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| L to R; Back row: Scott Cassidy, Patricia Grabarek, Shin-I Shih, Lily Cushenbery, Christian Thoroughgood; Front row: Amie Skattebo, Katina Sawyer, Rachel Hoult, Joshua Fairchild |
TIP-TOPics: Cross-Disciplinary Research With Engineering and Information Sciences and Technology
Typically, when considering areas to research, we begin by looking either at what has already been done or what has been recommended within our own field. This certainly provides a viable jumping-off point for research, as there are certainly many topics to cover within the field of industrial-organizational psychology and plenty of depth within these areas, but such an approach may exclude many relevant research questions. There are many related content areas that can shed light on how people perform at work, which are not traditionally addressed within I-O literature. As a field that studies people at work, we should not limit ourselves to topics that have been widely explored and should be willing to branch out into such unexplored territory.
An excellent approach to doing so is to seek out and collaborate with scholars from other disciplines. Such collaboration can enable us to branch out, gain new perspectives, and pursue ideas that may be especially interesting or novel. This can in turn shed light on human and organizational processes that our field might otherwise overlook.
The following sections seek to provide some more insight into what to expect from such collaborations and what we as I-O psychologists can hope to gain from them. In particular, through firsthand accounts, we will examine the personal experiences of two graduate students at Penn State.
Collaborating With Engineering
Joshua Fairchild
Pennsylvania State University
My recent personal research experience has been heavily shaped by such a collaboration with professors and graduate students in the field of engineering. I first became interested in this field, and how it may relate to our own, when I was trying to better understand how technology impacts people at work, particularly in terms of creative performance. We live in a world where technology pervades every aspect of our lives, including work, so it seemed natural to want to examine its effects on the workplace. However, very early on, I hit an impasse; outside of a few specialized areas, there just wasn’t much literature on technology within the field of I-O. In fact, a recent review of 20 years of literature on technology implementation found that less than 10% of such literature was in psychology journals at all (Rizzuto & Reeves, 2007).
It has only been recently, through working on a cross-disciplinary grant with the College of Engineering at Penn State, that I began to step outside of my comfort zone and learn about interaction with others who can provide new insight and a fresh perspective on how technology influences the cognitive, behavioral, and social processes in a work setting. Specifically, we are examining how novel engineering technology can be used to facilitate creative performance in design teams. Such a collaboration is challenging for many of the same reasons it is rewarding; it requires exposing oneself to an unfamiliar body of literature, replete with terms and ideas that may not be intuitive to someone without a background in the area. I encountered this personally the first time I opened an article from an engineering journal and encountered calculus in the literature review.
Building an understanding of such unfamiliar literature and tying it back into what our field studies has required frequent communication with students and professionals within engineering, both for help in putting the literature in context and in devising effective ways to test the phenomena described. This latter point is crucial; within psychology, we typically don’t have the tools, experience, or knowledge to conduct highly technical, design-based studies, such as I am working on in my collaboration with engineering. Were I to investigate technology and creativity in teams in a traditional psychological study, I would likely have to run an abstracted lab study, which, although often acceptable, would have reduced the fidelity of the study and perhaps limited the conclusions I could draw from it.
Also, by collaborating with engineers, I have been able to tap into others’ expertise that likely falls outside of what is available within the discipline of I-O psychology. As psychologists, we often have our own frameworks for structuring our approach to studies, or interpreting findings, but it may often be the case that information in other fields can likely help flesh out these frameworks.
For instance, we have numerous creative process models in psychology, which can certainly be applied to studying creative problem solving in teams (as I am currently doing), but engineering and related disciplines have their own models describing creative performance, often focused on the technical side or not incorporating what we in psychology study. For example, Schneiderman (1998, 2007) and Hewett (2005) have examined how technology can enhance creative performance but without incorporating what we as psychologists know about creative processes. Cross-disciplinary collaboration enables us to integrate such related but unnecessarily segregated bodies of literature to gain a more complete picture of the phenomena we want to study.
However, in interacting and collaborating across disciplines, it’s essential to remember that terminology or ideas that seem second nature to us might be entirely foreign to the other party. Interacting and effectively exchanging information requires a willingness to meet with others and remaining in frequent contact. In my short time collaborating with engineers, I have provided my peers with articles from our own journals, explained key psychological concepts, and broken complex topics down into easily digestible concepts. This alone is a vital skill to have, and I value the experiences I have had that allow me to practice it. Being able to clearly and concisely explain the topics in one’s own research area is essential in professional and academic communication, and also helps to build one’s own expertise in the field.
On the other hand, for as much as I find that I need to explain our concepts to the engineers with whom I’m collaborating, it’s at least as often that I need to ask for clarification on the topics they study. Such areas as human–computer interaction, design visualization, and functional modeling in design are often foreign concepts in psychology, and it is only through frequent discussion with experts, asking questions, watching demonstrations, and requesting examples that I have been able to get a better understanding of the cross-disciplinary phenomena we are studying. Throughout this year, I have probably spent more time reading engineering and design studies journals than I have psychology ones, but far from being a wasted effort, I have found connections and insight relating to my own research interests, which would have remained hidden were I not engaging in such a cross-disciplinary collaboration.
Collaborating With Information Sciences and Technology
Shin-I Shih
Pennsylvania State University
In this next segment, I am going to share some of my experiences working with researchers in the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) here at Penn State. I have been working as a research assistant in the Computer Supported Collaboration and Learning (CSCL) Lab of IST for over a year. The experiences of working with researchers from an area other than I-O psychology have been pleasant, special, and rewarding.
The project that I am involved in focuses on design of software to support collaborative information analyses tasks. A campus-theft scenario consisting of 300 pieces of information was designed to be used throughout the three stages of the project. The participants work in a three-person team to solve a series of campus thefts and predict a future theft. In the first stage, participants work on the task without the supports of computer software. The interaction among team members will be analyzed and serve as the basis for the software design in the following stages.
Researchers working on this project have various backgrounds including experimental and cognitive psychology, educational psychology, I-O psychology, and computer science. Each of them brings a different perspective to team collaboration. For example, a cognitive psychologist would be interested in the way in which team knowledge-building processes develop as teams collaborate. Researchers with computer science backgrounds pay more attention to the artifacts that each team created. Through analyses, they are able to design software to support individual and team knowledge-building processes. As a student in I-O psychology, I am interested in how this team knowledge-building process can be influenced by team members’ characteristics and team processes (e.g., communication and psychological safety).
Before joining this research project, I asked myself what unique knowledge and skills I have and can bring to this project. Now I ask myself this question again. I think there are three main knowledge/skills that an I-O psychologist can contribute to this type of project: (a) skills in designing experimental scenario, (b) knowledge learned in macro I-O psychology, and (c) skills in scale development and survey design.
At the beginning of the project, I worked on constructing the scenario/task with the project team. Scenarios and tasks are frequently used in I-O psychology research. Therefore, one thing I could contribute was to make sure that the scenario/tasks were engaging to the participants and had proper design and structure. Also, connecting topics learned in macro I-O psychology (e.g., team composition/diversity, team processes, motivation, and leadership) with team collaboration will enrich the research findings of the project. Last, with skills in designing measures and surveys, I am able to study some of the research questions of interest by adopting or developing measures and, more importantly, making sure the measures are concise, reliable, and valid.
I also learned from working with these researchers from different areas. For example, in the current stage of the project, the interactions of team members are recorded during the lab session. These video recordings and artifacts created by team members need to be qualitatively analyzed, which requires me to learn a whole new set of research skills.
There are three challenges that I see for researchers involved in interdisciplinary research. First, people in different departments or programs have a different work style. They might have different pacing preferences in terms of work. Furthermore, the way they talk or e-mail might be different from what we are used to. Adjustment and coordination are definitely necessary to move the project forward. Second, as Josh mentioned, being able to explain our I-O jargon in plain English is also important for effective communication among team members with different research backgrounds. Third, working with people in other areas takes time. You may feel a little disconnected from the I-O program. If you plan on doing cross-disciplinary research, make sure you save enough time to spend with your dearest I-O friends!
Concluding Remarks
In conclusion, we discussed our experiences working with researchers in other disciplines than I-O psychology. There are many benefits coming from cross-disciplinary research (e.g., better use of research resources and different methods of examining similar research questions). However, there are also challenges that need to be overcome to ensure effective collaboration among researchers from different research areas. As a graduate student, being able to communicate what we learn in I-O psychology to other researchers may create lots of research opportunities for you!
Joshua Fairchild (jaf435@psu.edu) received his bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Connecticut and is a second-year graduate student in I-O psychology at Penn State. His research interests include creativity, leadership, and teams.
Shin-I Shih (szs215@psu.edu), a graduate of the National Chengchi University in Taipei, Tawain, is a third year doctoral student in I-O psychology at Penn State. Her research interests include decision making, team collaboration, measurement, and cross-cultural issues in the workplace.
References
Hewett, T. (2005). Informing the design of computer-based environments to support creativity. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 63, 383–409.
Rizzuto, T. & Reeves, J. (2007). A multidisciplinary meta-analysis of human barriers to technology implementation. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 59(3), 226–240.
Schneiderman, B. (2007). Creativity support tools: Accelerating discovery and innovation. Communications of the ACM, 50(12), 20–32.
Schneiderman, B. (1998). Codex, memex, genex: The pursuit of transformational technologies. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 10(2), 87–106.