A Fable
One day, a well-dressed, mature gentleman—one might be tempted to describe him as elderly, except he appears extremely vital and alert—walks into a psychotherapist's office for a first visit. After just a few brief exchanges, the therapist gets the impression that the gentleman is a socially adept, financially successful, educated professional, and a well-regarded member of the community. But all is not as it seems on the surface. This new patient “presents” with lingering complaints of vague malaise, and despite his apparent success, he reports having experienced long-term intermittent bouts of anxiety and fear stemming from threats that the therapist cannot be sure are real or imagined: Various people seem regularly aiming to put him out of business; family relatives are disrespectful, demeaning, and do not understand him. Moreover, there is an existential quality to his anxiety: As a younger, middle-aged man, although already successful, he changed his name legally because he felt it better suited his identity. In fact, he came close to changing his name twice again in recent years, but, after agonizing about it for a long time, could not make up his mind what to change it to; nothing seemed to “fit” well enough. The therapist surmised, however, that the patient was more concerned with the impression his name would make on potential business clients and competitors than with any genuine expression of his nature, and he seemed relatively unconcerned with maintaining his nominal family identification. It struck the therapist that his patient's insecurities were not in keeping with his considerable accomplishments in life. In fact, for an educated professional, the patient seemed to lack insight into his own character and values.
The Joint Task Force has presented us with an excellent discussion of licensing issues for industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology. The authors reveal early on in their presentation that a large majority of I-O psychologists identify as psychologists, even if some do not use the title in their work as practitioners, and also believe that the primary regulatory objective of licensing is relevant for industrial-organizational psychology (IOP)—that is, that “harm could be done to individuals or organizations if someone without appropriate training in I-O psychology tried to do their work” (LCIOP Joint Task Force, 2017, p. 146). Yet only a small proportion of us is licensed. In other words, our beliefs and professed identification as psychologists have not led to what would seem to be an obvious manifestation of them. I would like to focus on that discrepancy and speculate about its cause(s).
As I interpret the task force's analyses, there are five kinds of (nonindependent) potential obstacles to I-O psychologists becoming licensedFootnote
1
:
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I.
Structural impediments. These include difficulties like the ostensible need for some sort of external accreditation of graduate training programs, which may then lead to articulation problems with the academic psychology department as a whole, and providing supervised experience by licensed psychologists.
-
II.
Bureaucratic impediments. These include variation in regulations between states—regulations that may seem “inaccessible, irrelevant, and overly restrictive” (LCIOP Joint Task Force, 2017, p. 176)—as well as a certain amount of recalcitrance and/or inflexibility on the part of licensing boards and legislators.
-
III.
Pragmatic difficulties. These include the personal costs to candidates of time, expense, being examined, and maintaining registration; and professional practice in multiple states—in person or electronically. Also, the fact that other disciplines outside of psychology do some of the same work as contemplated in I-O's scope of practice.
-
IV.
Personal attributes. The only issue mentioned by the task force in this regard is apathy, which has long been noted as “a problem with respect to licensure . . . [so] that licensure laws and regulations in various jurisdiction have already been written in ways that pose problems for I-O and consulting psychologists” (LCIOP Joint Task Force, 2017, p. 147).
-
V.
Values of the profession. The task force refers briefly to some overt antipathy toward licensure that has sometimes been voiced, referring to it as “the cultural opposition to licensure and program accreditation in I-O psychology” (LCIOP Joint Task Force, 2017, p. 156).
The task force presents us with 21 helpful recommendations (12 aimed at jurisdictions, nine for I-O and consulting psychologists). They all concern issues in categories I, II, and III. The failure to (also) focus on IV and V may doom any constructive efforts undertaken. I will pay less attention to the structural, bureaucratic, and practical difficulties because they are what most treatises on the topic have focused on, and because I suspect that there already exist some model solutions or at least suggestions. For example, in New York state, among the 81 professions that are licensed there is a separate license for Applied Behavior Analyst as well as for Psychologist; and perhaps even more to the point, there are 16 separate licensing categories for Nurse Practitioner—each in a different specialty area.
Because it is possible to construe the content represented by categories IV and V as comprising the same (values) issues—at two different levels of theory or analysis—I will consider them under the single rubric used by the task force.
The Cultural Opposition
Here are some pertinent facts: (a) the moral and legal structure of our society includes that those who enjoy the benefits and privileges of professional practice also accept the responsibility of being licensed; (b) to not do so is against the law; (c) the primary function of licensure, protecting clients and others from harm, is nominally accepted by a large proportion of I-O psychologists as a worthwhile objective; yet (d) there has been for a long time rather vociferous antipathy from I-O psychology to anything that smacks of regulation, registration, licensure or accreditation; so that (e) very few I-O psychologists are licensed, and that has been the case for many, many years. Admittedly, it is also true that (f) in some jurisdictions it is extremely difficult if not impossible for I-Os to qualify for licensing; but I believe that is a derivative result of (d) and (e), not their cause.
It seems reasonable to infer that some very powerful cultural forces are at work in IOP sustaining this untenable situation. What if state boards decide to enforce the law? The problem is becoming larger—and perhaps thus more salient to the state boards. IOP recently ranked #1 among the 20 fastest growing occupations in the United States (U.S. Department of Labor, 2014).
The recommendations to the I-O community made by the task force take the form of “encouraging” us to take certain actions with regard to the structural, bureaucratic, and pragmatic obstacles they note. I believe that we will need more than encouragement: After all, surveys indicate that we do identify as professional psychologists, and we agree that protecting the public is a valid and worthwhile objective. Why isn't that encouragement enough? We will need to recognize and engage the potent cultural norms and values that characterize I-O psychology and that, I believe, underlie our continued resistance and inaction despite our prosocial attitudes. In order to make that case, I should try to convince the reader of the pervasiveness of that contrary value system.
The Prevailing IOP Value System
As I have argued previously, the ideal of the “value-free” practice of I-O psychology is not only a myth, but our attempt to exclude the supposed contamination of social values has created fertile ground for the flourishing of an alternative economic/business/corporatist (EBC) value system that is often antithetical to our concerns for individual, organizational, and societal well-being (Lefkowitz, Reference Lefkowitz1990, Reference Lefkowitz2003, Reference Lefkowitz2008, Reference Lefkowitz2017).Footnote
2
In the present context, the EBC value system should be recognized as the culture that motivates and sustains the resistance to regulation. The general dynamic was foreseen by the philosopher of social science Alexander Rosenberg (Reference Rosenberg1995): “A social science that sought to efface the moral dimension from its descriptions and explanations would simply serve the interests of some other moral conception. It would reflect values foreign to those that animate our conception of ourselves” (p. 205).
Any firmly entrenched value structure is likely to have become so by being functionally adaptive for the persons, organizations, or social systems it guides; hence, it will be highly resistant to change. In our case, it seems clear that having fervently adopted the norms, values, and objectives of our employers and clients has contributed to the great success we have had as a profession. Rarely, however, do we acknowledge the professional, scientific, and moral costs incurred.
Following are some examples of the pervasive adverse effects of our having adopted that “other moral conception.” However, these are complex phenomena with multiple determinants. In each case, there is almost certainly interplay of the normative EBC cultural influences with pragmatic, situational, contextual, and other social and sociopolitical forces.
-
• I-O psychologists have decried our “identity crisis” in so far as we are not seen as differentiated from our competitors in the marketplace (Ryan, Reference Ryan2003; Ryan & Ford, Reference Ryan and Ford2010). Proposed solutions generally involve promoting our superior education and training. But the sense of crisis has to do with much more than our degree of success in the marketplace. The unease stems largely from our failure to specify a morally embedded core professional identity, by which I mean “our beliefs, goals, and meta-objectives concerning what it is [we] intend to accomplish in the organizations with which [we] work and how [we] prefer to go about accomplishing them” (Lefkowitz, Reference Lefkowitz2010, p. 294). Jelley, Bonaccio, and Chiocchio (Reference Jelley, Bonaccio and Chiocchio2014) add that “Resolving the licensure debate is both important and pressing if we are to retain (or gain) our professional identity as psychologists” (p. 51).
-
• Greenberg (Reference Greenberg2009) notes that even though we study organizational justice (OJ), and know a lot about it, we do not attempt many interventions to enhance OJ, primarily because such interventions are difficult to implement and managers are ignorant of the issues. However, we accomplish many difficult projects and educate managers about many things. I believe that the reasons we do not do much are largely because we study only perceived OJ (primarily the procedural/interactional aspects) rather than actual distributional inequities. Focusing on distributive justice requires taking a moral stand regarding distributive (i.e., social) justice, which in turn, requires adopting an explicit normative position regarding what a socially just organization should be for its employees, community, and society (Lefkowitz, Reference Lefkowitz2009). But that would violate the mythic principle of “value-free” science and practice.
-
• Weiss and Rupp (Reference Weiss and Rupp2011) lament the absence of a person-centric perspective in I-O research and call for a “full and focused appreciation of the individual at work.” Although they acknowledge the limitation that “we are a science that takes its problems from organizational needs,” they nevertheless see the issue as “conceptual” not “political.” I disagree: “The espoused descriptive person-centric view is not readily separable from a normative- or morally-driven empathic and humanistic approach to individual workers and their circumstances” (Lefkowitz, Reference Lefkowitz2011, p. 113). It would be difficult to maintain an employee-centric research perspective in organizations without advocating for employees—which the profession believes would be “unscientific,” so we do not.
-
• Byrne et al. (Reference Byrne, Hayes, McPhail, Hakel, Cortina and McHenry2014) believe that the graduate training of I-O psychologists should be improved so as to enhance our employability, guided by which “aspects of graduate training are sought out by employers.” The authors assert that it is our cognitive, affective, and interpersonal competencies that “differentiate I-O psychologists from other graduates” (Byrne et al., Reference Byrne, Hayes, McPhail, Hakel, Cortina and McHenry2014, p. 7). True enough, as far as it goes. But “the education and training of I-O psychologists also includes being normatively socialized by means of informal and hidden curricula” (Lefkowitz, Reference Lefkowitz2014, p. 42, emphasis in the original). Those curricula contain the societal norms and values, beliefs, goals, and expectations that form the vital moral component of any profession, including our own, by which it socializes its entrants. These need to be made explicit and subject to contestation.
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• Ruggs et al. (Reference Ruggs, Law, Cox, Roehling, Wiener, Hebl and Barron2013) point out that our research samples are skewed by the virtual absence of seven marginalized and/or stigmatized groups. Similarly, Bergman and Jean (Reference Bergman and Jean2016) note the overrepresentation of management and underrepresentation of lower-level employees in our work. The authors view these skews as primarily reflecting methodological issues that can be corrected with increasing replications and better sampling strategies. However, to support the notion that something more basic is operating, Lefkowitz (Reference Lefkowitz2013a) showed that five other worker groups or organizations are similarly absent from the literature, and that these skews are in accord with attributes of our particular value system (Lefkowitz, Reference Lefkowitz2016). Cascio and Aguinis (Reference Cascio and Aguinis2008) also document our inattention to societal issues.
-
• Scherbaum, Goldstein, Yusko, Ryan, and Hanges (Reference Scherbaum, Goldstein, Yusko, Ryan and Hanges2012) note that despite our focus on intelligence, I-O psychology has contributed relatively little to the study and understanding of the construct, limiting ourselves to the narrow concern of employee selection. They view this as primarily due to our having embraced a psychometric approach. However, I suggested at least 11 other psychological constructs relevant to the field of I-O psychology about which the same observation could be made, in order to substantiate an inference that there is a broader (values) issue at work (Lefkowitz, Reference Lefkowitz2012a). In particular, “Corporate goals and objectives are not only preeminent in defining the nature, content, and criteria of professional practice in I-O psychology, they also influence greatly our scientific research agenda, partially to the detriment of the field” (Lefkowitz, Reference Lefkowitz2012a, p. 22).
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• A seventh example is suggested by the LCIOP Joint Task Force (2017): the longstanding resistance to licensure and accreditation. This was articulated by Howell (Reference Howell1986), who believed that licensing and accreditation would reduce our ability to innovate, prevent the influx of diverse people and points of view into the profession, promote a uniform “conventional wisdom,” and reduce our contributions. Not considered is the primary objective of protecting the public. Moreover, from an empirical perspective, one does not observe any of those dire attributes in clinical psychology or other licensed professions. At the risk of being perceived as a “hammer,” I cannot help but attribute the position to another manifestation of the EBC value system that I had not previously considered.Footnote
3
That is, the contemporary representation of the 18th-century, classical, free-enterprise, liberal model of political and social economy, which entailed a laissez-faire relationship between business and government, with minimal regulation of business and little if any social responsibility for business beyond profit maximization.
The Alternative Model of ProfessionalismFootnote
4
In return for society's conferring a considerable degree of legitimate authority to a profession, including a major role in determining the educational and training requirements for entry, it is generally assumed that “the power and responsibility of a profession extend beyond its direct clients to society at large” (Lefkowitz, Reference Lefkowitz2003, p. 193). This is part of the broader humanistic, caring, “true professional ideal” (Kimball, Reference Kimball1992, p. 303), which has long been part of the culture of psychology (Kimble, Reference Kimble1984). So there is a case to be made that the antiregulation EBC culture of I-O psychology is at odds with the broader cultural heritage of psychology—a heritage that we profess to value. The orientation has even been applied recently to business managers: “Just as doctors and lawyers have moral obligations that arise out of their role as professionals (and thus are obligations they have qua doctor or lawyer), so managers too have obligations that arise out of their professional role and accrue to them qua manager (rather than qua individual or person)” (von Kriegstein, Reference Von Kriegstein2016, p. 450).
Overcoming the Opposition—An Approach
How does one attempt to change the culture of a social system? How is it to be understood? Cultures are marked by three levels: surface manifestations or artifacts, espoused beliefs and values, and implicit underlying assumptions (Schein, Reference Schein2010). There are substantial correspondences between even larger social systems—national cultures—and the cultures of individual organizations within each (Gelfand, Erez, & Aycan, Reference Gelfand, Erez and Aycan2007).
We can avail ourselves of the knowledge of our colleagues who study organizational culture and who may have some experience in culture change efforts (cf. Schneider, Ehrhart, & Macey, Reference Schneider, Ehrhart and Macey2013). But the starting point must entail recognizing that the change process will engender considerable values conflict between these two contrary cultures of IOP—the EBC value system and that of professionalism. Indeed, the “apathy” among I-O psychologists about which the LCIOP Joint Task Force writes can be viewed as a defense (in the psychodynamic sense) against engaging the two sets of values and experiencing the conflict.
A relevant model may be available from our study of organizational ethical culture and the climate for ethical behavior in organizations. What do we know that might be of use? A recent review of the area includes the following observations (Lefkowitz, Reference Lefkowitz2017):
-
(a) Fewer than half of studies investigating the effectiveness of corporate codes of ethics found them to be effective.Footnote
5
Effectiveness seemed related to additional factors like having a supportive ethical training program; the nature of the enforcement provisions; whether observed violations are reported; and having developed and implemented the code as a bottom-up, collaborative process, yet also having demonstrable, vocal “buy-in” from senior management.
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(b) Organizational leaders have a profound cascading effect on the culture and climate of their organizations, including prosocial ethical aspects. It is thought to occur via role modeling and as a motivational effect that inspires appropriate behavior and a sense of well-being.
-
(c) A competitive environment tends to lower people's sensitivity to the concerns of others and focuses attention on one's own (or one's team, unit, or company's) needs and goals, reducing prosocial behavior. Similarly, benevolent and principled ethical climates are seen as desirable and are linked with many positive organizational outcomes. The converse is true for egoistic (purely instrumental) climates.
-
(d) Systemic factors such as formal organizational compliance practices, as well as individual-level factors such as ethical climate perceptions, are independent predictors of misconduct.
-
(e) Individuals who have salient moral identities are attracted to socially responsible organizations.
Conclusion
There are, indeed, a number of overt (structural, bureaucratic, and pragmatic) obstacles to be overcome if one is to enhance the receptivity of IOP to the regulatory influences and societal benefits of professional licensing and, perhaps, accreditation. That would be nothing less than a major culture change for the field, and the position taken here is that attempts to tackle the practical problems will be much less likely to succeed if they are not implemented in light of the values conflict so engendered.
Some of what we know about changing the ethical cultures of organizations seems suggestively apropos (cf. (a)–(e), above). I believe those findings (and others) are relevant in two ways: (a) as contextual influences that will provide constraints and should shape the process of solving the “real world” problems noted and (b) as substantive issues requiring explicit accommodations in their own right. I am sure that a group of dedicated I-O and consulting psychologists (such as, but hopefully not limited to, the LCIOP Joint Task Force) would generate many ways in which the findings regarding the promotion of an organization's ethical culture might be usefully applied to the promotion of a discipline's professional culture.
Recent events in IOP suggest that cultural changes favoring licensure adoption have already begun. Perhaps foremost among these has been the formation of the Global Organization for Humanitarian Work Psychology (GO/HWP)—and its decidedly young membership. It has been responsible for the publication of texts with numerous authors promoting the prosocial possibilities of IOP: Carr, MacLachlan, and Furnham (Reference Carr, MacLachlan and Furnham2012); Carr et al. (Reference Carr, Thompson, Reichman, McWha, Marai, MacLachlan and Baguma2013); McWha-Herman, Maynard, and O'Neill Berry (Reference McWha-Herman, Maynard and Berry2016). This optimism is also reflected in The Organizational Frontiers Series sponsored by SIOP (Olson-Buchanan, Koppes Bryan, & Foster Thompson, Reference Olson-Buchanan, Koppes Bryan and Foster Thompson2013). The LCIOP Joint Task Force should be thanked for trying to keep the momentum going. It was not lost on this reader that the Task Force's presentation euphemistically referred to its own deliberations as “vigorous” and the article itself as presenting “negotiated perspectives.”
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A Fable
One day, a well-dressed, mature gentleman—one might be tempted to describe him as elderly, except he appears extremely vital and alert—walks into a psychotherapist's office for a first visit. After just a few brief exchanges, the therapist gets the impression that the gentleman is a socially adept, financially successful, educated professional, and a well-regarded member of the community. But all is not as it seems on the surface. This new patient “presents” with lingering complaints of vague malaise, and despite his apparent success, he reports having experienced long-term intermittent bouts of anxiety and fear stemming from threats that the therapist cannot be sure are real or imagined: Various people seem regularly aiming to put him out of business; family relatives are disrespectful, demeaning, and do not understand him. Moreover, there is an existential quality to his anxiety: As a younger, middle-aged man, although already successful, he changed his name legally because he felt it better suited his identity. In fact, he came close to changing his name twice again in recent years, but, after agonizing about it for a long time, could not make up his mind what to change it to; nothing seemed to “fit” well enough. The therapist surmised, however, that the patient was more concerned with the impression his name would make on potential business clients and competitors than with any genuine expression of his nature, and he seemed relatively unconcerned with maintaining his nominal family identification. It struck the therapist that his patient's insecurities were not in keeping with his considerable accomplishments in life. In fact, for an educated professional, the patient seemed to lack insight into his own character and values.
The Joint Task Force has presented us with an excellent discussion of licensing issues for industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology. The authors reveal early on in their presentation that a large majority of I-O psychologists identify as psychologists, even if some do not use the title in their work as practitioners, and also believe that the primary regulatory objective of licensing is relevant for industrial-organizational psychology (IOP)—that is, that “harm could be done to individuals or organizations if someone without appropriate training in I-O psychology tried to do their work” (LCIOP Joint Task Force, 2017, p. 146). Yet only a small proportion of us is licensed. In other words, our beliefs and professed identification as psychologists have not led to what would seem to be an obvious manifestation of them. I would like to focus on that discrepancy and speculate about its cause(s).
As I interpret the task force's analyses, there are five kinds of (nonindependent) potential obstacles to I-O psychologists becoming licensedFootnote 1 :
I. Structural impediments. These include difficulties like the ostensible need for some sort of external accreditation of graduate training programs, which may then lead to articulation problems with the academic psychology department as a whole, and providing supervised experience by licensed psychologists.
II. Bureaucratic impediments. These include variation in regulations between states—regulations that may seem “inaccessible, irrelevant, and overly restrictive” (LCIOP Joint Task Force, 2017, p. 176)—as well as a certain amount of recalcitrance and/or inflexibility on the part of licensing boards and legislators.
III. Pragmatic difficulties. These include the personal costs to candidates of time, expense, being examined, and maintaining registration; and professional practice in multiple states—in person or electronically. Also, the fact that other disciplines outside of psychology do some of the same work as contemplated in I-O's scope of practice.
IV. Personal attributes. The only issue mentioned by the task force in this regard is apathy, which has long been noted as “a problem with respect to licensure . . . [so] that licensure laws and regulations in various jurisdiction have already been written in ways that pose problems for I-O and consulting psychologists” (LCIOP Joint Task Force, 2017, p. 147).
V. Values of the profession. The task force refers briefly to some overt antipathy toward licensure that has sometimes been voiced, referring to it as “the cultural opposition to licensure and program accreditation in I-O psychology” (LCIOP Joint Task Force, 2017, p. 156).
The task force presents us with 21 helpful recommendations (12 aimed at jurisdictions, nine for I-O and consulting psychologists). They all concern issues in categories I, II, and III. The failure to (also) focus on IV and V may doom any constructive efforts undertaken. I will pay less attention to the structural, bureaucratic, and practical difficulties because they are what most treatises on the topic have focused on, and because I suspect that there already exist some model solutions or at least suggestions. For example, in New York state, among the 81 professions that are licensed there is a separate license for Applied Behavior Analyst as well as for Psychologist; and perhaps even more to the point, there are 16 separate licensing categories for Nurse Practitioner—each in a different specialty area.
Because it is possible to construe the content represented by categories IV and V as comprising the same (values) issues—at two different levels of theory or analysis—I will consider them under the single rubric used by the task force.
The Cultural Opposition
Here are some pertinent facts: (a) the moral and legal structure of our society includes that those who enjoy the benefits and privileges of professional practice also accept the responsibility of being licensed; (b) to not do so is against the law; (c) the primary function of licensure, protecting clients and others from harm, is nominally accepted by a large proportion of I-O psychologists as a worthwhile objective; yet (d) there has been for a long time rather vociferous antipathy from I-O psychology to anything that smacks of regulation, registration, licensure or accreditation; so that (e) very few I-O psychologists are licensed, and that has been the case for many, many years. Admittedly, it is also true that (f) in some jurisdictions it is extremely difficult if not impossible for I-Os to qualify for licensing; but I believe that is a derivative result of (d) and (e), not their cause.
It seems reasonable to infer that some very powerful cultural forces are at work in IOP sustaining this untenable situation. What if state boards decide to enforce the law? The problem is becoming larger—and perhaps thus more salient to the state boards. IOP recently ranked #1 among the 20 fastest growing occupations in the United States (U.S. Department of Labor, 2014).
The recommendations to the I-O community made by the task force take the form of “encouraging” us to take certain actions with regard to the structural, bureaucratic, and pragmatic obstacles they note. I believe that we will need more than encouragement: After all, surveys indicate that we do identify as professional psychologists, and we agree that protecting the public is a valid and worthwhile objective. Why isn't that encouragement enough? We will need to recognize and engage the potent cultural norms and values that characterize I-O psychology and that, I believe, underlie our continued resistance and inaction despite our prosocial attitudes. In order to make that case, I should try to convince the reader of the pervasiveness of that contrary value system.
The Prevailing IOP Value System
As I have argued previously, the ideal of the “value-free” practice of I-O psychology is not only a myth, but our attempt to exclude the supposed contamination of social values has created fertile ground for the flourishing of an alternative economic/business/corporatist (EBC) value system that is often antithetical to our concerns for individual, organizational, and societal well-being (Lefkowitz, Reference Lefkowitz1990, Reference Lefkowitz2003, Reference Lefkowitz2008, Reference Lefkowitz2017).Footnote 2 In the present context, the EBC value system should be recognized as the culture that motivates and sustains the resistance to regulation. The general dynamic was foreseen by the philosopher of social science Alexander Rosenberg (Reference Rosenberg1995): “A social science that sought to efface the moral dimension from its descriptions and explanations would simply serve the interests of some other moral conception. It would reflect values foreign to those that animate our conception of ourselves” (p. 205).
Any firmly entrenched value structure is likely to have become so by being functionally adaptive for the persons, organizations, or social systems it guides; hence, it will be highly resistant to change. In our case, it seems clear that having fervently adopted the norms, values, and objectives of our employers and clients has contributed to the great success we have had as a profession. Rarely, however, do we acknowledge the professional, scientific, and moral costs incurred.
Following are some examples of the pervasive adverse effects of our having adopted that “other moral conception.” However, these are complex phenomena with multiple determinants. In each case, there is almost certainly interplay of the normative EBC cultural influences with pragmatic, situational, contextual, and other social and sociopolitical forces.
• I-O psychologists have decried our “identity crisis” in so far as we are not seen as differentiated from our competitors in the marketplace (Ryan, Reference Ryan2003; Ryan & Ford, Reference Ryan and Ford2010). Proposed solutions generally involve promoting our superior education and training. But the sense of crisis has to do with much more than our degree of success in the marketplace. The unease stems largely from our failure to specify a morally embedded core professional identity, by which I mean “our beliefs, goals, and meta-objectives concerning what it is [we] intend to accomplish in the organizations with which [we] work and how [we] prefer to go about accomplishing them” (Lefkowitz, Reference Lefkowitz2010, p. 294). Jelley, Bonaccio, and Chiocchio (Reference Jelley, Bonaccio and Chiocchio2014) add that “Resolving the licensure debate is both important and pressing if we are to retain (or gain) our professional identity as psychologists” (p. 51).
• Greenberg (Reference Greenberg2009) notes that even though we study organizational justice (OJ), and know a lot about it, we do not attempt many interventions to enhance OJ, primarily because such interventions are difficult to implement and managers are ignorant of the issues. However, we accomplish many difficult projects and educate managers about many things. I believe that the reasons we do not do much are largely because we study only perceived OJ (primarily the procedural/interactional aspects) rather than actual distributional inequities. Focusing on distributive justice requires taking a moral stand regarding distributive (i.e., social) justice, which in turn, requires adopting an explicit normative position regarding what a socially just organization should be for its employees, community, and society (Lefkowitz, Reference Lefkowitz2009). But that would violate the mythic principle of “value-free” science and practice.
• Weiss and Rupp (Reference Weiss and Rupp2011) lament the absence of a person-centric perspective in I-O research and call for a “full and focused appreciation of the individual at work.” Although they acknowledge the limitation that “we are a science that takes its problems from organizational needs,” they nevertheless see the issue as “conceptual” not “political.” I disagree: “The espoused descriptive person-centric view is not readily separable from a normative- or morally-driven empathic and humanistic approach to individual workers and their circumstances” (Lefkowitz, Reference Lefkowitz2011, p. 113). It would be difficult to maintain an employee-centric research perspective in organizations without advocating for employees—which the profession believes would be “unscientific,” so we do not.
• Byrne et al. (Reference Byrne, Hayes, McPhail, Hakel, Cortina and McHenry2014) believe that the graduate training of I-O psychologists should be improved so as to enhance our employability, guided by which “aspects of graduate training are sought out by employers.” The authors assert that it is our cognitive, affective, and interpersonal competencies that “differentiate I-O psychologists from other graduates” (Byrne et al., Reference Byrne, Hayes, McPhail, Hakel, Cortina and McHenry2014, p. 7). True enough, as far as it goes. But “the education and training of I-O psychologists also includes being normatively socialized by means of informal and hidden curricula” (Lefkowitz, Reference Lefkowitz2014, p. 42, emphasis in the original). Those curricula contain the societal norms and values, beliefs, goals, and expectations that form the vital moral component of any profession, including our own, by which it socializes its entrants. These need to be made explicit and subject to contestation.
• Ruggs et al. (Reference Ruggs, Law, Cox, Roehling, Wiener, Hebl and Barron2013) point out that our research samples are skewed by the virtual absence of seven marginalized and/or stigmatized groups. Similarly, Bergman and Jean (Reference Bergman and Jean2016) note the overrepresentation of management and underrepresentation of lower-level employees in our work. The authors view these skews as primarily reflecting methodological issues that can be corrected with increasing replications and better sampling strategies. However, to support the notion that something more basic is operating, Lefkowitz (Reference Lefkowitz2013a) showed that five other worker groups or organizations are similarly absent from the literature, and that these skews are in accord with attributes of our particular value system (Lefkowitz, Reference Lefkowitz2016). Cascio and Aguinis (Reference Cascio and Aguinis2008) also document our inattention to societal issues.
• Scherbaum, Goldstein, Yusko, Ryan, and Hanges (Reference Scherbaum, Goldstein, Yusko, Ryan and Hanges2012) note that despite our focus on intelligence, I-O psychology has contributed relatively little to the study and understanding of the construct, limiting ourselves to the narrow concern of employee selection. They view this as primarily due to our having embraced a psychometric approach. However, I suggested at least 11 other psychological constructs relevant to the field of I-O psychology about which the same observation could be made, in order to substantiate an inference that there is a broader (values) issue at work (Lefkowitz, Reference Lefkowitz2012a). In particular, “Corporate goals and objectives are not only preeminent in defining the nature, content, and criteria of professional practice in I-O psychology, they also influence greatly our scientific research agenda, partially to the detriment of the field” (Lefkowitz, Reference Lefkowitz2012a, p. 22).
• A seventh example is suggested by the LCIOP Joint Task Force (2017): the longstanding resistance to licensure and accreditation. This was articulated by Howell (Reference Howell1986), who believed that licensing and accreditation would reduce our ability to innovate, prevent the influx of diverse people and points of view into the profession, promote a uniform “conventional wisdom,” and reduce our contributions. Not considered is the primary objective of protecting the public. Moreover, from an empirical perspective, one does not observe any of those dire attributes in clinical psychology or other licensed professions. At the risk of being perceived as a “hammer,” I cannot help but attribute the position to another manifestation of the EBC value system that I had not previously considered.Footnote 3 That is, the contemporary representation of the 18th-century, classical, free-enterprise, liberal model of political and social economy, which entailed a laissez-faire relationship between business and government, with minimal regulation of business and little if any social responsibility for business beyond profit maximization.
The Alternative Model of ProfessionalismFootnote 4
In return for society's conferring a considerable degree of legitimate authority to a profession, including a major role in determining the educational and training requirements for entry, it is generally assumed that “the power and responsibility of a profession extend beyond its direct clients to society at large” (Lefkowitz, Reference Lefkowitz2003, p. 193). This is part of the broader humanistic, caring, “true professional ideal” (Kimball, Reference Kimball1992, p. 303), which has long been part of the culture of psychology (Kimble, Reference Kimble1984). So there is a case to be made that the antiregulation EBC culture of I-O psychology is at odds with the broader cultural heritage of psychology—a heritage that we profess to value. The orientation has even been applied recently to business managers: “Just as doctors and lawyers have moral obligations that arise out of their role as professionals (and thus are obligations they have qua doctor or lawyer), so managers too have obligations that arise out of their professional role and accrue to them qua manager (rather than qua individual or person)” (von Kriegstein, Reference Von Kriegstein2016, p. 450).
Overcoming the Opposition—An Approach
How does one attempt to change the culture of a social system? How is it to be understood? Cultures are marked by three levels: surface manifestations or artifacts, espoused beliefs and values, and implicit underlying assumptions (Schein, Reference Schein2010). There are substantial correspondences between even larger social systems—national cultures—and the cultures of individual organizations within each (Gelfand, Erez, & Aycan, Reference Gelfand, Erez and Aycan2007).
We can avail ourselves of the knowledge of our colleagues who study organizational culture and who may have some experience in culture change efforts (cf. Schneider, Ehrhart, & Macey, Reference Schneider, Ehrhart and Macey2013). But the starting point must entail recognizing that the change process will engender considerable values conflict between these two contrary cultures of IOP—the EBC value system and that of professionalism. Indeed, the “apathy” among I-O psychologists about which the LCIOP Joint Task Force writes can be viewed as a defense (in the psychodynamic sense) against engaging the two sets of values and experiencing the conflict.
A relevant model may be available from our study of organizational ethical culture and the climate for ethical behavior in organizations. What do we know that might be of use? A recent review of the area includes the following observations (Lefkowitz, Reference Lefkowitz2017):
(a) Fewer than half of studies investigating the effectiveness of corporate codes of ethics found them to be effective.Footnote 5 Effectiveness seemed related to additional factors like having a supportive ethical training program; the nature of the enforcement provisions; whether observed violations are reported; and having developed and implemented the code as a bottom-up, collaborative process, yet also having demonstrable, vocal “buy-in” from senior management.
(b) Organizational leaders have a profound cascading effect on the culture and climate of their organizations, including prosocial ethical aspects. It is thought to occur via role modeling and as a motivational effect that inspires appropriate behavior and a sense of well-being.
(c) A competitive environment tends to lower people's sensitivity to the concerns of others and focuses attention on one's own (or one's team, unit, or company's) needs and goals, reducing prosocial behavior. Similarly, benevolent and principled ethical climates are seen as desirable and are linked with many positive organizational outcomes. The converse is true for egoistic (purely instrumental) climates.
(d) Systemic factors such as formal organizational compliance practices, as well as individual-level factors such as ethical climate perceptions, are independent predictors of misconduct.
(e) Individuals who have salient moral identities are attracted to socially responsible organizations.
Conclusion
There are, indeed, a number of overt (structural, bureaucratic, and pragmatic) obstacles to be overcome if one is to enhance the receptivity of IOP to the regulatory influences and societal benefits of professional licensing and, perhaps, accreditation. That would be nothing less than a major culture change for the field, and the position taken here is that attempts to tackle the practical problems will be much less likely to succeed if they are not implemented in light of the values conflict so engendered.
Some of what we know about changing the ethical cultures of organizations seems suggestively apropos (cf. (a)–(e), above). I believe those findings (and others) are relevant in two ways: (a) as contextual influences that will provide constraints and should shape the process of solving the “real world” problems noted and (b) as substantive issues requiring explicit accommodations in their own right. I am sure that a group of dedicated I-O and consulting psychologists (such as, but hopefully not limited to, the LCIOP Joint Task Force) would generate many ways in which the findings regarding the promotion of an organization's ethical culture might be usefully applied to the promotion of a discipline's professional culture.
Recent events in IOP suggest that cultural changes favoring licensure adoption have already begun. Perhaps foremost among these has been the formation of the Global Organization for Humanitarian Work Psychology (GO/HWP)—and its decidedly young membership. It has been responsible for the publication of texts with numerous authors promoting the prosocial possibilities of IOP: Carr, MacLachlan, and Furnham (Reference Carr, MacLachlan and Furnham2012); Carr et al. (Reference Carr, Thompson, Reichman, McWha, Marai, MacLachlan and Baguma2013); McWha-Herman, Maynard, and O'Neill Berry (Reference McWha-Herman, Maynard and Berry2016). This optimism is also reflected in The Organizational Frontiers Series sponsored by SIOP (Olson-Buchanan, Koppes Bryan, & Foster Thompson, Reference Olson-Buchanan, Koppes Bryan and Foster Thompson2013). The LCIOP Joint Task Force should be thanked for trying to keep the momentum going. It was not lost on this reader that the Task Force's presentation euphemistically referred to its own deliberations as “vigorous” and the article itself as presenting “negotiated perspectives.”