Prosocial I-O: Quo Vadis
I-O Joins Worldwide Initiative: A “Global Special Issue"
Stuart Carr
Massey University
In mid 2010, a dozen international journals will release a set of publications focused on a single global topic. I-O is closely involved. Today we hear about the project from some participating editors. Their calls for papers are found at http://poverty.massey.ac.nz/#global_issue.
Ajit K. Dalal, PhD, Editor: Psychology and Developing Societies (Sage). Professor of psychology at University of Allahabad, India, Dr. Dalal is an ex-Fulbright Senior Fellow who has worked at UCLA and University of Michigan and was a recipient of the UGC Career Award, Rockefeller Foundation Award, and an ICSSR Senior Fellowship. Books include New Directions in Indian Psychology and Handbook of Indian Psychology.
Professor Dianna L. Stone, PhD, Editor: The Journal of Managerial Psychology. Professor Stone is with the Department of Management, University of Texas at San Antonio. Dr. Stone is a Fellow of APA, APS, and SIOP.
Dr. Winnifred Louis, Special Issue Co-Editor: Australian Psychologist. With a PhD from McGill and based in psychology at the University of Queensland, Australia, Dr. Louis is a member of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) and an affiliate of the Australian Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies.
Professor Chris Burt, PhD, Special Issue Co-Editor: Journal of Managerial Psychology. Chris coordinates the industrial and organizational psychology program at the University of Canterbury in Aotearoa/New Zealand. His interests include publishing on the organizational psychology of fund-raising and social marketing.
Please tell us a little about your understanding of the project.
Dianna Stone: My understanding is that a number of journals are collaborating to promote research on how psychology can be used to reduce poverty around the world. This strategy will help encourage research on poverty reduction and enable us to gain insights about the issue from a wide variety of perspectives.
Ajit Dalal: Reduction of poverty is a major challenge for all countries of the world, especially for developing countries. Poverty is multidimensional and multisector, and countries are joining hands to meet UN Millennium Goals of poverty reduction by 2015. These essentially entail improving access to health and education, enhancing quality of life, freedom, and human rights. As in many other social sciences, psychology has much to contribute toward poverty alleviation. This realization has brought psychology journals from across the globe together to focus on psychological issues, implications, interventions, and inputs in formulating effective strategies to deal with worldwide poverty. Many special issues at one point in time should help in consolidating the contribution of psychology, both actual and potential, and should provide new insights and understanding about human factors in poverty.
Winnifred Louis: By launching special issues addressing poverty and poverty reduction across every area of psychology, the project will create a huge boost of research attention and scholarly interest. It will motivate people to dust off and write up their data in the area, and it will bring new readers to the topic and perhaps lead people to do more research of their own.
Chris Burt: Psychology has a long history of investigating issues associated with poverty. However this work is scattered across journals and decades. The Global Special Issue (GSI) will bring this work together through referencing, as well as setting the research agenda for the next decade. While the GSI may attract the attention of researchers and students, our real audience has to be the policy makers and others who are in a position to make change. By creating a critical mass of work on this central topic, such individuals may take notice.
Does the psychology of work and organization play a role in the project?
WL and AD: Of course!
AD: There are government and nongovernment organizations that are actively engaged in interventions to reduce poverty. Much depends on the effective functioning of these organizations.
DS: I believe that industrial and organizational psychology will play a key role in this project because we have a great deal of knowledge that can be used to help reduce poverty. For example, we have a lot of expertise in the areas of training, motivation, and strategies for building individuals’ self-efficacy and skill levels. We also have insights about leadership, cooperation in organizations, teamwork, and other issues that may be helpful. Many years ago, researchers in our field conducted research on training for the hardcore unemployed. The results of this research may be a useful starting point for research on poverty reduction. Similarly, our research on strategies for enhancing individuals’ self-efficacy may be quite helpful.
CB: The key word in the question is role. As we all know, an objective is often achieved by everyone completing their role. The objective of poverty reduction is a massively complex endeavor, and the systems surrounding it are complex. Individual organizations involved in poverty-related work undoubtedly face some of the same issues as for-profit organizations, and any improvement in their ability to function through the application of I-O psychology knowledge should translate into an improvement in their key outcomes.
What kinds of impact would you like to see from this project?
AD: This collective endeavor should help in forging better international and interdisciplinary collaborations in improving quality of life of the poor. It should lead to a more intense dialogue within the psychology discipline to create new knowledge base to deal with poverty. I see many exciting possibilities of integrating cultural, social, and personal perspectives into global strategies to bring people out of the poverty trap. Poverty is an economic challenge as much as it is a psychosocial one. Psychological theories, research, and practices have much to contribute in preparing viable action plans both at macro- and microlevels. Such action plans should benefit from the rich field experience of the developing world, as well as from scientific and technological advancements of the west.
DS: I believe that this project will have important implications for reducing poverty around the world and will also benefit our field. It may help promote research in I-O psychology on other important social issues, for instance reduction of serious illnesses like HIV/AIDS.
CB: Generally research takes time to produce a real change. Thus, I think patience is the key word when thinking about the GSI impact. If it gets the attention of key policy makers, things may start to happen, which ultimately will have a true impact on poverty. Hopefully, key organizations engaged in poverty reduction work will pick up on some of the ideas that come out of the GSI and attempt to implement them. The GSI should be considered as Stage 1 of a multistage process—our research will only have an impact if adopted and implemented. The GSI will undoubtedly prompt further research efforts, which we all know will be years away from publication—again patience is the key. Poverty is not going away, so thinking that our endeavors will take time to have a true impact should not be discouraging.
WL: It would be great if the mass research attention and new findings created momentum for a new research-active community aimed at understanding poverty and helping individuals and groups escape it.
How can I-O psychologists get behind it?
WL: Some of the issues that are in the I-O domain concern the working poor: Researchers could study organizations and workers affected by casualization, contract work, and underemployment. It’s my perception that marginalized workers attract very little attention in I-O.1 When does work lift people and families out of poverty, and when does it lock them in? What institutional and organizational factors reinforce or weaken class inequalities? Many have commented that compared to fields like sociology and history, psychology has neglected the role of class and socioeconomic status (SES). And then there are evaluation research projects. Which projects aimed at recruiting people from disadvantaged groups into the workforce actually work and to what extent?
1 See also Maynard, D. C., & Ferdman, B. M. (2008, April). The marginalized workforce: How I-O psychology can make a difference. Roundtable discussion presented at the 23rd Annual Conference of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, San Francisco, CA.
DS: I believe that I-O psychologists have a great deal of knowledge that can be used to enhance the lives of people throughout the world. We have focused primarily on private-sector organizations, but many of the same principles can be used to increase the well-being of individuals. I think many I-O psychologists are just waiting for the opportunity to conduct and publish research on these key issues.
CB: If we divided I-O psychologists into two groups, academics and practitioners, we may get a better answer to this question. Academics need to produce research that is applicable to not-for-profit organizations. They need to truly understand the unique features of the poverty-reduction industry. Only then will practitioners be able to translate research output into useful interventions.
What else can, could, or should the profession do in the future?
AD: Academic psychologists need to focus more on the widening gap between rich and poor, and on why the poor are getting poorer. There is a wide range of social-psychological ramifications of this changing scenario. We need to take cognizance of innovative, practical strategies that work and where the profession of psychology can make a difference. As journal editors we can contribute by way of encouraging and publishing poverty studies and by crystallizing issues for an ongoing debate. What we could do as editors and professionals is to organize various forums, workshops, and discussion groups. We have to collectively think about the ways of promoting research on poverty and its proper dissemination.
WL: It’s a wider question for psychologists: Part of the bigger picture surely involves lobbying governments and universities to make sure there are incentives to do difficult applied research. This project is also a great initiative; I can imagine if it were repeated every few years it would help to keep the ball rolling.
DS: As noted above, I believe our profession should focus on the application of I-O psychology to other important social issues. For instance, the SIOP conference might include key sessions on social issues, and our journals might expand their coverage of these topics. Last year, Lois Tetrick, the president of SIOP, set the stage for this strategy by focusing the conference on issues of employee well-being. Therefore, I would encourage our leaders to expand the domain of I-O psychology to include its application to important social issues.
CB: Listen to those in need and those trying to help them and respond to their issues. They may be different (or in addition) to the concepts that we think are important.
Thank you for your valuable time and collective insights on a timely initiative.