To prosper, organizational psychology should… expand the values of organizational psychology to match the quality of its ethics

✍ Scribed by Joel Lefkowitz

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2008
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 128 KB
• Volume: 29
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0894-3796
• DOI: 10.1002/job.527

✦ Synopsis

Abstract

The values of organizational psychology are criticized as (a) having supplanted psychology's humanist tradition and societal responsibilities with corporate economic objectives; (b) being “scientistic” in perpetuating the notion of value‐free science while ignoring that it is business values that largely drive our research and practice; (c) failing to include normative perspectives of what organizations ought to be like in moral terms; (d) having a pro‐management bias; and (e) having allowed ourselves to be defined largely by technocratic competence, almost to the exclusion of considering desirable societal goods. Illustrations of some adverse consequences of these values are presented. It is suggested we expand our self‐image to encompass a scientist–practitioner–humanist (S‐P‐H) model that includes consideration of different values, advocacy of employee rights and a normative characterization of how organizations ought to be—reflecting the broader societal responsibilities of a true profession. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.