Emerging Trends and Vexing Issues in Industrial and Organisational Psychology

Abstract

One way of summarising what has been presented here is to refer to the title of this article and comment briefly on emerging trends and vexing issues. Emerging trends can be viewed as areas of accomplishment for our field. At the beginning of this decade, Campbell (1990) commented that the last 25 years has witnessed an increased feeling of genuine discomfort with the scientist-practitioner model. The dual role does present problems, but also exciting challenges and a great diversity of subject matter. As noted earlier, SIOP's success in producing the 16 volumes in the Practice and Frontier series emphasises the reality of a strong beginning towards successful integration of our science and our practice. They represent and, in fact, proclaim an institutional imperative towards such integration. A most profound and successful advancement for our field has been the rapid growth and development of meta-analysis methodology–accompanied by what may be the last gasps of statistical significance testing. Other advances include an increasing recognition and empirical justification of the use of personality measures as useful and important tools in areas of selection, vocational counselling, and career guidance. Another article in this volume elaborates on this advancement (see Hough, 1998). Advances have been made in areas related to prediction of job and career accomplishments. The AT&T study outcomes suggest that clinical procedures can be conducted in a manner to produce excellent validities for predicting long-term job and career success. In spite of these findings, substantial evidence has been accumulated showing that clinical procedures typically fare quite poorly in comparison with statistical methods when assessments depart much from the elaborate procedures used in the AT&T studies. Questions raised by this fact must be seen as one of the vexing issues for private practitioners because they are rarely equipped with the full complement of resources that characterised the AT&T studies. Affirmative action programmes for employment and other aspects of career guidance and job placement have generally been successful in the sense of encouraging broad awareness that such procedures must be carefully developed and documented. They have been aided by psychometric approaches such as banding and/or the use of measurement methods such as personality inventories, interest inventories, and carefully structured interviews to aid in employment decisions and vocational counselling. Yet this arena still constitutes a vexing issue–one that will require continuing attention and creative problem solving in the years ahead. Finally, an accumulating body of knowledge leads not only to one of the most robust findings but also to what must be one of our greatest research needs. Carefully performed research shows relatively large heritable components for such areas as aptitude, interests, personality factors, job satisfaction, and even happiness. Equally robust findings have not been obtained in relation to environmental effects. In fact, our current level of knowledge seems to suggest that the nature of environments–both in the home and in work settings–are due more to individuals themselves than to causal mechanisms that can be identified as within either the family or the work setting. This is indeed by far the most vexing and important issue faced by industrial and organisational psychology both immediately and in the years ahead. Research focused on ascertaining stable effects on individuals of environmental experiences whether they be at home, in school, at work, or at play may hold promise for moving the science and the practice of industrial and organisational psychology incrementally ahead over the next decade.