COVID-19 has resulted in dramatic and rapid changes to work, working conditions, and workplaces, all of which have had an enormous effect on individuals, organizations, and societies. As such, these changes have attracted a great deal of attention from scholars of social and psychological sciences. Against this backdrop, Rudolph etal. (Reference Rudolph, Allan, Clark, Hertel, Hirschi, Kunze, Shockley, Shoss, Sonnentag and Zacher2021) have aptly invited “[industrial and organizational (I-O)] psychology researchers and practitioners to address the challenges and opportunities of COVID-19 head-on by proactively innovating the work that we do in support of workers, organizations, and society as a whole” (p. X). Leading the charge, they discussed the work-related challenges and opportunities related to 10 topics: occupational health and safety, work–family issues, telecommuting, virtual teamwork, job insecurity, precarious work, leadership, human resources policy, the aging workforce, and careers.
Although these topics cover many issues made salient by COVID-19, the discussion of each focused a great deal on the usual concerns of efficiency and organizations. This was jarring not only because the vision and mission of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology and I-O psychology have a broader focus but also because the pandemic prompted calls to rethink business and management research and practice to create better societies (Bapuji, de Bakker etal., Reference Bapuji, de Bakker, Brown, Higgins, Rehbein and Spicer2020; Brammer etal., Reference Brammer, Branicki and Linnenluecke2020). Thousands of scholars cutting across disciplines have called for giving better share and voice to workers (https://democratizingwork.org/). The UN secretary general has called for major reforms to global institutions to address systemic inequalities exposed by the pandemic (McVeigh, Reference McVeigh2020). Closer to home, management researchers have been called upon to examine how organizational practices result in inequalities at the societal level (Bapuji, Patel etal., Reference Bapuji, Patel, Ertug and Allen2020) and international HRM scholars have highlighted the need to redefine performance and reorient organizations toward sustainable development goals in the context of COVID-19 (Caligiuri etal., Reference Caligiuri, De Cieri, Minbaeva, Verbeke and Zimmermann2020).
Against the backdrop of the larger societal challenges the pandemic has highlighted, in the remainder of this commentary, we highlight what we see as the problematic nature of the discussion in Rudolph etal. (Reference Rudolph, Allan, Clark, Hertel, Hirschi, Kunze, Shockley, Shoss, Sonnentag and Zacher2021) and offer a snapshot of how a more expansive view of I-O psychology would reveal a decidedly different and richer set of research and practice challenges and opportunities. Our intention is not to critique the specific content of the authors’ article but rather to make explicit several implicit underlying premises of the content they discussed so that I-O psychology researchers and practitioners can reflect on their role and purpose in organizations and societies.
First, Rudolph etal. (Reference Rudolph, Allan, Clark, Hertel, Hirschi, Kunze, Shockley, Shoss, Sonnentag and Zacher2021) appear to consider a number of challenges (e.g., job insecurity, precarious work) and organizational responses to challenges as exogenous and given, rather than—in no small part—as outcomes of organizational choices related to particular ways of defining/understanding organizational boundaries, compensation policies, and staffing profiles. For example, in discussing occupational health and safety, the authors have assumed higher workloads and increased work stress as natural rather than arising as a result of managerial decisions to not hire additional staff to deal with such workloads and/or reduce activity volume so as not to increase workloads to existing staff. Consequently, the authors offered recommendations and research opportunities (e.g., learn from extreme work environments such as the military or bush fire brigades) to identify “factors that help employees function well—even when experiencing high strain levels.” This view—that employees need to work at the same level as before the pandemic, if not at a higher level—runs contrary to understanding and appreciating the vulnerabilities, fears, and anxieties of individuals who are working during a pandemic that has not occurred at such a global scale in living memory.
Second, the article focused more on managers and other white-collar employees, even if implicitly, rather than others (e.g., frontline staff, gig workers, contract workers, and freshly unemployed/underemployed) who have been severely affected by the pandemic. By focusing on challenges faced mainly by those working within organizational boundaries and in virtual environments, the article has largely overlooked those who work at the boundary of organizations or who are not formally employees/members of organizations but who still work for those organizations. Even when such workers are being discussed, they have been considered as research subjects rather than as individuals equally deserving of attention in a work setting whose performance and well-being need to be studied within a larger context. For example, the authors encouraged research on nontraditional samples to better understand the struggles of underrepresented populations in work–family research rather than also reflecting on why previous research has overlooked those “samples,” even though low-income workers are not a new population. With respect to work–family conflicts, the authors suggested that couples may emerge stronger, having learned more about each other, rather than weaker. This assumption is symptomatic of a focus on those who have the privilege to work from home (rather than stay at home without work and thus income) and possess the resources, including physical (e.g., new workspaces, help for domestic services) and psychological support services to manage conflicts to emerge stronger.
Third, the authors take a decidedly organizational perspective and shift the burden of managing the fallout of the pandemic to employees and governments. For example, the strategies to manage work–family segmentation emphasize what the employees can do (e.g., walk around the block, have a separate office) rather than what the organization can do (e.g., stop emailing after hours, provide appropriate equipment, furniture, and tools or gadgets). Similarly, the authors suggest that “psychologists can play a key role in advocating for governmental and organizational policies that reduce precarious work and increase social protections.” But, in the following sentence, they highlight “advocating for a living wage, increasing food and wage assistance, expanding Medicaid, eliminating work requirements, expanding unemployment benefits, improving the accessibility of job skills training, expanding the earned income and child tax credits, or prohibiting unemployment discrimination,” all of which fall in the ambit of the government, thus overlooking the role and responsibility of organizations. Instead, or at least just as importantly, and keeping to matters/decisions over which they have control, it might be useful to ask why organizations employ precarious workers and why they sometimes do not pay a living wage to precarious workers.
Fourth, the authors make some assumptions about organizational actions and practices rather than critically questioning them. These include the comment that “employers have turned to furloughing or laying off employees to stay afloat” whereas many companies have used the ongoing crisis as an expedient excuse to lay off people, squeeze suppliers, and cut back on wages and benefits (Knight, Reference Knight2020). Similarly, they suggest that casualization of employment is a result of globalization, despite evidence that more complex factors are at play, including firm choices that are related to compensation practices (Bidwell etal., Reference Bidwell, Briscoe, Fernandez-Mateo and Sterling2013; Kristal & Cohen, Reference Kristal and Cohen2017; Kristal etal., Reference Kristal, Cohen and Navot2020). In addition, the authors make suggestions that are likely to further reinforce inequalities (e.g., use of volunteering to expand career prospects and work meaningfulness during the crisis), without considering the fact that being able to volunteer in an unpaid capacity is not an option that is available to a vast majority of populations.
Broadening the focus to society and well-being
Overall, in our reading, the authors’ focus on managerial and white-collar workers and organizational perspective on managing performance, without questioning organizational choices and their effects on workers, are indicative of problematic trends in I-O research in general. These approaches limit the profession’s vision of “science and practice transforming work that builds effective organizations and promotes worker well-being” and the mission “to enhance human well-being and performance in organizational and work settings” (SIOP, 2020). In light of ongoing and future health, economic, social, and psychological crises, including but not limited to COVID-19, we have to reconsider how we evaluate research findings and their corresponding effects. Further, the changing nature of work and organizations reflects the importance of constituencies other than managers and organizations and also of research and interventions with goals that go beyond solely managerial or organizational relevance.
The architecture of I-O research and practice, including interventions, begets the questions, “Good for what?” and “Good for whom?” The main premise of I-O psychology is the application of psychology to understand employee behaviors in work settings. Nonetheless, organizations are entities that are embedded within societies, dealing with similar challenges. The complex interplay between organizations, their work settings, and societies present opportunities for I-O psychology scholars to examine the implications of micro-organizational research to the societal level, combining “managerial/organizational relevance” with “societal relevance.” Therefore, I-O psychologists need to expand their primary constituencies to include the broader society, which is meant to benefit from the activities of businesses. Our research must look at both intended, as well as unintended, consequences of I-O psychology at the broader societal level by taking into account the human (i.e., each other, as opposed to manager and/or worker) and well-being (as opposed to performance alone) components of the profession’s mission.
Take, for instance, the practice of telecommuting, which can yield outcomes (i.e., performance and well-being) in both desirable and undesirable directions at the organizational and managerial level, due to variance within contextual factors in remote work arrangements (Table 1 provides details), something Rudolph etal. (Reference Rudolph, Allan, Clark, Hertel, Hirschi, Kunze, Shockley, Shoss, Sonnentag and Zacher2021) aptly explain. Our reading of Rudolph etal.’s recommendations for research and practice, though, are that their recommendations focus on researcher productivity (e.g., leveraging the large workforce currently working remotely; gather data from forced telecommuting time) or organizational policies and practices (e.g., longitudinally study organizational policies and attitudes) and also that they assume that much of the burden of continued performance and well-being is on the individual (e.g., telecommuter boundary management strategies; participating in additional virtual time for socialization; assuming that productivity should stay the same else “accommodation” need be made). Such well-intended practices can nevertheless create unintended consequences at the societal level, reinforcing and sometimes even exacerbating collective issues.
Table 1.
Teleworking Research and Practice Questions
For example, the vanishing of daily commute due to remote working provides lessons about the reduction of carbon footprint (Butner & Hein, Reference Butner and Hein2020), a desirable effect albeit unintentional. At the same time, remote working has highlighted the importance of digital inequalities and their effects on disadvantaged, or traditionally underrepresented, segments of the population, another unintentional outcome, but this time undesirable. Similarly, beyond the individual worker, telework can also affect, again unwittingly, familial mental and/or physical health, well-being, and satisfaction, as well as existing health disparities among employees’ families with higher versus lower socioeconomic status.
The rich I-O tradition has indicated that mechanisms that explain intended versus unintended effects of work practices are likely to be distinct (e.g., Leslie, Reference Leslie2019). What is needed now more than ever is an examination of the manifestations of these mechanisms that might be of a different degree and form at the societal level. For example, how does teleworking influence long-term skills acquisition in different sociodemographic groups, in turn affecting their socioeconomic status and occupational mobility? What are the interrelationships between teleworking and family life, and do factors conducive to the success of teleworking come with the cost of familial well-being/health? By underscoring such circumstances and externalities that are related to organizational and work practices and processes, which might not be evident at the organizational level, I-O psychology research can shed light on the complex and multidimensional psychosocial dynamics of workplace practices at the societal level.
With this agenda in mind, we illustrate some future research questions in Table 1 about how a change in our research orientation and focus—from managerial to human and performance to well-being—can help us better understand the implications of organizational practices at the individual, organizational, and societal levels. We hope that this serves as an inspiration for I-O psychology researchers and practitioners to join the broader conversations in the business and management disciplines to rethink and revisit the purpose of the work we do to support the performance as well as well-being of workers, organizations, and society.
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COVID-19 has resulted in dramatic and rapid changes to work, working conditions, and workplaces, all of which have had an enormous effect on individuals, organizations, and societies. As such, these changes have attracted a great deal of attention from scholars of social and psychological sciences. Against this backdrop, Rudolph etal. (Reference Rudolph, Allan, Clark, Hertel, Hirschi, Kunze, Shockley, Shoss, Sonnentag and Zacher2021) have aptly invited “[industrial and organizational (I-O)] psychology researchers and practitioners to address the challenges and opportunities of COVID-19 head-on by proactively innovating the work that we do in support of workers, organizations, and society as a whole” (p. X). Leading the charge, they discussed the work-related challenges and opportunities related to 10 topics: occupational health and safety, work–family issues, telecommuting, virtual teamwork, job insecurity, precarious work, leadership, human resources policy, the aging workforce, and careers.
Although these topics cover many issues made salient by COVID-19, the discussion of each focused a great deal on the usual concerns of efficiency and organizations. This was jarring not only because the vision and mission of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology and I-O psychology have a broader focus but also because the pandemic prompted calls to rethink business and management research and practice to create better societies (Bapuji, de Bakker etal., Reference Bapuji, de Bakker, Brown, Higgins, Rehbein and Spicer2020; Brammer etal., Reference Brammer, Branicki and Linnenluecke2020). Thousands of scholars cutting across disciplines have called for giving better share and voice to workers (https://democratizingwork.org/). The UN secretary general has called for major reforms to global institutions to address systemic inequalities exposed by the pandemic (McVeigh, Reference McVeigh2020). Closer to home, management researchers have been called upon to examine how organizational practices result in inequalities at the societal level (Bapuji, Patel etal., Reference Bapuji, Patel, Ertug and Allen2020) and international HRM scholars have highlighted the need to redefine performance and reorient organizations toward sustainable development goals in the context of COVID-19 (Caligiuri etal., Reference Caligiuri, De Cieri, Minbaeva, Verbeke and Zimmermann2020).
Against the backdrop of the larger societal challenges the pandemic has highlighted, in the remainder of this commentary, we highlight what we see as the problematic nature of the discussion in Rudolph etal. (Reference Rudolph, Allan, Clark, Hertel, Hirschi, Kunze, Shockley, Shoss, Sonnentag and Zacher2021) and offer a snapshot of how a more expansive view of I-O psychology would reveal a decidedly different and richer set of research and practice challenges and opportunities. Our intention is not to critique the specific content of the authors’ article but rather to make explicit several implicit underlying premises of the content they discussed so that I-O psychology researchers and practitioners can reflect on their role and purpose in organizations and societies.
First, Rudolph etal. (Reference Rudolph, Allan, Clark, Hertel, Hirschi, Kunze, Shockley, Shoss, Sonnentag and Zacher2021) appear to consider a number of challenges (e.g., job insecurity, precarious work) and organizational responses to challenges as exogenous and given, rather than—in no small part—as outcomes of organizational choices related to particular ways of defining/understanding organizational boundaries, compensation policies, and staffing profiles. For example, in discussing occupational health and safety, the authors have assumed higher workloads and increased work stress as natural rather than arising as a result of managerial decisions to not hire additional staff to deal with such workloads and/or reduce activity volume so as not to increase workloads to existing staff. Consequently, the authors offered recommendations and research opportunities (e.g., learn from extreme work environments such as the military or bush fire brigades) to identify “factors that help employees function well—even when experiencing high strain levels.” This view—that employees need to work at the same level as before the pandemic, if not at a higher level—runs contrary to understanding and appreciating the vulnerabilities, fears, and anxieties of individuals who are working during a pandemic that has not occurred at such a global scale in living memory.
Second, the article focused more on managers and other white-collar employees, even if implicitly, rather than others (e.g., frontline staff, gig workers, contract workers, and freshly unemployed/underemployed) who have been severely affected by the pandemic. By focusing on challenges faced mainly by those working within organizational boundaries and in virtual environments, the article has largely overlooked those who work at the boundary of organizations or who are not formally employees/members of organizations but who still work for those organizations. Even when such workers are being discussed, they have been considered as research subjects rather than as individuals equally deserving of attention in a work setting whose performance and well-being need to be studied within a larger context. For example, the authors encouraged research on nontraditional samples to better understand the struggles of underrepresented populations in work–family research rather than also reflecting on why previous research has overlooked those “samples,” even though low-income workers are not a new population. With respect to work–family conflicts, the authors suggested that couples may emerge stronger, having learned more about each other, rather than weaker. This assumption is symptomatic of a focus on those who have the privilege to work from home (rather than stay at home without work and thus income) and possess the resources, including physical (e.g., new workspaces, help for domestic services) and psychological support services to manage conflicts to emerge stronger.
Third, the authors take a decidedly organizational perspective and shift the burden of managing the fallout of the pandemic to employees and governments. For example, the strategies to manage work–family segmentation emphasize what the employees can do (e.g., walk around the block, have a separate office) rather than what the organization can do (e.g., stop emailing after hours, provide appropriate equipment, furniture, and tools or gadgets). Similarly, the authors suggest that “psychologists can play a key role in advocating for governmental and organizational policies that reduce precarious work and increase social protections.” But, in the following sentence, they highlight “advocating for a living wage, increasing food and wage assistance, expanding Medicaid, eliminating work requirements, expanding unemployment benefits, improving the accessibility of job skills training, expanding the earned income and child tax credits, or prohibiting unemployment discrimination,” all of which fall in the ambit of the government, thus overlooking the role and responsibility of organizations. Instead, or at least just as importantly, and keeping to matters/decisions over which they have control, it might be useful to ask why organizations employ precarious workers and why they sometimes do not pay a living wage to precarious workers.
Fourth, the authors make some assumptions about organizational actions and practices rather than critically questioning them. These include the comment that “employers have turned to furloughing or laying off employees to stay afloat” whereas many companies have used the ongoing crisis as an expedient excuse to lay off people, squeeze suppliers, and cut back on wages and benefits (Knight, Reference Knight2020). Similarly, they suggest that casualization of employment is a result of globalization, despite evidence that more complex factors are at play, including firm choices that are related to compensation practices (Bidwell etal., Reference Bidwell, Briscoe, Fernandez-Mateo and Sterling2013; Kristal & Cohen, Reference Kristal and Cohen2017; Kristal etal., Reference Kristal, Cohen and Navot2020). In addition, the authors make suggestions that are likely to further reinforce inequalities (e.g., use of volunteering to expand career prospects and work meaningfulness during the crisis), without considering the fact that being able to volunteer in an unpaid capacity is not an option that is available to a vast majority of populations.
Broadening the focus to society and well-being
Overall, in our reading, the authors’ focus on managerial and white-collar workers and organizational perspective on managing performance, without questioning organizational choices and their effects on workers, are indicative of problematic trends in I-O research in general. These approaches limit the profession’s vision of “science and practice transforming work that builds effective organizations and promotes worker well-being” and the mission “to enhance human well-being and performance in organizational and work settings” (SIOP, 2020). In light of ongoing and future health, economic, social, and psychological crises, including but not limited to COVID-19, we have to reconsider how we evaluate research findings and their corresponding effects. Further, the changing nature of work and organizations reflects the importance of constituencies other than managers and organizations and also of research and interventions with goals that go beyond solely managerial or organizational relevance.
The architecture of I-O research and practice, including interventions, begets the questions, “Good for what?” and “Good for whom?” The main premise of I-O psychology is the application of psychology to understand employee behaviors in work settings. Nonetheless, organizations are entities that are embedded within societies, dealing with similar challenges. The complex interplay between organizations, their work settings, and societies present opportunities for I-O psychology scholars to examine the implications of micro-organizational research to the societal level, combining “managerial/organizational relevance” with “societal relevance.” Therefore, I-O psychologists need to expand their primary constituencies to include the broader society, which is meant to benefit from the activities of businesses. Our research must look at both intended, as well as unintended, consequences of I-O psychology at the broader societal level by taking into account the human (i.e., each other, as opposed to manager and/or worker) and well-being (as opposed to performance alone) components of the profession’s mission.
Take, for instance, the practice of telecommuting, which can yield outcomes (i.e., performance and well-being) in both desirable and undesirable directions at the organizational and managerial level, due to variance within contextual factors in remote work arrangements (Table 1 provides details), something Rudolph etal. (Reference Rudolph, Allan, Clark, Hertel, Hirschi, Kunze, Shockley, Shoss, Sonnentag and Zacher2021) aptly explain. Our reading of Rudolph etal.’s recommendations for research and practice, though, are that their recommendations focus on researcher productivity (e.g., leveraging the large workforce currently working remotely; gather data from forced telecommuting time) or organizational policies and practices (e.g., longitudinally study organizational policies and attitudes) and also that they assume that much of the burden of continued performance and well-being is on the individual (e.g., telecommuter boundary management strategies; participating in additional virtual time for socialization; assuming that productivity should stay the same else “accommodation” need be made). Such well-intended practices can nevertheless create unintended consequences at the societal level, reinforcing and sometimes even exacerbating collective issues.
Teleworking Research and Practice Questions
For example, the vanishing of daily commute due to remote working provides lessons about the reduction of carbon footprint (Butner & Hein, Reference Butner and Hein2020), a desirable effect albeit unintentional. At the same time, remote working has highlighted the importance of digital inequalities and their effects on disadvantaged, or traditionally underrepresented, segments of the population, another unintentional outcome, but this time undesirable. Similarly, beyond the individual worker, telework can also affect, again unwittingly, familial mental and/or physical health, well-being, and satisfaction, as well as existing health disparities among employees’ families with higher versus lower socioeconomic status.
The rich I-O tradition has indicated that mechanisms that explain intended versus unintended effects of work practices are likely to be distinct (e.g., Leslie, Reference Leslie2019). What is needed now more than ever is an examination of the manifestations of these mechanisms that might be of a different degree and form at the societal level. For example, how does teleworking influence long-term skills acquisition in different sociodemographic groups, in turn affecting their socioeconomic status and occupational mobility? What are the interrelationships between teleworking and family life, and do factors conducive to the success of teleworking come with the cost of familial well-being/health? By underscoring such circumstances and externalities that are related to organizational and work practices and processes, which might not be evident at the organizational level, I-O psychology research can shed light on the complex and multidimensional psychosocial dynamics of workplace practices at the societal level.
With this agenda in mind, we illustrate some future research questions in Table 1 about how a change in our research orientation and focus—from managerial to human and performance to well-being—can help us better understand the implications of organizational practices at the individual, organizational, and societal levels. We hope that this serves as an inspiration for I-O psychology researchers and practitioners to join the broader conversations in the business and management disciplines to rethink and revisit the purpose of the work we do to support the performance as well as well-being of workers, organizations, and society.