Scholarly Opinion About Organizational Psychology

¶ … organizational/industrial psychology. The author endeavored to find such an article and found one by Guest and Zijstra. The article pertains to the academic perceptions of research evidence that exist when it comes to work and organizational psychology. The study was executed in 2012 by the aforementioned authors. The facets of the study that will be covered include the purpose of the experiment, the methods that were used, the statistical analyses that were utilized and a summary of the results and discussion of the study. The author of this report will also offer a personal perspective about what shall be reviewed in this study.

Purpose of the Experiment

As mostly noted in the introduction, the purpose of the study or experiment is to measure and quantify the perceptions about the academic and scholarly research that is involved and present when it comes to work on organizational psychology. They study's introduction and hypothesis section notes that fields like medicine and so forth are all about evidence-based practice and that the use of this principle has served that and similar fields well. People in the sociology and psychology field have tried to copy that to organizational psychology but with mixed results. The primarily cited reason for this stems from the fact that sociological concerns and studies are much different than more conventional medical ones. Even with that being the case, it is deemed that psychology in particular is probably the best sociological paradigm when it comes to staying true to the just-mentioned evidence-based practice and similar facets of scholarly study. The commonly cited reason for this good performance with psychology is that it has a strong base of positivism and thus helps follow the required medical model (Guest & Zijlstra, 2012).

Experimental Hypotheses

The study's authors look at a total of ten different ideas and hypotheses but they whittle it down to six in particular. Those six assertions and hypotheses are as follows:

The general mental ability is the strongest (or at least one of the strongest) predictors of performance in an organization.

The setting of goals and the providing of feedback is absolutely and highly effective as a motivational methodology when practiced in an organization.

Human resources practices are a key part of defining and meeting organizational outcomes.

When doing interviews, structured ones are better-performing than unstructured ones.

Selection practices need to be valid and are very important when it comes to measuring and summarizing performance outcomes

Personality and performance are absolutely related (Guest & Zijlstra, 2012).

Method

The method of this study was intentionally modeled after the prior study by Rynes et al. completed in 2007. The one major difference is that one of the primary questions asked of the participants was modified. The question asked about the five most important organizational psychology findings that human resources should know. The prior question as used by Rynes referred to "human resources research." The revised question referred instead to what an informed human resources manager should know. The participants of the study were people that were part of the European Network of Organizational Psychologists, or ENOP. The network is rather loose in nature but has been in place for a long time. The group's membership is made up of senior professors from universities scattered across European countries. There were a total of twenty-three respondents and they came from a total of seventeen countries during the first round. Those respondents were in turn asked to loop in some new survey takers, using what the authors refer to as a "snowball" technique. These referrals led to a total of seventy-five responses in fourteen different countries. A second round of surveys were done for the same people. The questions from that second round were garnered from the suggestions offered from the first study, as noted earlier in this report. Statistical measurement was limited to the measurement of the most prolific and common statements, mostly as measured and counted from the first round.

Results

For the first round, there were three levels of responses. Those levels were specific propositions/assertions, reference to a category without specifics and general statements. Most of the responses overall could be placed into specific categories and typologies. The selected statements from group I were measured in terms of the consensus, or lack thereof, that was found when those same statements were posed in the second round of questions. Anything above seventy-five percent was considered a "strong consensus." Of the questions given in the second round, only a few questions got values of "strongly agree." The best performing question was "participation in decisions improves commitment to decisions," which had a "strongly agree" rating of sixty percent.