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Industrial-organization (IO) psychology is a field study concerned with workplace behavior. It strives in improving employer employee’s relationshipss. This branch of psychology applies the theories and principles of psychology to improve workplace productivity.
Let’s look at the following pros and cons to learn more about this branch of psychology.
Pros:
1. Work life: It focuses on improving employee’s satisfaction in the workplace and it increases the productivity of the workforce. It looks at ways on how the jobs can be rewarding or come up with programs that improve the quality of life in the workplace.
2. Employee selection: I/O Psychology involves the development of an employee selection program and designing screening tests that determine the qualification of an applicant to a certain position.
3. Organization behavior: It helps to study the attitudes and behaviors of employees in the workplace. How the organization itself affects individual behavior based on the management style, organizational culture, and role expectations.
4. Evaluate the company: It enables you to evaluate the operation of the company in terms of its effective communication, conflict resolution methods and professional competence of the company.
5. Conduct leadership training: It establishes training programs required to improve the performance and leadership skills of the employees. It focuses on developing skills for specific jobs.
6. Personal management: It analyses interaction among individuals, groups, and employer-employee relationships in the organization. It also assesses motivational strategies for employees.
7. Organization development: It helps in improving the organization’s performance through increased profits, redesigning of products, work environment, and improving the organizational structure.
8. Performance management: I/O psychologists in this area design job performance standards and assessment techniques to evaluate employee’s performance, design rewarding systems, and areas of improvement.
9. Team building: It focuses in coming up with team building events to creating bonding among the employees and help them see themselves as part of a group working towards a common objective.
10. Conflict resolution: It comes up with the best conflict resolution mechanism to solve disputes among workers.
Cons:
1. Changing the nature of the workplace: Technological changes and innovating procedures within a company affect I/O psychology. Any development program designed should be flexible enough to accommodate the changes.
2. Understanding individual challenges: In a large organization, it is difficult to understand individual challenges and career issues to provide guidance on work-life balance.
3. Time-consuming: It takes a lot of time to develop and nurture employees in the company and also ensure you have the right person for the right position.
4. Tedious research work: There is a lot of research carried out in order to come up with an appropriate organizational structure and culture beneficial to the organization and employees at large.
5. Expensive: A lot of training and research is needed. Development of training manuals, selection processes, and employee development programs cost the company some fortune.
6. Biased professional I/O psychologist: An institution needs to hire a professional I/O psychologist who may be biased by working to benefit himself while compromising on the quality of services offered.
7. Resistance to change: Designing development programs, training and allocation of roles may be met with resistance especially where there is no effective communication on what is expected of staff.
8. Communication: The complexity of the institution and a lot of research required results in a barrier to flow and dissemination of information between various groups in the organization.
9. Structure of work and human factors: It is difficult to design the jobs and work based on individual specialization as well as optimize developing systems to fit individual’s roles.
