The Historical Development of Industrial and Organizational Psychology

Industrial and organizational psychology had its origins in the early 20th century. James Cattell (1860–1944), Hugo Münsterberg (1863–1916), Walter Dill Scott (1869–1955) had been students of Wilhelm Wundt, the father of experimental psychology. Before the First World War they focused consulting, selecting and training employees, and advertising—things that would later fall under the umbrella of industrial psychology (it was only later in the century that the field of organizational psychology developed as an experimental science) (Katzell & Austin, 1992). In addition to their academic positions, these researchers also worked directly for businesses as consultants.

James Cattell’s contribution founded  a psychological consulting company, which is still operating today called the Psychological Corporation, and helped to teach students at Columbia in the area of industrial psychology. In 1913, Hugo Münsterberg published Psychology and Industrial Efficiency, which covered topics such as employee selection, employee training, and effective advertising. Walter Scott was one of the first psychologists to apply psychology to advertising, management, and personnel selection. In 1903, Scott published two books: The Theory of Advertising and Psychology of Advertising. They are the first books to describe the use of psychology in the business world. By 1911 he published two more books, Influencing Men in Business and Increasing Human Efficiency in Business. In 1916 a newly formed division in the Carnegie Institute of Technology hired Scott to conduct applied research on employee selection (Katzell & Austin, 1992).

When the United States entered World War I in April 1917, the work of psychologists working in this discipline expanded to include their contributions to military efforts. At that time Robert Yerkes (1876–1956) was the president of the 25-year-old American Psychological Association (APA). Yerkes organized a group under the Surgeon General’s Office (SGO) that developed methods for screening and selecting enlisted men. They developed the Army Alpha test to measure mental abilities and the Army Beta test, a non-verbal form of the test, that was administered to illiterate and non-English-speaking draftees. While the tests were significant assome of the first large-scale assessment (nearly 2 million men were tested), the tests were also culturally and racially biased.^[1]

Scott and Walter Bingham (1880–1952) organized a group under the Adjutant General’s Office (AGO) with the goal to develop selection methods for officers. They created a catalogue of occupational needs for the Army, essentially a job-description system and a system of performance ratings and occupational skill tests for officers (Katzell & Austin, 1992). After the war, work on personnel selection continued. For example, Millicent Pond, who received a PhD from Yale University, worked at several businesses and was director of employment test research at Scoville Manufacturing Company. She researched the selection of factory workers, comparing the results of pre-employment tests with various indicators of job performance. These studies were published in a series of research articles in the Journal of Personnel Research in the late 1920s (Vinchur & Koppes, 2014).

The Hawthorne Effect

From 1929 to 1932 Elton Mayo (1880–1949) and his colleagues began a series of studies at a plant near Chicago, Western Electric’s Hawthorne Works. This long-term project took industrial psychology beyond just employee selection and placement to a study of more complex problems of interpersonal relations, motivation, and organizational dynamics. These studies mark the origin of organizational psychology. They began as research into the effects of the physical work environment (e.g., level of lighting in a factory), but the researchers found that the psychological and social factors in the factory were of more interest than the physical factors. These studies also examined how human interaction factors, such as supervisorial style, increased or decreased productivity.

Analysis of the findings by later researchers led to the term the Hawthorne effect.

the Hawthorne effect

The Hawthorne effect describes the increase in performance of individuals who are aware they are being observed by researchers or supervisors.

What the original researchers found was that any change in a variable, such as lighting levels, led to an improvement in productivity; this was true even when the change was negative, such as a return to poor lighting. The effect faded when the attention faded (Roethlisberg & Dickson, 1939). The Hawthorne-effect concept endures today as an important experimental consideration in many fields and a factor that has to be controlled for in an experiment. In other words, an experimental treatment of some kind may produce an effect simply because it involves greater attention of the researchers on the participants (McCarney et al., 2007).

Watch this video to hear first-hand accounts of the original Hawthorne studies from those who participated in the research.

Early Organizational Psychology

In the 1930s, researchers began to study employees’ feelings about their jobs. Kurt Lewin also conducted research on the effects of various leadership styles, team structure, and team dynamics (Katzell & Austin, 1992). Lewin is considered the founder of social psychology and much of his work and that of his students produced results that had important influences in organizational psychology. Lewin and his students’ research included an important early study that used children to study the effect of leadership style on aggression, group dynamics, and satisfaction (Lewin, Lippitt, & White, 1939). Lewin was also responsible for coining the term group dynamics, and he was involved in studies of group interactions, cooperation, competition, and communication that bear on organizational psychology.

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