What is Your OrientationI or O?:
A Perspective from the Middle (of America)
Bob Grace
Grace & Associates
Vicki Staebler Tardino
Saint Louis University1
1We thank Ed Sabin of Saint Louis University for his helpful comments. Please send your thoughts to
bob@grace-associates.com and tardino@slu.edu.
Having read Paul Muchinskys July 2002 article
What is Your Orientation: Are You an I or an O? with much
amusement and some distressdistress similar to that felt when your parents
argue in publicwe were intrigued by the assertions that it contained. Namely,
we tend to pick teams (the Is and Os) and each
team has an even distribution of players. Living here in the middle of the
country, St. Louis, we are certainly familiar with the I versus O
divide. The two PhD programs in our own backyard mirror this separation; one
program is traditionally I and the other is almost exclusively O.
The local masters program appears to strike a balance between the two and
perhaps serves as the professional glue. Given these different lenses, conflict
and competition are not strangers here. But the belief that as a field we are
bimodally distributed in our orientations just didnt seem to match our own
experiences. So we did the only thing we could do: looked for archival data.
As active members of our local collective of Is and Os,
Gateway Industrial/Organizational Psychologists, this I-O identity issue piqued
our curiosity more than a little. In 1999, we decided to find out how people
described themselves on this dimension. A question on our membership survey
asked respondents to identify their orientation along a 5-point scale of I
and O. While some of the 37 professional members were purists, aligning
with the extreme Is (3%) and Os (28%), the majority placed
themselves somewhere in between. And considering the views of 20 graduate
student members hardly changed the picture4% Is and 29% Os.
We conducted another membership survey early this year, and this time we
asked members to categorize themselves as either I, O, balanced
between I-O, or something else. Of the 57 professionals responding,
most (60%) labeled themselves as balanced between I and O. More
than twice as many26% versus 12%labeled themselves as purely O
rather than purely I. Looking at the 24 student members we saw a similar
proportion in the balanced category (54%), a larger proportion labeling
themselves as O (42%), and very few labeling themselves as I (4%).
If this meeting in the center is the case throughout the field, shouldnt we
have more harmony and peace? What do these surveys tell us? Perhaps we have an
enclave of centrists in St. Louis, or maybe we are inclined to impression
management and the perception of harmony. Or maybe its self-selection bias
within our organization. More questions than answers, so we looked for more
data.
The 2000 SIOP Salary Survey presented us with a different perspective. When
asked about their primary work area, PhDs placed themselves 58% and 37%,
respectively, in the I and O categories. Of course this is
comparing apples and oranges with regard to questions. For one thing, categories
of work performed dont lend themselves to impression management. Again no
firm answers, but there are other telling clues revealed in the survey. When we
sorted work areas into I or O buckets something became very
apparent: There are many more opportunities to label yourself an I
compared to an O. Coincidence? The I categories outnumbered the O
by 7 to 2, with three categories not fitting neatly in either group. (Were
just not sure what to do with the human factors folks). The I categories
of job analysis, selection, and individual assessment each have their own home,
where organizational design, development, and change are forced to share.
So what have we learned about picking teams and being evenly split between I
and O? Well the even split doesnt appear to hold up. At the national
level the Is have it. As for picking teams, it seems at the national
level we maintain a dichotomy of either I or O. On a local scale,
where we have more opportunities to get to know each other, the gulf seems to
diminish. Could this result from interacting and working together? Or maybe
its due to the way the question was asked? At the national level the question
was about work. At the local level the question was about our views of self.
When we think about ourselves, perhaps we like to think we are closer to the
middle. Perhaps we see ourselves as more open-minded, more open to the
possibility of coexistence and cross-pollination of Is and Os,
or maybe weve kept our eyes on the super-ordinate goal of stewarding research
and practice of I-O psychology.
With I-O its not an either/or proposition; rather, its clear to us that
the future of our discipline will depend on both. With this approach perhaps we
can stop saying You got your peanut butter on my chocolate! and You got
your chocolate in my peanut butter! and begin to double our pleasure and
double our fun.2
2 In case the attempt at humor was lost, our references are to Reeses Peanut Butter Cups and Wrigleys Doublemint Gum.
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