists?

Leaetta:  Interdisciplinarity makes us more broad minded and more aware and knowledgeable of the sciences. Our contributions and relevance to the workplace are greater by having a wider base.

Lois: There are two things suggested by this question. One is that in the training of students, it is good for them to be encouraged to take courses outside of psychology. These courses should be sufficiently different from psychology content so that they provide a working knowledge of the language of other areas, such as finance. The other is that the world is interdisciplinary. That means that I-O psychologists have to be able to communicate with people from different perspectives and different backgrounds. I think we have to start thinking about interdisciplinarity and encourage and cultivate people reading widely and taking advantage of working with others.

Jeff:  I think a lot of the creative ideas come out of the synergy from different disciplines coming together, and so although I still feel our fundamental training needs to be in psychology, I think some of the real breakthroughs that are possible in any discipline come when that discipline rubs against another discipline, sort of like the tectonic plates crashing into each other. You get an earthquake and you get an upheaval and new ideas.

I think that there’s a strong benefit to us being very aware of and very familiar with disciplines that are closely related to ours. If I think about the time I have been out of school, I-O psychologists have done a lot more to understand organizational psychology and change and organizational development, and I think that interdisciplinary work has influenced our field in a positive way.

Lois: Yes, the public and society benefit from work that is more relevant because of interdisciplinary efforts.

E&T: Based on the first two questions, there seems to be a disconnect between being grounded in psychology and trained as I-O psychologists but reaching out to other fields. How does that affect our identity, how we define ourselves, and how others view us?

Lois:  I don’t think it affects our identity. It is like saying I lose my identity if I interact with other people. I think it may actually strengthen my identity and/or broaden it.

Leaetta:  We do have an identity crisis, in terms of the public’s perception of us. Is that a problem? Should we be exclusive and parochial because we want people to know that they’re not us?

E&T: We’re not saying that we should be exclusive. It is an issue with what we should call ourselves because the public seems to not understand what I-O psychologists do.

Leaetta: That is partially because we haven’t done a good job of getting out there and being visible. Lawyers for example, have many different specialty areas and no one says “Gee, they have an identity problem.” I think we have just not done enough and we need to do more in terms of publicizing the wide variety of contributions that I-O psychology makes to society and the world.

Jeff: I do think that we have not done a good job of declaring publicly where we do have expertise and can bring that to bear. So, although I wouldn’t say we should be the only people who can do selection testing, for example, I think we ought to be pretty bold in claiming that we can do it better than anyone else. There are other areas where I think we can and should be equally bold and sort of staking our claim to expertise. We have not done that very well. I think that the public doesn’t have a very strong sense of where we contribute, and so that’s something we need to continue to work on. We have initiatives going on right now that are looking at that. It’s going to be a long time though before the public has an understanding of what an I-O psychologist does, the way they understand what an accountant does or what a lawyer does. Maybe what we need is a television show featuring I-O psychologists!

E&T: Is an answer to the identity question licensing? Do we need to certify I-O psychologists?

Lois: I don’t think licensing is the answer. I don’t know what the answer is. I do, in some sense, think that having some sort of certification or credentialing might help bring I-O psychology to a more visible front. The elephant in the room is the public perception of psychology being clinical psychology.

Jeff: I am intrigued by the notion of certification. What I don’t know is how will people in I-O psychology be certified? Will they certify in specific practice areas? These are open questions.

E&T: Now turning from the present then to the future, one pressing issue is I-O psychologists being trained as I-O psychologists and then going to teach in business schools. If you play that out to its morbid extreme, who ends up training the next generation of I-O psychologists if all the academics are in other departments? What can SIOP do in terms of the education aspect of our students to prevent that from happening?

Jeff: That’s a great question. There is something appealing about being in a psychology department that continues to be attractive to a large number of our members. It would be interesting to find out what some of those factors are. Where might we be at risk moving forward in terms of losing people? Is it all around cash, or is it something else that makes those jobs interesting?  What can SIOP do to continue to make those jobs attractive?

Leaetta:  What can SIOP do? That is really the heart of it. One of the issues of course is keeping I-O psychologists at a pay level that keeps them in psychology departments. And if you can do that, what does that do to the rest of the psychology department colleagues? What happens to collegiality when your colleagues make significantly more or less than you?

E&T: If you play it out, are we at risk of having just a limited number of I-O programs that do all of the training of academics? Then, all the other programs just produce practitioners? Does that risk making us homogenous and in-bred?

Jeff: I don’t know the answer to this. I really don’t. I do know that SIOP doesn’t have enough money to subsidize I-O program faculty [laughter from all].

Leaetta: One thing that some schools have been doing is fundraising to pay for endowed professorships and chairs. But again, what does that mean for the rest of their colleagues in the psychology department? Even if I-O programs are successful in fundraising, do you really want to be in a department that people don’t really want you there because you make so much more money?  I don’t know.

Lois:  Well, I’m sitting here in a psychology department. Money’s not everything.

Leaetta: That’s very, very true.

Lois: I do think there are some benefits of being in a psychology department that are sort of intangibles. One of the things that SIOP is doing that will indirectly help is pushing for more funding and grants in our areas because one way to supplement salary is through grants and/or contracts. So, that is one way that I think SIOP is starting to get that message through. Also, I do know at some universities at least, the more senior I-O people spend a lot of time consulting, which is essentially a way to equalize the salary imbalance but also provides them with good applied research for the things academics get rewarded for. However, this can be a double-edged sword because the faculty are not around as much as they should be. Maybe there is something SIOP can do to come up with guidelines for what is the appropriate amount of time faculty should be engaged in field research.

E&T: You make a really good point about the intangibles. Is there something SIOP could do in the training of doctoral students to accelerate the awareness of what other fields are doing and how they go about doing things and therefore make psychology more appealing?

Leaetta:  This is a possibility. There are benefits besides money in the colleagues and the kind of work you get to do, and that’s more important the longer you are in the field.

Lois: One thing that has kept a fair number of folks in psychology is that we have great graduate students. If you go to other places where you find I-O psychologists on faculty, they often times don’t have access to the graduate students to work with that we do in psychology. I think that is a real draw for a lot of people.

Leaetta: That is a very good point. Graduate students in psychology may have a greater interest in research and research orientation than those in other programs.

E&T: What is next for education and training in I-O?  What are your thoughts about I-O education for the next 10 or 15 years? What is the big unanswered question?

Jeff: I still think it is about the fundamentals. I think it is about really making sure that people come out of I-O programs with great methodological training, that they know how to do research, to interpret and analyze data. They know about measurement. More and more I think it is critical to show how technology can be used to aid in research. That’s probably part of methodological training that wasn’t there 25 years ago. There has been discussion that we need to train students more in the real world, how to consult, and how to teach effectively, and postgraduate school skills. It is interesting that I have been in a couple of different settings and had conversations with people about that. I think the feeling of at least people in practice settings is that these are things that can largely be trained on the job, through internship and other things. The thing that you can’t train people on, once they start working or teaching full time, is how to be a good researcher. They have to learn that in graduate school. So I think teaching the fundamentals is absolutely critical. I think the people coming out of graduate school with good fundamental training are going to continue to be those who are most in demand.

Leaetta: I agree with Jeff’s point about learning consulting skills somewhere other than graduate school. During graduate school there is barely enough time to work on the fundamentals. This may be an opportunity for SIOP to help students gain consulting skills outside the academic setting but within the culture of I-O psychology.

Lois: I think all of us who have been trained as psychologists have good methodological as well as theoretical preparation. At the same time, I think we need to make our curricula a little more flexible. I think academics have an inclination to think that since there is a new topic, there needs to be a course on it, but if students have to take all those courses, they will never finish. We need to think about how we can have our curriculum and structure more flexible so we don’t lose sight of the key things but that students also get some breath and avail themselves of interdisciplinary perspectives.

E&T: Thank you so much for taking the time to discuss these issues with us.

Lois: This was an interesting exercise. The questions were really tough and I thank you for making us think about them!

Leaetta: Thank you, David and Jennifer. The issues and questions you posed are critically important to I-O and SIOP and obviously merit much more discussion.

E&T: Our hope is that exchanges like this will advance our thinking about the critical issues facing I-O psychology.