What is I-O?

Our colleague Cary Cooper was an automatic candidate when we began discussing potential contributors to this series on international cooperation in I-O psychology (Mark and Boris speaking here). As an expatriate American who has spent a long time in the UK, he has had fruitful collaborations on both sides of the Atlantic spanning several decades. Cary represents a relatively rare example of a thoroughly globalised I-O academic. As anyone who knows him will readily agree, Cary is also a person of enormous energy and generosity. We thought that these qualities provided him with an interesting vantage point from which to comment on the pleasures and perils of international collaboration. Finally, of course, Cary is a great academic entrepreneur. More than 20 years ago, he launched a new OB journal from the UK, the Journal of Organizational Behavior, into a marketplace well and truly dominated by North American publications. Throughout its history, including under its new editor Denise Rousseau, the journal has sought to provide a slightly different voice or accent to the OB field by trying just that little bit harder to expose North American readers to non-North American researchers. So, as both a research colleague and journal editor, Cary brings a distinctive perspective to the topic under discussion, and we thank him for this.

International Collaboration in I-O Psychology: 
The Joys and Pitfalls

Cary L. Cooper
University of Manchester Institute of Science & Technology

As an American, who was transplanted in the UK in the mid 60s as a graduate student, I am a natural internationalist when it comes to most things, particularly research. Having met a senior UK academic while finishing my MBA at UCLA, and then being invited to the University of Leeds ostensibly for a year, I ended up doing my PhD in England and staying forever more! My early career, on exploring the impact of T-groups, was at the beginning of my multicultural experience involving a variety of different research centres across the Atlantic, from the Tavistock Institute, Leeds University, UCLA, the Group Relations Training Association, and so forth, collaborating and sometimes competing for the philosophical and empirical high ground in the field of group dynamics. This was an exciting time, with experiential learning groups and other modes of social skill training and more touchy-feely alternatives being put under the scientific microscope both in Europe, North America, and even the Far East. In the 70s, the group dynamics or human relations movement was very buoyant, particularly in close ties between North American and European researchers, but also ironically in Japan with Kaizan, the Japanese Institute of Laboratory Training and Kochiro Kobayashis group at Toyo University. 

As the human relations movement declined in prominence by the end of the 70s, more attention was being paid not to the self-actualizing nature of people at work but to the sources of their discontent or workplace stress. This was truly an international phenomenon in the developed world of the 80s, described by many as the decade of the enterprise culture, with people working longer and harder to achieve individual success and material rewards. We had globalization, privatization, process re-engineering, mergers and acquisitions, strategic alliances, joint ventures and the like, transforming workplaces throughout the world into hot-house, free-market environments. In the short term, this entrepreneurial period improved economic competitiveness in international markets in the countries that embraced it (Cooper & Jackson, 1997). But as the strains began to appear, the concepts of stress, burnout, and job insecurity entered the business vocabulary, as well as the research agenda throughout the developed and developing world of the 90s. This was further reinforced by organizations outsourcing, downsizing, and the like, creating an army of, in effect, contingency workers. The issues of the psychological contract and worklife balance came alive and are still at the top of the agenda of many I-O psychologists. It was during the 80s and 90s that my international collaborations came of age. I have worked closely with many colleagues and friends on stress in the workplace, worklife balance, the psychological contract, hours of work, and the role of women at work with many colleagues from Germany (e.g., Michael Frese), Japan (e.g., Satoru Shima), Russia (e.g., Yuri Hanin), China (e.g., Oi Ling Sui), Estonia (e.g., Mare Teichmann), Portugal (e.g., Rita Cunha de Campos), Brazil (e.g., Lucio Renault de Moraes), Canada (e.g., Julian Barling), New Zealand (e.g., Mike ODriscoll) and numerous other countries and with many colleagues in the U.S. 

Much of the early work was in bilateral or trilateral international studies, which developed through the conference circuit, in testing particular instruments, or in exploring cross-cultural comparisons with definitive differentiating country characteristics. These proved incredibly useful in attempting to generalize across cultures, in seeing how factor structures on various measures were constructed in different cultures, and in mapping the impact of the changing nature of work, particularly the move toward intrinsic job insecurity, and constant organizational restructuring and change. Karaseks (1979) early work on the significance of locus of control was dramatically changing by the end of the 80s, with people being given control, indirectly, by the short-term contract cultures that were developing in the industrialized world far beyond the confines of North America, what some have termed the Americanization of work globally. 

These developments led Paul Spector and me to explore how these trends were affecting a range of different countries in terms of their economic development (i.e., developed, developing, and underdeveloped), individualistic versus collectivistic orientation, workplace stress, well-being, and locus of control. We brought together academics from 25 countries into a consortium entitled the Collaborative International Study of Managerial Stress (CISMS). With the advent of the Internet, it was possible to design and refine the research methodology without constant face-to-face collaboration and to translate and cross-translate the research instruments. This has proved an extremely useful and productive international collaboration. We had to establish two centers for the study, one at the University of Manchester Institute of Science & Technology in England and the other at the University of South Florida. The cross section of countries, ranging from the underdeveloped to the developing to the developed, has proved empirically useful in terms of economic outputs, but other criteria for comparisons emerged during our investigations and have led to interesting generalizable findings (Spector, Cooper, et al, 2001a). By focusing on one particular group of workers, in this case managers, and by choosing instruments felt to be appropriate to a range of cultures, it was relatively smooth going. There were several problems, however, which seem to be common to a number of these types of international cohort studies. First, one of our measures, the Hofstedes Values Survey Module 1994 proved unreliable across the countries (Spector & Cooper, 2001), which meant we were left without a cross-cultural values measure. This was very unexpected but raised a range of issues about cross-cultural methodology in general, which we discussed in Spector and Cooper (2001b, 2002). The second issue was a political one of having both Israel and Iran in the same study population. Our Iranian colleague felt that it would have been very difficult politically for her to appear with Israel in the published work, so the Iranian data had to be published separately. This circumstance may have been rare in the past, but this problem may loom larger in the future, given the heightened political context in the world at present since September 11th.

Opportunities through the Internet have enormous potential for research collaboration, underwritten by eyeball-to-eyeball contact at conferences and by short sabbaticals or visits by scholars. It is my experience that you need to build a relationship between partners before you can embark on global research through the Internet. In addition, you have to have clarity about various roles of the collaborators (e.g., who does the stats, who designs the measures, who is responsible for ensuring sample comparability, what are the rules on individual and group publications). It is essential that this is done at the beginning of the collaborative process rather than during the middle or at the end of the project, but it is doable and very worthwhile if we are to generalize our findings in I-O psychology beyond our own country.

We are very fortunate in our field to be at a point in time when so many quality of working life questions are emerging for us to explore. For example, it is predicted that more people will be working more and more from home or in virtual organizations in the future. Some corporate questions will be: How will this virtual organization of the future manage this dispersed workforce, with communications difficulties already apparent in existing organizational structures, and will this be problematic in some cultures and not others? Is working substantially from home in a flexible working arrangement more productive and less stressful than central-office working? With nearly two out of three families in the developed world being two-earner couples, how will working substantially from home affect the delicate balance between home and work or, indeed, the roles between men and women? In addition, with employers increasingly looking for and recruiting flexible workers, will women be preferred to men given their history of flexibility? Are women more flexible than men? What is the impact of new technology in general on working relationships in offices and for home workers? Will this trend toward stable job insecurity, freelance working and virtual organizations continue? And more importantly, can organizations, virtual or otherwise, continue to demand commitment from employees they do not commit to? The questions are legion and the opportunities for us in I-O psychology are great. As I see it, from my perspective as an organizational health psychologist, one of my research tasks is to see how work environments can deliver what Studs Terkel (l972) suggests in his acclaimed book Working: Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor, in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.

References

     Cooper, C. L. & Jackson, S. (l997). Creating tomorrows organizations: A handbook for future research in organizational behavior. Chichester & New York: John Wiley & Sons.
     Karasek, R. A. (l979). Job demands, job decision latitude and mental strain. Administrative Science Quarterly, 24, 285307.
     Spector, P. E., Cooper, C. L., Sanchez, J. I., ODriscoll, M., Sparks, K., Bernin, P., et al. (2001a). Do national levels of individualism and internal locus of control relate to well being: An ecological level international study. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 22, 815832.
     Spector, P. E., Cooper, C. L., Sparks, K., Bernin, P., Bssing, A., Dewe, P., et al. (2001b). An international study of the psychometric properties of the Hofstede Values Survey Module 1994. Applied Psychology: An International Review, 50, 269281.
     Spector, P. & Cooper, C. L. (2002). The pitfalls of poor psychometric properties. Applied Psychology: An International Review, 51, 174178.
     Terkel, S. (l972). Working. New York: Avon Books.

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