section_path: Applications/Work
section_name: Work
paragraph_text: Work
  
  Industrial and organizational (I/O) psychology involves research and practices that apply psychological theories and principles to organizations and individuals' work-lives. In the field's beginnings, industrialists brought the nascent field of psychology to bear on the study of scientific management techniques for improving workplace efficiency. The field was at first called economic psychology or business psychology; later, industrial psychology, employment psychology, or psychotechnology. An influential early study examined workers at Western Electric's Hawthorne plant in Cicero, Illinois from 1924 to 1932. Western Electric experimented on factory workers to assess their responses to changes in illumination, breaks, food, and wages. The researchers came to focus on workers' responses to observation itself, and the term Hawthorne effect is now used to describe the fact that people's behavior can change when they think they are being observed. Although the Hawthorne research can be found in psychology textbooks, the research and its findings were weak at best.
  
  The name industrial and organizational psychology emerged in the 1960s. In 1973, it became enshrined in the name of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Division 14 of the American Psychological Association. One goal of the discipline is to optimize human potential in the workplace. Personnel psychology is a subfield of I/O psychology. Personnel psychologists apply the methods and principles of psychology in selecting and evaluating workers. Another subfield, organizational psychology, examines the effects of work environments and management styles on worker motivation, job satisfaction, and productivity. Most I/O psychologists work outside of academia, for private and public organizations and as consultants. A psychology consultant working in business today might expect to provide executives with information and ideas about their industry, their target markets, and the organization of their company.
  
  Organizational behavior (OB) is an allied field involved in the study of human behavior within organizations. One way to differentiate I/O psychology from OB is that I/O psychologists train in university psychology departments and OB specialists, in business schools.