A&O Psychology at Universität Siegen

Industrial-organizational (I/O) psychology is the scientific study of the employees, workplaces, and organizations.

Industrial and organizational psychologists contribute to an organization's success by improving the performance and well-being of its people.

Information Systems and HCI are design sciences:

- Designing technical artifacts for social practice

- Intervention into life of users and social systems

IS and HCI are applied to social/organizational practice

e.g. buyers, clients, customers, contractors                                                

We are organization members ourselves:

Working for a company, running a company, belonging to a network/community etc.

• Behaviourism, Cognitivism
• Pragmatism, Constructivism
• Socio-cultural theories
• Neurological theories
• Philosophical theories
• Political theories, ecological theories
• Economical theories, game theories
• Learning Theories, evolutionary and development theories
• Epistemological and methodological theories

Empirically derived small explanations of single aspects of a certain behaviour

Adaptation of Grand Theories’ fragments

Compositions of mini-theories and other disciplines’ approaches

• Vigotsky’s Socio-cultural theory
• Tajfel’s Social Identity Theory

• Social unit of people, systematically structured
• Pursue collective goals on a continuing basis
• All have management structure that
  • determines relationships between function & position
  • subdivides
  • delegates roles, responsibility & authority to carry out defined tasks
• Open systems that affect/are affected by environment

• Efficiency and productivity for industrial production
• With Scientific Task Analysis, company improved efficiency by cutting out unimportant steps
• Helps adjust workload for the workers so that they are not overworked
• Improved Health of the workers

• Monotonous & repeated task which can decrease motivation of the workers 
• Workers are exchangeable, because they do small tasks and manual activities.
• De-qualification and dis-satisfaction from workers

• Central mechanism of rationalization of modern society
• Solves the problem of favoritism and nepotism

• Improves Organizational Efficiency
• Improves objectivity/rationality of

  organization, structure and

  processes

• Supports planning and control/management rationales

• Supports accountability

• De-personalization, de-humanization of workers
• Goal displacement

  (bureaucracy as l‘art pour

  l‘art, bureaucracy as bureaucracy's sake)

• Disappearance of individual

  responsibility

• Inflexibility due to rigid structure

Organisation and Management can be

characterized by the relationship between Theory X and Theory Y