7 Critical IO Psychology 1

CONCEPTS AND DIRECTIONS

IN CRITICAL INDUSTRIAL/ORGANIZATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY

Gazi Islam and Michael Zyphur

MAIN CHAPTER TOPICS

• THE PSYCHOLOGY OF INDIVIDUALS IN AN ORGANIZATIONAL CONTEXT

- Individual Differences at Work

- Motivation

- Leadership

• INSIDE THE ORGANIZATION: HUMAN RESOURCE TECHNOLOGIES

- Job Analysis

- Selection and Recruitment

- Training and Socialization

• OUTSIDE THE ORGANIZATION: WORK-ENVIRONMENT ISSUES

- Organizational Stress

- The Changing Nature of Careers

- Organizational and Culture

• IMPLICATIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

7 Critical IO Psychology 2

From its inception, critical theory has attempted to uncover the ideological underpinnings of

everyday actions, beliefs, and interpersonal relations. Horkheimer (1982), a key figure in the

Frankfurt School of critical theory, framed this objective as one of liberating human beings from

often taken-for-granted social and economic conditions that shape their understandings of who they

are and of what they are capable. Thus, from the beginning, critical theory in the social sciences has

involved examining the interface between human understanding and the social and economic

systems that frame and limit human possibilities.

Stated as such, it would seem that industrial/organizational (IO) psychology should be a natural

home for critical theory. IO psychology is commonly defined as the study of human behavior within

organizational systems (e.g. Katz and Kahn, 1978), and has held that the multilevel nature of its

constructs requires theorizing between levels of analysis (e.g., House et al., 1995). One would thus

expect that the analysis of the socio-economic context which frames and conditions human beings’

lives, and which, to use Horkheimer’s vivid language, forms the “circumstances that enslave them”

(1982: 244), would be a central topic of study in this area of psychology.

To date, however, critical perspectives have remained on the periphery of IO psychology (Islam and

Zyphur, 2006). While related areas such as Organization Studies (e.g., Alvesson and Deetz, 1996)

and Industrial and Labor Relations (e.g., Edwards, 1992) maintain strong traditions in critical studies

as well as quantitative empirical work, the IO literature has remained firmly tied to experimental and

quantitative roots. Although this does not necessarily exclude a critical approach, a uniquely

quantitative approach tends to take for granted pre-existing facts rather than unpack the social

relations which led to the establishment of certain orders as facts. As an “applied” science, IO

psychology has tended to employ a “scientist-practitioner model” (e.g., Hayes et al., 1987) in which

7 Critical IO Psychology 3

scientific research is used to further existing managerial goals and add utility to current managerial

procedures, rather than call into question these goals and question managerial capitalism as such

(Baritz, 1974). One way to undo a managerial bias, we argue, is to question the politics inherent in

the very categories used by IO psychologists.

This combination of a plethora of fertile areas of inquiry and the lack of a firmly established and

critical program of research in the center of the discipline should be enticing to current and future IO

psychology scholars. This chapter is an attempt to demonstrate the potential for critical work

throughout the major subfields of IO psychology. While it is impossible to tackle all the areas within

the discipline, we have chosen some of the key topics found in most IO textbooks and syllabi, and

contrast existing perspectives in current work with future possibilities using a critical perspective.

The chapter is structured as follows: First, we examine individual-level IO psychological theory

involving individual differences such as cognitive ability, motivation, personality and attitudes,

contrasting traditional perspectives with current and potential critical contributions. Next, we address

the power implications of key human resources technologies developed and used by IO

psychologists, suggesting implications for critical theories of technology and social control. Finally,

we examine work-life balance issues, focusing on “macro” ramifications of psychological theories of

the workplace, such as stress and public health, governance, and the changing nature of work. Given

the wide purview of this coverage, this review is meant to whet the appetite of IO researchers rather

than provide a comprehensive discussion of critical perspectives as applied to IO psychology. As

stated above, there is much room for new and interesting debate in this emerging field.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF INDIVIDUALS IN AN ORGANIZATIONAL CONTEXT

7 Critical IO Psychology 4

Individual Differences at Work

The study of stable individual differences in IO psychology has been largely based in the attempt to

create effective selection systems (e.g., Anderson, 2005) as well as to understand the role of such

differences in behavior at work, such as job performance (e.g., Weiss and Kurek, 2003) or team

behavior (e.g., Stewart, 2003). The first and prototypical example of the study of stable individual

differences in work settings concerns the century-old study of intelligence or “general mental

ability” at work (e.g., Thorndike, 1986), but research has also proliferated regarding the roles of

stable personality in predicting applied work outcomes such as job performance (e.g., McCrae and

John, 1992). These literatures, while not denying change and social influences in affecting individual

characteristics (cf., Roberts et al., 2006), tend to underplay change and treat change as an intrinsic

development of pre-existing potentials (e.g., Costa and MacCrae, 2006). In addition, traditionally,

the study of individual differences has tended to emphasize genetic inheritance (e.g. Loehlin, 1992;

Jensen and Johnson, 1994) and downplay the role of culture, seeing individual cognitive and

personality as “universalizable,” if not universal in a more objective sense (e.g., McCrae and Costa,

1997).

Such perspectives are anathema to critical views, which tend to focus on subjective potentials rather

than the psychological “individual differences.” What distinguishes potentials from individual

differences is that the former do not simply involve observable individual variables. Rather, they

refer to a line of thought where an agentic human subject grasps at objects in the world through

perception and action, and is actively involved in finding his or her own identity. Rather than

attempting to pin down the universal features of this subject, which is always essentially undefined

but in search for self-definition (e.g. Wittgenstein, 1961), this line of thought defines individuals not

7 Critical IO Psychology 5

by their z-scores on given variables but in the projects and struggles they set for themselves within a

given social context. In the words of Foucault, “What I wanted to try to show was how the subject

constituted itself, in one specific form or another…in each case one plays, one establishes a different

relation to oneself” (1984: 290). As such, the self is always embedded in a specific, grounded

context, but also always reaches beyond that context in the search for itself. A critical view, thus,

compared to traditional IO psychology, leaves much more openness in the notion of the individual,

which is dynamic and projective, but also locates more explanatory value in social and cultural

situations, since it is only through social contexts that the self finds the institutional moorings it

needs to ground its projects.

Motivation

If the mainstream IO view of the structure of human psychology is essentialistic, its view of human

motivation is largely utilitarian. That is, human beings, according to traditional IO models, are

driven to achieve certain ends in order to satisfy personal demands (cf., Salancik and Pfeffer, 1977).

In classic models of motivation, these demands may be extrinsic, as in money or benefits (see

Komaki, 1986) or intrinsic, in terms of social value (see Tyler et al., 1996), power and achievement

(McClelland and Boyatzis, 1982), or more “existential” demands such as growth (Alderfer, 1969) or

self-actualization (Maslow, 1943). In many ways, IO psychology has provided a counterpoint to

economistic views of human behavior by showing that the diversity of human motives escapes a

purely monetaristic view. However, the traditional IO psychology view is not incompatible with the

classical economic view of human beings in that people strive after goals in order to satisfy their

personal utility functions (see Schwartz, 1986), an essentially economic vision of human beings.

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What changes in the psychological version is the diversification of objects of utility of social and

psychological needs and desires, not the basic view of people as utility calculators.

The more starkly economistic variants of IO motivation theory, such as goal setting (e.g., Locke and

Latham, 1990), expectancy theory (e.g., Vroom, 1964) or behavior modification (Komaki, 1986), are

the easiest to submit to a critical approach, because they view human motivation in simple means-

ends terms that might be as much the outcome of socialization into an economistic view than the

proof of the validity of this view (e.g., Ferraro and Pfeffer, 2005), that is, people may learn their

means-ends mentalities from the theories themselves. An ideological critique of such approaches

would, at a minimum, point to their framing of human nature in ways that conveniently fit into a

modern consumer capitalist system, and leave out human potentials which might not be realizable in

such a system.

While more humanistic variants of motivational models attempt to capture a richer picture of human

motivation through concepts such as self-actualization, the basic picture of utilities as something that

an individual has obscures a richer picture of human action as establishing who one is (Fromm,

1976). To place self-actualization as a need in a hierarchy of other needs (Maslow, 1943) is to turn

self-actualization into a utility among others, drawing critiques from critical theorists that the

pyramid of needs looks more like a pyramid of post-war American values (Cook, 2005). Thus, rather

than conceptualize self-actualization as a drive or a need of the self, a critical perspective might

attempt to break free of such a utilitarian anchor and view growth needs as possibilities for radical

self-transcendence.

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Leadership

Although the academic literature on leadership is increasingly varied and multidisciplinary, much of

mainstream thought on leadership still relies on the concept of a leader as a singular, charismatic,

and courageous individual who emerges at the head of an organization through personal merit and

enterprise (Meindl et al., 1985). Contemporaneous to and following Meindl et al.’s well-known

exploration of the “romantic” conception of leadership as an important organizational sense-making

process, and similar treatments exploring the primarily symbolic function of leadership (e.g., Pfeffer,

1981), many studies have moved away from only looking at the individual leader, also examining,

for example, leader-subordinate relationships (e.g., Graen and Scandura, 1987) and follower

cognitive processes (e.g. Lord and Maher, 1991).

These works have theoretically decentered the leader as the locus for understanding leadership, but

have rarely directly called into question the entrenched system-reinforcing powers inherent in the

modern concept of leadership in general (Meindl et al, 1985). For example, in a historical

exploration of leadership, Pears (1992) traced the roots of the individualistic notion of the great

leader to 19th century Europe, where this picture of leadership allowed the ruling elite to maintain

power in the newly consolidating European states and avoid popular revolution. Trait-based

conceptions of leadership provide an ideological buttress to dominant power systems by giving the

impression to organizational members that they are less competent to make decisions, that if they

contributed more to the organization then they might achieve upward mobility, and that all important

successes of the organization are attributable to power-holders (Haslam et al., 2001). As such, a

critical perspective would start from Haslam et al.’s observation, and attempt to explore how beliefs

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about leadership contribute to a psychology of subordination, while on the other hand providing

important meaning-giving resources for organizational members (Pfeffer, 1981).

INSIDE THE ORGANIZATION: HUMAN RESOURCES TECHNOLOGIES

In the section above, we dealt with issues in IO focused around individuals. Since critical theories

view individuals as embedded in social contexts marked by unequal power relations, and maintain

that human liberation requires an analysis of these relations, a major criticism of individualistic

perspectives is their neglect of such expositions. With regards to IO treatments of human resources

technologies, which occur at the collective level of the organization, the key critique shifts from

ignoring contextual factors to misframing the social effects of these techniques. While personnel

psychology purports to be about administrative efficiency, critical perspectives would attempt to

unearth where power relations and elite interests lie behind claims to efficiency.

Job Analysis

Job analysis was developed from scientific management principles to systematically divide and

organize job-related behaviors in organizations (Harvey, 1991). It consists of defining performance

behaviors, required knowledge, skills, and abilities, and eventually job categories to best meet

productivity needs. The control of job characteristics extends even to the physical movements of

workers when, for example, jobs are broken down into their requisite physical movements. As such,

in minutely analyzed tasks, each worker movement may be considered an administrative target. At

the organizational level, job categories often form the basis of departmental divisions that structure

communication and can create distinctive departmental cultures.

7 Critical IO Psychology 9

Townley (1991) describes Human Resource Management techniques such as job analysis according

to a Foucaultian view (e.g., Foucault, 1977), such that the technical-scientific process of

“partitioning” takes place where managers identify a sphere of analysis and break up this sphere into

relevant units to arrange and rearrange. From a Foucaultian perspective, power is not simply a

coercive force, but lies in the ability to impose definitions and modes of interpretation on situations

people use to structure their lives. In this view, job analysis gains its power from its ability to pre-

define people’s actions from morning to evening each day of their careers.

Relatedly, many jobs at the upper echelons of organizations are difficult to submit to strict scientific

management principles such as job analysis. This is because top management performance is

notoriously difficult to define or measure (see Longenecker and Gioia, 1992). Thus, the very control

systems justified by efficiency rather than social control are most frequently employed in

particularly those segments of the organization marked by low power rather than those leadership

positions which presumably are the drivers of firm success. Such an observation may reinforce the

view that job analytic techniques are often used to maintain power as much as ensure firm

effectiveness.

Alternatives to the strict delimitation of job aspects have appeared in the literature, including job

revision (Wrzesniewski and Dutton, 2001), task revision (Staw and Boetteger, 1990) and role

innovation (Van Maanen and Schein, 1979). Such treatments involve participation by employees in

remaking their jobs and cite worker needs for control and intrinsic motivation as key factors. In line

with this stream of research, critical theory could be employed in exploring the political as well as

the operational implications of such a reworking. This added dimension might explain why such

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programs have been slow to take off in the marketplace, or demonstrate the conditions under which

such programs could be used by employees seeking empowerment.

Selection and Recruitment

If job analysis techniques are essentially geared toward providing stability and order within a

hierarchical system by imposing definitions on tasks and occupational categories, selection

procedures complement this process by matching these categories with potential actors in the job

market, searching for an ideal “fit” (Chatman, 1991) between organizational culture and individual

traits. This process not only assumes but depends inherently on the idea that individuals are

“observable, measurable and quantifiable” (Townley, 1993: 529). The above described picture of

human nature lends itself easily to organizational selection processes. In fact, the history of the study

of individual differences and that of selection procedures are highly interdependent, with early

intelligence testing, for example, being used in immigration control (Richardson, 2003) and

university admissions (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983). The racial and

ethnic discrimination that accompanied early selection initiatives is well-documented (see Sternberg,

2005). However, at a deeper level, the view of human nature as individual difference variables itself

has an ideological patina, a theoretical choice understandable only in the light of the social structures

to which such knowledge was and still is applied.

With regards to group bias in testing, it is certainly true that IO psychology has produced many

studies attempting to counter inequality in the workplace through improving selection tests and

increasing non-discriminatory selection criteria (e.g. Maxwell and Arvey, 1993). In addition, many

studies have attempted to show benefits of diversity on individual and team functioning (e.g.,

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Dovidio et al., 1998) — although diversity is often shown to have a deleterious impact on such

outcomes (e.g., Tsui and O’Reilly, 1989). Such research claims a progressive political agenda in

attempting to undo negative effects of gender, racial, and other group-based prejudice in selection

contexts. However, similar to the literatures described above on job redesign, rethinking

individualistic leadership, non-monetary motivation, and change in individual differences, such

studies do not question the basic structure of managerial ideology in the workplace, but rather work

to mitigate the social harms brought about given the status quo system of work employment. In the

selection context, studies questioning the validity of selection tests seldom question the notion of

management-based selection as a method of social organizing or draw out the political ramifications

of this nearly ubiquitous practice.

Following Townley (1993), selection systems follow closely the Foucaultian “ranking” function that

is comprised of the evaluation, testing, and placement within a hierarchy of people within the

managerial purview. Managerial control is in large measure based on these hierarchies, and although

such control is not specifically spelled out in the “objective” selection test procedures, this very

objectivity is what justifies managerial authority, as it provides a gloss of disinterestedness that hides

power interests. Thus, debates about the content, construct, and predictive validity of selection

measures hide the fact that observation and quantification themselves — explicitly aimed at judging

and ranking people as qualified or disqualified for resource linked social roles — are elements taken

for granted in organizational life.

Training and Socialization

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In a way, the training and socialization literatures form a counterpoint to selection and individual

differences approaches, in that they do not take individuals to be relatively stable entities to be

selected for or against, but rather acknowledge the malleability of organizationally-relevant aspects

of human beings. The training and socialization literatures are joined together here because both

involve the changing of individuals’ attitudes, beliefs, values, or behaviors in order to bring these in

alignment with organizational norms, demands and/or culture (e.g., Kolb and Frey, 1975). In the

socialization literature, the focus tends to be on the automatic social processes that bring newcomers

into alignment with the organization, usually early in their tenure (Chatman 1991), through norms,

rituals, stories, and other informal mechanisms (Trice and Beyer, 1984). The training literature, on

the other hand, tends to focus on specific formalized procedures used to change employee cognition

and behavior (Arthur et al., 2003).

While both literatures focus on change in individuals based on social contextual variables, they do so

in quite different ways. For example, the training literature tends to use more of an educational

model (see Huddock, 1994), focusing on processes of individual cognitive change rather than the

content that organizational members learn (e.g., Bandura, 1986; Salas and Cannon-Bowers, 2002).

Thus, outcomes in the training literature take the form of memory and retention and application of

learned material (e.g., Hacker, 2003; Kolb and Frey, 1975). On the other hand, the socialization

literature tends to be more self-conscious about the links between training and ideology,

emphasizing much more often the negative influences of acculturation in terms of legitimizing

unethical behavior in organizations (e.g., Ashforth and Kreiner, 1999), alienation and rejection of

external groups by the organization (e.g., Pratt, 2000), and socialization into cultures of brutality or

violence (e.g., Van Maanan, 1973).

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Perhaps the difference in focus between training and socialization literatures may be explained by

the tendency of socialization researchers to take a dynamic, interdisciplinary view of culture, mixing

psychological theories of cognitive change with an anthropological sensitivity to social systems as

wholes (Schein, 2006). In contrast, the training literature tends to draw more on individual-level

educational psychology theory (e.g., Bandura, 1986) rather than look critically on the training

systems themselves as parts of social systems. This interdisciplinary tendency in organizational

socialization aligns it much more closely with critical theory, which integrates macro-level political

perspectives, interpersonal, meso-level communicative practices, and individual psychological

tendencies (e.g., Marcuse, 1964; Fromm, 1976).

OUTSIDE THE ORGANIZATION: WORK-ENVIRONMENT ISSUES

A critical overview of the discipline would be incomplete without a treatment of the growing

importance of work-environment issues. The emergence of such interest has grown from the

recognition that business practices do not exist in an entirely separate sphere from other life spaces,

but are highly influential in the way that, among others, familial, cultural, political, and

environmental institutions are affected by the meanings of work and the terms under which people

labor (e.g., Ciulla, 2000). To give a flavor of how critical theory can inform further discussions

about the interface of work and society, we review a small sampling of the social spheres affected by

the terms and understandings of labor.

Organizational Stress

7 Critical IO Psychology 14

The notion of stress is to some extent a quintessential case of a dense work-society mixture with

multiple nuanced facets. On the one hand, stress is often treated as a medical condition and treated in

terms of its negative biological effects, such as increased risk of heart disease and lowered immunity

(e.g., Cooper and Marshall, 1976). However, stress is also often analyzed in terms of individual

cognitions and emotions (e.g., Bhagat, 1983), thus creating an interface between biological and

psychological theory. Simultaneously, stressful working conditions are also examined as precursors

of experienced stress, adding a public health/occupational safety dimension to the mix (e.g., Parker

and DeCotiis, 1983). Finally, some recent treatments of stress have highlighted the socio-cultural

aspects of stress as a discourse (Barley and Knight, 1992, Meyerson, 1994), an addition which

greatly increases the potential for studying stress under a critical lens.

Prior to Barley and Knight’s (1992) discussion of stress as a social symbol, there was a dominant

tendency to treat the stress phenomenon using a “medical model.” According to this model, stress

could be discussed as a disease, whose etiological factors fell into one of two categories, (a)

environmental stressors such as workload, family problems, or economic distress, and (b) personal

dispositional factors, such as personality traits, attitudes and values. The interaction of personal

proclivities with environmental factors gave rise to the “presence” of stress, with its concomitant

social, psychological, and biological effects.

The “critical turn” in the early 90’s (e.g., Barley and Knight, 1992, Meyerson, 1994) challenged this

view by treating stress not as an objective disease that appears or disappears given the right

conditions, but as a “dominant cultural metaphor” that can be used to encode various cultural

contradictions. While in the disease model culture still entered the picture, it did so only as a cause

of individual beliefs and attitudes, or because it structured the environment in stress-producing ways;

7 Critical IO Psychology 15

in other words, culture existed as a cause of stress, but stress was not itself cultural. By contrast, in

Barley and Knight’s view, the use of the stress concept enabled the expression of various cultural

tensions, such as that of the relation between individual utility and organizational performance and

the relation between the mind and the body. Playing the stress card offered a justification for

individuals requesting organizational resources and offered an avenue for legitimate escape, as

disease is considered a justifiable external cause for poor performance. On the other hand,

medicalizing stress allowed organizations to implement “stress management programs,” implicitly

transferring responsibility onto the worker for managing his/her own stress and avoiding radical

system change. It should be clear how this type of analysis is fundamentally different from an

analysis which seeks to measure and reduce stress-related problems at work. The latter approach

takes for granted a certain problem, and attempts to solve it, while the former seeks to explain the

discursive construction of the problem in the first place, and relies much more on historical and

interpretive paradigms.

The Changing Nature of Careers

While a critical approach to stress focuses more on the construction of individual experience, the

study of careers takes as its focus more macro institutions such as the nature of occupations. In some

cases, such as academic careers (e.g., Meyer et al., 2006), these institutions may be thousands of

years old, whereas in other cases, such as project managers or software developers, they may be

nascent or transitory categories. The traditional approach to the psychological study of careers is a

type of matching exercise between pre-set occupational categories and individual profiles; tests,

interviews, and other psychometric tools are used to ensure that people follow career paths that “fit”

their sets of knowledge, skills and abilities in order to improve both their personal well-being and

7 Critical IO Psychology 16

their performance at work (e.g., Kristoff, 1996). In our view, critical perspectives can inform this

traditional view on two important and related fronts.

First, rather than viewing career trajectories as existing “natural” categories in which people have

varying aptitudes, a critical perspective would attempt to unpack systems of power and ideology

underlying these trajectories. As discussed above, views of the human being that are based in

typological profiles undercut the sense of human freedom and agency that is critical to a liberated

view of human beings; in a parallel fashion, views of occupations as stable categories overlook

potentials for social change and reify existing social structures (e.g., Lukacs, 1923). Rather than

viewing careers as taken-for-granted categories, a critical IO psychology would view career

categories as reflective of who gets to define what work is to be done and to impose methods of

ensuring newcomers are socialized into these definitions. Such perspectives with regards to the

making of doctors (e.g., Islam and Zyphur, 2007), executives (e.g., Ferraro et al., 2005) and public

workers (e.g., Van Mannen, 1979), among others, have demonstrated that the establishment of career

role identities is fraught with hard socialization and “strong” situations (Mitchell, 1974), i.e. those

that impose social structures through training and occupational norms.

Second, a more prolific literature has examined society-level changes in the structure of work

relationships, reflecting widespread concerns about fundamental changes in the way people work

(e.g., Howard, 1995). Several parallel phenomena are worth noting here: changes in work

relationships based on technological developments in the workplace (e.g., Griffith and Neale, 2001),

increases in the variety of careers over the lifespan and shortening times spent in careers (e.g.,

Mainiero and Sullivan, 2006), the globalization of markets and concomitant issues of off-shoring

labor (cf., Harrison and MacMillan, 2006), child labor (e.g., Cigno et al., 2001), and diminishing

7 Critical IO Psychology 17

power of local labor organizers (Goldfield, 1987), and the “flexibilization” of labor and the increase

in spot contracts and part-time work among adults (e.g., Askenazy, 2004). All have led to a difficulty

in using traditional career categories to describe the world of work. In all these phenomena, critical

scholars should be paying attention to how career categories are remade by powerful actors and how

local workers react to a new and confusing workplace.

Organization and Culture

Although organizational culture (and culture in general [see Kroeber and Kluckhorn, 1952]) has long

groped for a consensus in definition, a general way to describe the phenomenon would be as a set of

basic assumptions about roles and practices that develops in an organization, is taught to new

members, and influences how people think, feel, and behave with regards to organizationally

relevant issues (Schein, 1990). The organizational culture literature is varied and interdisciplinary

(Schein, 2006); however, it is worth noting that this literature became increasingly popular in the late

1970’s and 1980’s, when culture theorists attempted to explain the high efficiency of Japanese

management as a consequence of “cultural” factors that led to increased worker productivity (e.g.,

Ouichi, 1981). The use of culture as an explanation for efficiency and its subsequent treatment as a

management technique has led to criticisms that the management literature pulled anthropological

and sociological facets of cultural studies out of context, and inappropriately used the concept of

culture in a purely functional sense (e.g., Meek, 1988).

The ways in which organizational culture would appropriately use critical theory to further its

already interdisciplinary views on practices and belief structures could be divided into two broad

levels of analysis. The first would look within the organization’s culture, and would take the form of

7 Critical IO Psychology 18

a micro-analysis of organizational politics and symbolic actions (e.g., Pfeffer, 1981). The second

would be to link organizational culture with wider cultural dynamics, attempting to map the

relationships between ideologies and practices originating in organizational cultures and those

prevalent in society at large, in order to formulate a cultural theory of organization, and explain the

cultural functions of organizations in terms beyond mere efficiency explanations.

The first of these two approaches has been described as a microsociological approach (e.g.,

Goffman, 1983), and most often has drawn on interpretive anthropology and ethnography (e.g.,

Geertz, 1973) ethnomethodology (e.g., Garfinkel, 1967), and micro-analyses of events such as rituals

(e.g., Trice and Beyer, 1984) or speech acts (e.g., Austin, 1962). Based on the above perspectives,

the researcher would begin at the level of everyday practices, routines or habits, and attempt to infer

“hidden meanings” that reveal organizational ideologies. From there, the critical scholar could

attempt to demonstrate how these ideologies reinforce elite power structures or maintain a

hegemonic status quo, or else demonstrate spaces in everyday practices where resistance to such

structures occurs.

The second, macro approach would look at larger institutions, such as managerialism, organizational

forms or relationships between national and organizational cultures. For example, a critical culture

study at this level might examine where organizational cultures reflect and reinforce national level

cultural beliefs or values or where organizational cultures might signal a challenge to dominant

country-level social structures (cf., Bucheli, 2006; Grieder, 1997). In this case, organizational culture

would be thought of as a mode of being that competes with others for expression in a social space,

and individual workers’ socialization into a particular organizational culture might be thought of as a

7 Critical IO Psychology 19

political conversion into a specific clan. Venturing into institutional levels of analysis could provide

alternate explanations of norms and selection systems from a social standpoint.

IMPLICATIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

In contrasting mainstream IO psychological views with critical alternatives, it is important to note

that we have provided a necessarily broad and caricatured view of mainstream IO psychology. In

reality, IO psychologists often temper their views with considerations of socio-economic context and

are aware of the ideological undergirding of the theories they use. Conversely, critical theorists often

fall victim to many of the mainstream presuppositions that they attempt to problematize. What are

provided here, then, are prototypes of the mainstream and critical views, the function of which is to

highlight major points of distinction between the two approaches.

Complicating the situation, the “industrial” side of IO is often discussed separately from the

“organizational,” where the former regards more personnel-related topics such as selection and

testing, and the latter, more “humanistic” topics such as motivation and attitudes. In this case, the

current critique regards the former side more than the latter, although several points are applicable to

both. Further complicating the picture still, the field of Organizational Studies, which is distinct

from, but in many ways parallel to, IO psychology, has a rich and growing critical and post-modern

tradition that encapsulates some of the points made here, but has been more strongly represented in

business schools and in sociology departments than in IO psychology departments. Thus, even

separating out IO psychology as an independent field of study involves some premises that are

difficult to hold. It may be, for example, that IO psychology has been able to focus on quantitative,

psychometric approaches at the expense of critical theory precisely because other related fields have

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more thoroughly explored critical alternatives — allowing critical studies in allied fields to serve a

kind of relief-valve function for any critical motives within IO psychology itself. If this is the case,

then critiquing mainstream IO approaches may be somewhat misplaced.

To a large extent, promoting a critical IO psychology is not a call for a radically changed set of

objects of study. We believe that critical theory is more of a posture taken with respect to the object

of study [than???] a specific set of variables under study.. To some extent, this involves an

awareness of how the results of one’s study are to be used in a social context. Will a certain theory

of intelligence be used against marginalized groups? Will motivational techniques be used to exploit

workers? Whatever the answer to such questions, it is important to note that the critical posture goes

beyond simple usage of empirical data, and asks why certain things are studied in the first place,

whose idea it was to study such things, and what individual and social interests may have been

secured or compromised through such a study. For example, in a criticism of the use of IQ testing to

establish racial differences, Sternberg states, “Deciding to show that one group is genetically inferior

on an index is a value judgment as to what is worth showing. These decisions, among others,

indicate that there is no value-free science. Few of us can hear our own accents when we

speak—only other people have accents!” (2005: 295). Although Robert Sternberg is a mainstream

psychologist normally not associated with the critical theory paradigm, the critical recognition to

what psychologist are doing, and why we are doing it, is clear from such statements. Thus,

promoting critical IO psychology can take place through a sensitizing of scholars to the effects of

their work, and does not require that IO psychologists immerse themselves in 19th century German

or postmodern philosophy.

7 Critical IO Psychology 21

That said, an important point to be stressed is that while critical theory entails a multi-level

approach, integrating cultural, political, interpersonal, and psychological phenomena into a holistic

worldview, simply bringing social effects into the picture as variables — for example as a moderator

or boundary condition — is not sufficient to do justice to the critical view. In many of the cases cited

above, researchers (rightly) brought social context into their discussion of psychological effects,

without taking on a critical viewpoint. For example, intelligence researchers have searched for bias

in testing conditions, motivational researchers have stressed the role of social values in creating

utilities, leadership researchers have studied followership, stress researchers have looked at context

in the etiology of stress, and many other examples of examining context are readily available.

However, looking at context in this way misses a fundamental point stressed by critical theory. For

instance, a critical theorist might not stop at asking how culture affects peoples’ preferences, but

rather might look at how the notions of motivation and preference in the first place help make sense

of the world, and at the same time, hold in place institutional structures. So, for example, a stress

researcher that studies how harsh labor conditions augment stress might be doing important research,

but is not really critical in orientation because nothing essential is being problematized. Barley and

Knight’s (1992) theory of stress, however, could be considered critical, because it doesn’t take for

granted the object under study, but asks how such an object is constituted within a social-discursive

nexus.

As a final note, we stress that we are not suggesting critical scholarship replace quantitatively

oriented, “objective” science, a worry that some organizational psychologists have voiced when

viewing this peripheral scholarship from the center of mainstream organization studies (e.g.,

Donaldson, 1992; Locke, 2002). While some scholars feel that analyzing the social construction of

commonly held ideas, particularly intimate psychological constructs such as selves, emotions, or

7 Critical IO Psychology 22

values, can cause scholars to lose their grounding and fall into academic nihilism (e.g., Crosby,

1988), we feel that the danger is greater for scholars not to examine the social premises and origins

of their theories and applications. While the promotion of self-reflection can cause vertigo, it also

provides a basis for the scholarly quest for evermore coherent discourses (Habermas, 1981). While

such discourses may not provide the bedrock of absolute truth that some scholars unrealistically

demand (e.g., Locke, 2002), there is no indication that ignoring self-criticism can do any better,

although such a posture certainly increases subjective certainty. If scientific progress depends on the

right mix of humility, perspicacity, and drive, then we believe that no better recipe for such a mix is

at present available than the cycle of disciplinary self-questioning that defines critical studies in the

social sciences, and has the potential to define an emerging field of critical IO psychology.

MAIN CHAPTER POINTS

• Often, mainstream IO Psychology builds theory around unspoken managerial assumptions

about human behavior and social order.

• Critical approaches analyze psychological theory and workplace techniques from the point of

view of power dynamics and ideologies.

• At the level of individuals, mainstream approaches see persons in terms of objective traits,

whereas critical approaches view people in terms of subjective potentials.

• At the level of human resources techniques, mainstream approaches view such techniques as

pragmatic, whereas critical approaches view these techniques as power-reinforcing.

• Critical perspectives on work-environment issues question social categories such as careers,

work related stress, and organizational culture, reframing these categories as power-relevant.

7 Critical IO Psychology 23

GLOSSARY

• Ideology – a collection of organized ideas. In critical theory, refers to where ideas are used to

further particular social or economic orders.

• Individual differences – any variable (e.g. psychological, demographic) on which people

differ from one another.

• Microsociology – study of social structure in terms of patterns of interactions between

individuals, often in small groups.

• Self-actualization – In humanistic psychology, the process by which people realize their

potentials for full selfhood.

• Subject – In the context of critical theory, refers to thinking and acting agents, with a

particularistic points of view and life projects.

READING SUGGESTIONS

Alvesson and Deetz (1996) offer a good introduction to critical perspectives applied to

organizational settings. Barley and Knight (1992) show how occupational stress entered workplace

discourse and became a dominant cultural trope among organizational thinkers. Pratt’s (2000) study

of identification among Amway workers shows how organizational identity is manipulated to fit

managerial objectives, and the sometimes negative results of organizational socialization on

7 Critical IO Psychology 24

members’ well being. Pfeffer’s (1981) treatment of management as a symbolic activity is an

overview of the ways in which socially shared symbolic meanings are politically leveraged by

managers. Finally, Townsley’s (1993) review of Foucault in the HR literature provides a link

between this key thinker and practices of organizational selection and surveillance.

INTERNET RESOURCES

- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Critical Theory - plato.stanford.edu/entries/critical-

theory/

- European Group for Organizational Studies, - www.egosnet.org/index.shtml

- Ephemera Journal - www.ephemeraweb.org

QUESTIONS

• What are the main assumptions about human nature that managers hold? Under what

circumstances should these assumptions be questioned or challenged?

• Are acts of defining job roles politically neutral, or are they necessarily based on ideological

premises? Are some managerial actions more political than others, and if so, which ones?

• Should organizations concerned with the bottom line take into account worker well-being

even where well-being is not linked to profits? If so, are such concerns sustainable in a

competitive marketplace?

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