Kath etal. (Reference Kath, Salter, Bachiochi, Brown and Hebl2021) invite industrial-organizational (I-O) psychologists to refresh their teaching practices in accordance with the science of the discipline, and I believe they offer creative and practical suggestions for doing so. As these authors note, a compelling reason for such change is that the students we engage in the classroom (or, these days, on Zoom) represent the future of our field and/or the business leaders to come. Undoubtedly our teaching would be improved by implementing Kath etal.’s evidence-based suggestions. However, I argue that the authors do not go quite far enough in their recommendations for change. The events of 2020 have exposed major issues within our systems of work. A global pandemic has widened existing social and economic divisions throughout our societies. The killing of numerous Black Americans has shown that racism continues to threaten the well-being of many in the United States and around the world. If we want to push I-O psychology forward, help our field tackle the most pressing problems faced by organizations and society, and equip our students to be “more effective workers and more healthy/happy at work” (Kath etal., p. X), we need to champion a larger and more normative vision of I-O psychology. We need to expand the way that we teach I-O psychology to encompass humanistic values.
One of Kath etal.’s (Reference Kath, Salter, Bachiochi, Brown and Hebl2021) useful themes is the need for us to reflect on “what is your course all about?” Even more important would be reflection on “what is I-O psychology all about?” (or, what it should be about). Let me suggest this as a starting point for innovation in the teaching of I-O psychology.
The values of I-O psychology
Traditionally, a profession has been distinguished by several attributes, including its body of knowledge, its technical expertise (i.e., applications), and its values, which typically reflect a shared vision of what the profession seeks to contribute to society at large (Lefkowitz, Reference Lefkowitz2003). Arguably, the field of I-O psychology lacks explicit professional values, having adopted instead a scientific “values-free” stance as part of the scientist-practitioner model. Although this approach has a venerable tradition in natural science, some would argue that in I-O psychology it has led to the tacit and widespread adoption of the profit-motivated, promanagement values that dominate the organizations in which we work to the exclusion of humanistic concerns. Accordingly, some have challenged I-O psychology to expand its values model to encompass humanistic values (Lefkowitz Reference Lefkowitz2008, Reference Lefkowitz2010, Reference Lefkowitz2014; Zickar, Reference Zickar2010).
There are at least two reasons that articulating humanistic values can be an important catalyst for change within I-O psychology. First, a humanistic values perspective can serve as an aspirational vision for the field that motivates us to pursue people-centered ends amid the complex challenges that we face. Second, a humanistic vision for I-O psychology can serve as a benchmark against which we evaluate our positions and actions both individually and as a field. This helps to ensure that the good work that we do toward humanistic issues (e.g., our current efforts to better understand and eradicate racism at work) does not lose momentum as other concerns or perspectives compete for our attention, because these efforts are firmly rooted in the identity and values of our field. So how do we incorporate humanistic values into our I-O values system?
Applying humanistic values to the teaching of I-O
As individual I-O psychologists, few of us have the influence to formally change the espoused values of our profession, but we can still promote an employee-centered humanistic movement within I-O psychology. One of the best ways to do so is to leverage our platform as undergraduate teachers. Hopefully we are poised to make some changes to our teaching after reading Kath etal.’s (Reference Kath, Salter, Bachiochi, Brown and Hebl2021) focal article. Before we rush to implement their excellent suggestions, though, we would do well to take a step back and consider our larger goals. I will follow Kath etal.’s example by offering the following three questions as a needs assessment:
Do your students understand how organizational systems and processes contribute to or undermine human flourishing?
Are you equipping your students to help make organizations great places to work?
Are you promoting a conception of I-O psychology as a profession that cares about such things?
Adopting a humanistic agenda for I-O psychology means putting people back at the center of our discipline. Our students should walk away not only with a technical understanding of how to hire, train, evaluate, and retain employees but also with an appreciation for the role of work in people’s lives and how to help organizations become great places to work. This may seem like a daunting task. Let me follow Kath etal.’s example, then, by offering three steps you can take to apply humanistic values to your teaching of I-O psychology.
Recommendation #1: Develop a humanistic values statement in which to anchor your teaching practice. Promoting a more humanistic version of I-O psychology to your students begins with articulating your own values. If this is new territory for you, a helpful starting point may be to read through the values and goals espoused by humanistic organizations and initiatives such as the Global Organization for Humanitarian Work Psychology or the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Reflect on questions such as these: What is I-O psychology’s unique role in promoting human flourishing? What specific values and objectives do I want to promote in my work as an I-O psychologist? Use this reflection to develop a humanistic meta-objective that will inform your teaching of I-O psychology. Example statements include “to assure that organizations are safe, just, healthy, challenging, and fulfilling places in which to work” (Lefkowitz, Reference Lefkowitz2010, p. 297) or my own aspiration “to make work better for everyone.”
If you already cover humanistic issues and topics like justice, diversity, and well-being in your I-O psychology courses, bravo! If you do so without having developed an explicit values statement, it may be tempting to skip this step. However, just as I argued that articulating professional values could help the field of I-O psychology direct and evaluate its practice, the same principle applies here. In a field with a growing number of subfields and topic areas, you will ensure humanistic topics do not get crowded out by other content if you formalize a humanistic agenda for your I-O courses.
Recommendation #2: Communicate your humanistic agenda to your students via learning objectives and course content. Kath etal. (Reference Kath, Salter, Bachiochi, Brown and Hebl2021) advise that effective teaching (like any training program) begins with defining what success looks like and developing strong learning objectives. I agree and argue that your humanistic values statement should play a role in this process. Incorporating humanistic values into the learning objectives of your course will signal their importance and increase the likelihood that your students attend to this perspective. There are at least two different ways to approach this. You could develop a specific learning objective oriented around humanistic values, or you could rework other learning objectives to encompass a humanistic focus. Your humanistic values statement may even play the role of the big “why” behind everything that goes into the course (Kath etal.). Whatever the case, it should be clear to students that humanistic values play an integral role in I-O psychology and are embedded throughout the course.
The next step, of course, is to make good on this promise by developing course content and assignments that support your humanistic agenda. This starts with examining your current practices. Do your lectures and class discussions help students think critically about how various applications of I-O theory and principles affect people at work? Are humanistic topics like justice, diversity, and well-being treated as sidebars, or are they integrated as broader themes within “core” topics like selection, performance management, and leadership? Do you provide students with opportunities to identify the underlying values of mainstream I-O psychology and develop their own normative perspective? Do you create a classroom environment in which conflicting values perspectives can be openly discussed? Your answers to these questions will help you identify opportunities for change. Large-scale change is not easy, so recognize that any change you make to move your course in a more humanistic direction is valuable and that this can be an iterative process.
Recommendation #3: Help your students develop their own humanistic commitments. As an undergraduate business student I took a course on economic justice. A decade later, I do not remember much of the course readings or lectures, but I do remember the values perspective within which they were embedded and the capstone assignment: writing a paper articulating a personal commitment to combatting economic injustice. In my paper, I decided on what I believed was a reasonable living wage in the U.S. and committed to giving any income beyond that amount toward organizations that help level the economic playing field. Although this idea is not beyond criticism, nor have I lived up to my exact commitment, the point is that it is still salient to me when making significant financial decisions. A single undergraduate assignment shaped my perspective and actions in a lasting way. I share this story to encourage us as I-O psychologists to believe that helping our students articulate their own humanistic values and commitments is worth making time for in our courses. Something as simple as a reflection paper could create the “aha” moment that puts students on a trajectory of being more people-centered workers, coworkers, bosses, and maybe even I-O psychologists.
Conclusion
Kath etal. (Reference Kath, Salter, Bachiochi, Brown and Hebl2021) challenge I-O psychologists to practice what they preach by incorporating their science and practice into their undergraduate teaching. That is certainly a worthwhile endeavor, but I argue that we also need to ask ourselves what we want to be practicing and preaching in the first place. Just below the surface of the needs assessment questions posed by Kath etal. are the grander questions of what “good” we want I-O psychology to contribute to the world and what type of workers we want our students to become. It does not take much scrutiny, especially in a year like 2020, to recognize that the organizations and institutions in which we do our work often fail to be places of human flourishing. Now, more than ever, the world needs I-O psychologists to adopt a humanistic agenda—for our research, our practice, and, perhaps especially, our teaching.
You have
Access
Kath etal. (Reference Kath, Salter, Bachiochi, Brown and Hebl2021) invite industrial-organizational (I-O) psychologists to refresh their teaching practices in accordance with the science of the discipline, and I believe they offer creative and practical suggestions for doing so. As these authors note, a compelling reason for such change is that the students we engage in the classroom (or, these days, on Zoom) represent the future of our field and/or the business leaders to come. Undoubtedly our teaching would be improved by implementing Kath etal.’s evidence-based suggestions. However, I argue that the authors do not go quite far enough in their recommendations for change. The events of 2020 have exposed major issues within our systems of work. A global pandemic has widened existing social and economic divisions throughout our societies. The killing of numerous Black Americans has shown that racism continues to threaten the well-being of many in the United States and around the world. If we want to push I-O psychology forward, help our field tackle the most pressing problems faced by organizations and society, and equip our students to be “more effective workers and more healthy/happy at work” (Kath etal., p. X), we need to champion a larger and more normative vision of I-O psychology. We need to expand the way that we teach I-O psychology to encompass humanistic values.
One of Kath etal.’s (Reference Kath, Salter, Bachiochi, Brown and Hebl2021) useful themes is the need for us to reflect on “what is your course all about?” Even more important would be reflection on “what is I-O psychology all about?” (or, what it should be about). Let me suggest this as a starting point for innovation in the teaching of I-O psychology.
The values of I-O psychology
Traditionally, a profession has been distinguished by several attributes, including its body of knowledge, its technical expertise (i.e., applications), and its values, which typically reflect a shared vision of what the profession seeks to contribute to society at large (Lefkowitz, Reference Lefkowitz2003). Arguably, the field of I-O psychology lacks explicit professional values, having adopted instead a scientific “values-free” stance as part of the scientist-practitioner model. Although this approach has a venerable tradition in natural science, some would argue that in I-O psychology it has led to the tacit and widespread adoption of the profit-motivated, promanagement values that dominate the organizations in which we work to the exclusion of humanistic concerns. Accordingly, some have challenged I-O psychology to expand its values model to encompass humanistic values (Lefkowitz Reference Lefkowitz2008, Reference Lefkowitz2010, Reference Lefkowitz2014; Zickar, Reference Zickar2010).
There are at least two reasons that articulating humanistic values can be an important catalyst for change within I-O psychology. First, a humanistic values perspective can serve as an aspirational vision for the field that motivates us to pursue people-centered ends amid the complex challenges that we face. Second, a humanistic vision for I-O psychology can serve as a benchmark against which we evaluate our positions and actions both individually and as a field. This helps to ensure that the good work that we do toward humanistic issues (e.g., our current efforts to better understand and eradicate racism at work) does not lose momentum as other concerns or perspectives compete for our attention, because these efforts are firmly rooted in the identity and values of our field. So how do we incorporate humanistic values into our I-O values system?
Applying humanistic values to the teaching of I-O
As individual I-O psychologists, few of us have the influence to formally change the espoused values of our profession, but we can still promote an employee-centered humanistic movement within I-O psychology. One of the best ways to do so is to leverage our platform as undergraduate teachers. Hopefully we are poised to make some changes to our teaching after reading Kath etal.’s (Reference Kath, Salter, Bachiochi, Brown and Hebl2021) focal article. Before we rush to implement their excellent suggestions, though, we would do well to take a step back and consider our larger goals. I will follow Kath etal.’s example by offering the following three questions as a needs assessment:
Do your students understand how organizational systems and processes contribute to or undermine human flourishing?
Are you equipping your students to help make organizations great places to work?
Are you promoting a conception of I-O psychology as a profession that cares about such things?
Adopting a humanistic agenda for I-O psychology means putting people back at the center of our discipline. Our students should walk away not only with a technical understanding of how to hire, train, evaluate, and retain employees but also with an appreciation for the role of work in people’s lives and how to help organizations become great places to work. This may seem like a daunting task. Let me follow Kath etal.’s example, then, by offering three steps you can take to apply humanistic values to your teaching of I-O psychology.
Recommendation #1: Develop a humanistic values statement in which to anchor your teaching practice. Promoting a more humanistic version of I-O psychology to your students begins with articulating your own values. If this is new territory for you, a helpful starting point may be to read through the values and goals espoused by humanistic organizations and initiatives such as the Global Organization for Humanitarian Work Psychology or the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Reflect on questions such as these: What is I-O psychology’s unique role in promoting human flourishing? What specific values and objectives do I want to promote in my work as an I-O psychologist? Use this reflection to develop a humanistic meta-objective that will inform your teaching of I-O psychology. Example statements include “to assure that organizations are safe, just, healthy, challenging, and fulfilling places in which to work” (Lefkowitz, Reference Lefkowitz2010, p. 297) or my own aspiration “to make work better for everyone.”
If you already cover humanistic issues and topics like justice, diversity, and well-being in your I-O psychology courses, bravo! If you do so without having developed an explicit values statement, it may be tempting to skip this step. However, just as I argued that articulating professional values could help the field of I-O psychology direct and evaluate its practice, the same principle applies here. In a field with a growing number of subfields and topic areas, you will ensure humanistic topics do not get crowded out by other content if you formalize a humanistic agenda for your I-O courses.
Recommendation #2: Communicate your humanistic agenda to your students via learning objectives and course content. Kath etal. (Reference Kath, Salter, Bachiochi, Brown and Hebl2021) advise that effective teaching (like any training program) begins with defining what success looks like and developing strong learning objectives. I agree and argue that your humanistic values statement should play a role in this process. Incorporating humanistic values into the learning objectives of your course will signal their importance and increase the likelihood that your students attend to this perspective. There are at least two different ways to approach this. You could develop a specific learning objective oriented around humanistic values, or you could rework other learning objectives to encompass a humanistic focus. Your humanistic values statement may even play the role of the big “why” behind everything that goes into the course (Kath etal.). Whatever the case, it should be clear to students that humanistic values play an integral role in I-O psychology and are embedded throughout the course.
The next step, of course, is to make good on this promise by developing course content and assignments that support your humanistic agenda. This starts with examining your current practices. Do your lectures and class discussions help students think critically about how various applications of I-O theory and principles affect people at work? Are humanistic topics like justice, diversity, and well-being treated as sidebars, or are they integrated as broader themes within “core” topics like selection, performance management, and leadership? Do you provide students with opportunities to identify the underlying values of mainstream I-O psychology and develop their own normative perspective? Do you create a classroom environment in which conflicting values perspectives can be openly discussed? Your answers to these questions will help you identify opportunities for change. Large-scale change is not easy, so recognize that any change you make to move your course in a more humanistic direction is valuable and that this can be an iterative process.
Recommendation #3: Help your students develop their own humanistic commitments. As an undergraduate business student I took a course on economic justice. A decade later, I do not remember much of the course readings or lectures, but I do remember the values perspective within which they were embedded and the capstone assignment: writing a paper articulating a personal commitment to combatting economic injustice. In my paper, I decided on what I believed was a reasonable living wage in the U.S. and committed to giving any income beyond that amount toward organizations that help level the economic playing field. Although this idea is not beyond criticism, nor have I lived up to my exact commitment, the point is that it is still salient to me when making significant financial decisions. A single undergraduate assignment shaped my perspective and actions in a lasting way. I share this story to encourage us as I-O psychologists to believe that helping our students articulate their own humanistic values and commitments is worth making time for in our courses. Something as simple as a reflection paper could create the “aha” moment that puts students on a trajectory of being more people-centered workers, coworkers, bosses, and maybe even I-O psychologists.
Conclusion
Kath etal. (Reference Kath, Salter, Bachiochi, Brown and Hebl2021) challenge I-O psychologists to practice what they preach by incorporating their science and practice into their undergraduate teaching. That is certainly a worthwhile endeavor, but I argue that we also need to ask ourselves what we want to be practicing and preaching in the first place. Just below the surface of the needs assessment questions posed by Kath etal. are the grander questions of what “good” we want I-O psychology to contribute to the world and what type of workers we want our students to become. It does not take much scrutiny, especially in a year like 2020, to recognize that the organizations and institutions in which we do our work often fail to be places of human flourishing. Now, more than ever, the world needs I-O psychologists to adopt a humanistic agenda—for our research, our practice, and, perhaps especially, our teaching.