01 Terms to Remember
360-degree feedback: Performance evaluation approach that gathers input from multiple sources—supervisors, peers, subordinates, and sometimes customers—rather than just from your direct boss.
Assessment center: A comprehensive evaluation approach that uses multiple exercises, simulations, and real-world scenarios to assess someone’s capabilities, originally developed for intelligence work during WWII.
Behaviorally Anchored Rating Scales: Performance evaluation scales that use specific behavioral examples to define different levels of performance, making ratings more objective and useful for feedback.
Competency: Knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) that allow people to effectively perform specific functions, developed through systematic training and experience.
Critical Incident Technique: A job analysis method that involves collecting critical incidents of effective and ineffective performance to identify the key behaviors that distinguish success from failure in a role.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI): Organizational efforts to create truly inclusive workplaces where people from all backgrounds can thrive and advance based on their capabilities.
Empiricism: The philosophical approach that emphasizes learning through systematic observation and direct experience rather than pure reasoning or theoretical speculation.
Evidence-based practice: Using systematic research and data analysis to determine what actually works rather than relying on intuition, tradition, or popular management trends.
Gig economy: The trend toward more people working as freelancers, contractors, and in temporary arrangements rather than traditional full-time employment.
Great Resignation: The massive wave of voluntary job changes beginning in 2021 that forced organizations to rethink employee value propositions and work experiences.
Hawthorne Effect: The phenomenon where people change their behavior simply because they know they’re being studied or observed, regardless of the specific intervention being tested.
Human Factors: The area of I/O psychology that focuses on designing workplaces, technology, and systems that work well with human capabilities and limitations rather than against them.
Humanitarian Work Psychology: The application of I/O principles to improve working conditions and promote social justice worldwide, particularly in developing regions.
Hyper-personalization: The use of advanced analytics and AI to create highly individualized approaches to recruitment, selection, development, and performance management.
Independent view of self: A cultural orientation that emphasizes individual characteristics, personal achievements, and autonomy as most important for identity.
Industrial and organizational psychology: The application of psychological principles, theories, and research methods to understand and improve workplace settings, employee behavior, and organizational effectiveness.
Industrial psychology: The branch of I/O psychology that focuses on individual-level issues like job analysis, employee selection, training and development, and performance measurement.
Interdependent view of self: A cultural orientation that emphasizes shared characteristics, group membership, and relationships as most important for identity.
Job Descriptive Index: A standardized questionnaire used to measure job satisfaction across five dimensions: work, pay, promotions, supervision, and coworkers.
Meta-analysis: A statistical technique that combines results from multiple independent studies on the same topic to obtain more robust and generalizable conclusions about relationships or effects.
O*NET: The Occupational Information Network, a comprehensive online database providing detailed information about occupations, required skills, work activities, and job requirements.
Organizational Development: The systematic effort to improve organizational effectiveness, adaptability, and health through planned change interventions based on behavioral science knowledge.
Organizational psychology: The branch of I/O psychology that studies group and organizational-level phenomena like motivation, leadership, team dynamics, organizational culture, and change management.
Performance Management: The ongoing process of creating a work environment and implementing systems where people can perform to the best of their abilities to meet organizational goals.
Position Analysis Questionnaire: A structured job analysis instrument that analyzes jobs in terms of worker activities, using 194 job elements grouped into six divisions.
Psychological Safety: A workplace climate where people feel safe to speak up, make mistakes, ask questions, and challenge the status quo without fear of punishment or humiliation.
Quality of Work-Life: Efforts to enhance employee satisfaction, well-being, work-life balance, and overall work experience while maintaining organizational effectiveness.
Rationalism: The philosophical approach that emphasizes discovering truth through reasoning, logical thinking, and theoretical analysis rather than empirical observation.
Scientist-practitioner model: The training approach that prepares I/O psychologists to be both generators and intelligent consumers of research knowledge, bridging the gap between scientific theory and practical application.
Selection: The process of choosing individuals who have relevant qualifications and the highest probability of success to fill existing or projected job openings.