The Military Community Does I-O Psychology, Sometimes Without Knowing It Exists

This article was submitted by SIOP Military and Veterans Inclusion Subcommittee member William (Bill) Schaffhauser.

Many service members, veterans, and military spouses doing I-O psychology-type work would not know to call it I-O psychology nor think to look to I-O psychology as a career path after transitioning out of the military. The soldier updating a job classification, the officer drafting a performance narrative, the commander hosting a family readiness meeting: none of them think of themselves as practicing I-O psychology. But look at what they are doing: They are defining jobs with precision, evaluating performance against defined criteria, and supporting families through the stress of separation, reassignment, and career decisions.

Unknowing overlap with core I-O practices is what happens when an organization the size of the Armed Forces and each military branch needs to make high stakes, consequential decisions constantly. Whether or not anyone involved would call it I-O psychology, there are I-O psychology practices that the military does exceptionally well, and arguably, perhaps even better than some of the civilian organizations would allow. Two examples would be the military’s approach to job analysis and performance appraisals.

Civilian organizations tend to treat job analysis as a short-term, single-iteration project. Someone runs the project as needed, often through an outside vendor, and the results age until the next cycle. The military runs it as permanent infrastructure. Every military occupation is defined, reviewed, and updated on an ongoing basis, mapped to specific tasks, conditions, and standards, across hundreds of thousands of positions. That is job analysis practiced at a scale most civilian I-O psychology departments never attempt.

Performance appraisal in many organizations depends heavily on individual manager judgment, however well intentioned. The military’s performance reports for officers and noncommissioned officers (alternatively known as evaluation reports, fitness reports, and performance reports among the uniformed services) are standardized rating instruments built around defined performance dimensions and grounded in narrative sections that are anchored to observed behavior rather than vague impressions. It is not a perfect system, but it is a genuinely rigorous one, applied consistently across an organization at a scale most performance management research never gets to test.

I-O psychology-related work extends beyond service members to their families. In the U.S. Army, for example, family readiness is the unit commander’s responsibility, currently formalized through soldier and family readiness groups and backstopped by a funded position—the family readiness support assistant—that keeps support running as commanders and volunteers rotate out. What I-O psychology researchers now call family-supportive supervisor behaviors including emotional support, instrumental support, role modeling, and creative work-family management (Hammer et al., 2007), describes almost exactly what a family readiness group is intended to deliver. While civilian research had to demonstrate the value of family-supportive behavior and then persuade organizations to train supervisors to practice it, the military made it structural before the construct had a name (e.g., Department of the Army, 2006).

Few of these mechanisms are operated by people who call themselves I-O psychology practitioners or psychologists. These systems exist because an organization the size of the U.S. military cannot make consequential people decisions on instinct alone, and rigor was the best approach. That pattern shows up sharply in individual careers too, not just the military organization as a whole. However, the gap between doing I-O psychology-type work and learning I-O psychology vocabulary can impede a veteran’s transition to the civilian workforce after military service. Once the vocabulary is understood, service members and veterans will find that I-O psychology is an industry that is applied across the military branches and service roles; offering transitioning members skills that can easily be applied to roles across the civilian workforce.

For specific examples of how current SIOP members and affiliates navigated their military / I-O psychology career journey or how they applied I-O psychology in their military or DoW role, please look for the Military and Veterans Inclusion (MVI)-sponsored articles in The Industrial-Organizational Psychologist’s (TIP’s) I-O at Work series. MVI’s next sponsored submission will follow one veteran’s experience as a specific, personal example of how the gap between performing I-O psychology work and learning the vocabulary played out during their transition to the civilian workforce.

Get involved or learn more here:

• Edit your My Account – Profile on org to include Additional Information on your interests and to identify your Veteran Status to receive information from SIOP about military, veterans topics, and the MVI.
• The SIOP team can create MIL/VET and MVI distributions from members who have selected a veteran, actively serving, or neither actively serving nor a veteran from the veteran status drop-down options (fifth input in the last tile). “Neither” would include all supporters of the military community, including spouse, dependents, DoD, and beyond.
• Contact MVI directly to submit your questions or a request for engagement or further collaboration.

References

Department of the Army. (2006). Army command policy (Army Regulation 600-20). https://p94008.eos-intl.net/P94008/OPAC/Details/Record.aspx?BibCode=22719400

Hammer, L. B., Kossek, E. E., Zimmerman, K., & Daniels, R. (2007). Clarifying the construct of family-supportive supervisory behaviors (FSSB): A multilevel perspective. In P. L. Perrewé & D. C. Ganster (Eds.), Research in occupational stress and well-being: Vol. 6. Exploring the work and non-work interface. (pp. 165–204). Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1479-3555(06)06005-7