Industrial and Organizational Psychology

I. Nature of the Program

The Ph.D. program in Industrial and Organizational (I/O) Psychology is based on four principles:  (1) both students and faculty learn best in an atmosphere characterized by diversity of interests, mutual respect, informality, and hard work; (2) students are responsible for formulating, within broad guidelines, the flavor of their own individual programs; (3) both breadth and depth of training in psychology is general, and I/O psychology in particular, is necessary to understanding the complexity of the developed  and established theories and research in I/O Psychology; and (4) research that is both problem-oriented ("practical") and theoretically meaningful is a major goal of our program.

We make the first principle happen by (1) meeting as a total program (faculty and students) each week during the year, (2) having students involved in all faculty research activities and (3) promoting a spirit of give and take amongst all members of the program.  We have established a student-faculty ratio of no more than 4:1, thereby facilitating close working relationships between students and faculty.

Our second principle results in students usually working with a number of faculty while in the program, thereby being exposed to the broad range of issues and topics necessary for the definition of a personal style.  In addition, students choose the topics of their comprehensive examination as well as their MA thesis and Ph. D. dissertation, providing vehicles for personal definition of interests and competencies.  In fact, the major training approach of our program is designed around the individual differences of our students. 

The third principle -- breadth and depth of training -- requires students to receive intensive training in the content of I/O Psychology, research methodologies, quantitative methods, computer applications, and foundations of general psychology.  The core program in I/O is a series of four seminars (i.e., 2 foundation courses and 2 elective seminars), one per semester after completing the Survey of I/O Psychology and Research Methods seminars.  In addition, the core program of the Department of Psychology is designed to provide students with a general psychology framework.    These general courses, in conjunction with the content courses and research seminars in I/O Psychology, are designed to help the student learn how to formulate questions, conceptualize issues, and research the wide variety of basic behavioral issues of interest that exist in the complex work organizations of today's society.  In addition, we emphasize the multiple levels of theory and analysis - individuals, groups, organizations, societies, and countries - that are relevant for I/O theory and research.

Because we strive to do research that is both problem-oriented and theoretically meaningful, much of our research and theory building is done vis a vis functioning organizations  - from financial services to manufacturing and from firefighters to real estate agencies.    In addition, some research is conducted in more controllable, laboratory settings - on gender issues in leadership, on bargaining and negotiation, on alternative methods for measuring personality and intelligence, and on teams.    We emphasize that there are many ways to do research, varying from quantitative techniques to qualitative methodologies, and we view these various methodologies as complementary, realizing that the nature of the practical and conceptual issues being tackled should determine the methodologies used.

Our commitment to research that has both practical utility and theoretical meaningfulness is reflected in the research projects that our faculty and students have carried out in the past and the kinds of jobs our graduates take.  Recent research projects include:  Desired leadership traits and behaviors  as a function of national culture and organizational policies and practices; relationships between employee attitudes, customer service, and company financial performance; the roles of individualism and collectivism in determining bargaining and negotiation process and outcomes; the cultural psychology of revenge, organizational climate and attributions to discrimination, and design entry selection and promotion procedures for state police agencies.  Graduates of the program go to a variety of settings. Recent graduates have taken positions at The Hay Group, William M. Mercer, Entergy, Rice University, Cornell University, Queens University and Wayne State University.  A number of our advanced students take internships in government and industry settings.  Our proximity to D.C. facilitates these internships.  In general, we prefer students whose backgrounds suggest that they have a strong interest in pursuing an academic career but we are also very supportive of students who wish to go into practice.

Our I/O Psychology program has proven attractive to potential Ph.D. candidates (we do not have a terminal M.A. program and we only accept full-time students into the program).  Approximately 100 candidates typically apply for admission and we admit two to four students, making admission very competitive.

I/O Courses and Seminars

First-year students take the required Survey of I/O Psychology and Research Methods as well as general psychology core courses and statistics.  In the second and third years, students take two I/O foundation courses and two elective seminars.  The topics of the I/O foundation courses include job analysis, selection and training validation designs and work motivation, negotiation and conflict, organizational justice, leadership and groups and organizational culture and climate.  Students are required to take and pass these foundation courses along with two additional I/O related graduate level seminars by the end of their fourth year in the I/O program.

The elective seminars focus on special research topics and these seminars are offered to meet student and faculty needs for in-depth exploration of topics such as: Cross-cultural Organizational Psychology, Cognition in Organizations (information processing, learning, negotiation, and decision making); Performance Measurement and Theory; Organizational systems (change, culture, structure).  There is also a weekly seminar, offered every semester and taken by all faculty and graduate students, at which time we would likely discuss issues relevant to the I/O program or hear a visiting speaker present his or her research.

Related Courses of Interest :  Depending on the student's specialty within I/O Psychology, s/he will find it necessary to supplement the courses with some of the following:   Multivariate Analysis; Psychometrics; Seminar in Small Group Behavior; Seminar in Counseling Psychology; Sensory and Perceptual Processes.  In addition to the courses within the Psychology Department, the University offers courses in related disciplines which the student is encouraged to take.  Departments such as Education and Measurement Sciences, Sociology, Computer Science, and Communications, as well as the College of Business and Management all offer relevant courses.  In recent semesters, courses in Organization Theory (Sociology), Marketing (Business and Management), and Covariance Structural Equation Modeling (Education and Measurement Sciences) have all been taken by I/O students.

II. Faculty

The faculty in the I/O area include Michele J. Gelfand, Irwin L. Goldstein, Paul J. Hanges, and Cheri Ostroff.

Michele J. Gelfand (Associate Professor) received her Ph.D. in Social/Organizational Psychology from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 1996.  Her research focuses on cultural influences on negotiation, mediation, justice, and revenge, the structure of social networks across cultures, sexual harassment and discrimination, and basic culture theory and method. She is currently testing a multilevel theory of cultural tightness-looseness in 35 nations, which links macro-ecocultural factors with the structure of social situations and individual psychological processes.  Her publications have appeared in outlets such as the Journal of Applied Psychology, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Handbook of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, the Handbook of Industrial and Organizational Psychology Research Methods, and the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology. Michele is the Associate Editor of Applied Psychology: An International Review, and serves on the editoral boards of the Journal of Applied Psychology, Personnel Psychology, the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, the International Journal of Conflict Management, and International Journal of Cross-Cultural Management. She is the co-editor of The Handbook of Negotiation and Culture  (Edited with Jeanne Brett, 2004, Stanford University Press), co-author of Frontiers of Cross-Cultural Organizational Behavior (with Miriam Erez and Zeynep Aycan, forthcoming, Sage Publications), and co-editor of The Psychology of Conflict in Organizations (with Carsten De Dreu, forthcoming, Erlbaum). Michele received the Ernest McCormick Award for Early Career Contributions from the Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology and the LL Cummings Award from the Organizational Behavior Division of the Academy of Management. She is currently the Treasurer of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology (IACCP) and the Program Chair-Elect of the Conflict Management Division of the Academy of Management.  Michele teaches courses on organizational psychology, diversity in organizations, cross-cultural I/O and OB, and cognition and decision-making in organizations.  

Irwin L. Goldstein(Professor of Psychology and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs) received his Ph.D. in 1963 from the University of Maryland. His research interests have focused on issues facing individual entering work organizations. As such, he is especially interested in how they are selected and promoted, how they are trained by organizations and how the climate of the organization effects HR practices. He also has a strong interest in understanding and resolving the constraints that affect people who enter organizations such as the problems of race and gender discrimination. In this role, he has served as a consultant to both public and private sector organizations and is currently serving on a number of work groups charged with the responsibility of introducing best practices into organizations that have experienced litigation. Due to Irv’s heavy schedule as Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs for the University System of Maryland, he does not offer courses but he is available as a member of comprehensive examination and dissertation committees. The fourth edition of his well known book “Training in Organizations”, co-authored with Professor Kevin Ford, was published in 2002. Irv is the editor of the SIOP Frontiers Volume titled Training & Development in Organizations. He was associate editor of the Journal of Applied Psychology from 1981-87 and editor of the Frontiers book series for the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology from 1988-1993. Irv has been awarded Fellow status by the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, the Society of Engineering Psychologist and the Human Factors Society. He was President of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology during the 1985-86 year. In 1995, Irv received the Swanson Award for Research Excellence from the American Society for Training and Development and in 1992 received the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology.

Paul J. Hanges, (Professor of Psychology), received his Ph.D. from the University of Akron in I/O Psychology in 1987.  His research centers on topics in (a) social cognition, leadership, and cross-cultural issues; (b) personnel selection, test fairness, and racial/gender discrimination; and (c) research methodology. His research on cross-cultural leadership involves his participation as a co-principal investigator of the Global Leader and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) research project.  This multi-year, multi-nation project seeks to identify organizational and societal cultural values and practices and their effect on shared attributes of effective leaders.  He has also explored individual attributes in the emergence of leaders.  His work on personnel selection, test fairness, and racial/gender discrimination has involved developing selection systems for public and private institutions, exploring stereotype threat, implicit racial attitudes and other factors as contributors to adverse impact, the development of new testing procedures for measuring intelligence, reading ability, personality, and other constructs.  Finally, he has an interest in nonlinear phenomena and the utility of complexity theory for modeling psychological phenomena.  This methodological work includes topics such as range restriction correction procedures, test banding methodology,  multilevel statistical modeling, catastrophe analysis, and neural network analyses.  Paul's recent work is published in a variety of journals such as the American Psychologist, Applied Psychology: An International Review, Educational and Psychological Measurement, Human Performance, Journal of Applied Psychology, Leadership Quarterly, and Organizational Research Methods.  Currently, he is on the editorial board of the Journal of Applied Psychology and The Leadership Quarterly.  Paul is an affiliate of the Cognitive Psychology program and the R.H. Smith College of Business and Management.  He is a fellow of the Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology and the American Psychological Association.  His work with House, Javidan, Gupta, and Sully de Luque on the GLOBE project won the 2005 Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology M. Scott Myers Award for Applied Research in the Workplace.  His work with Ben Schneider, Brent Smith, and Amy N. Salvaggio won the Academy of Management’s 2004 Human Resource Division Scholarly Achievement Award as well as the Academy of Management’s 2004 Organizational Behavior Division’s Best Paper Award.  Finally, he won the College of Behavioral and Social Science Excellence in Teaching Award in 1989 and 1998.

Cheri Ostroff (Professor of Psychology) received her PhD in I/O Psychology from Michigan State University in 1987. Prior to joining the University of Maryland in 2005, she served on the faculty in the Industrial Relations Center at the University of Minnesota, the Management Department at Arizona State University, and the Department of Organization and Leadership at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research interests levels of analysis issues, organizational climate, person-environment fit, socialization, and human resource management systems. Cheri is particularly interested in understanding the interplay between individuals’ attributes, the group setting and the organizational context. Her current work focuses on a broad range of issues including explaining slumps and streaks in performance, the role of organizational climate in fostering employee and customer outcomes. Cheri received the Ernest J. McCormick Award for Early Career Contributions from SIOP as well as APA’s Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contributions in Applied Research. She is also a fellow of both SIOP and APA. Cheri currently serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Applied Psychology, Academy of Management Review, and Human Resource Management Journal. Previously, she served on the boards of Personnel Psychology and the Journal of Vocational Behavior, and was associate editor for the International Journal of Selection and Assessment. She is an active member of SIOP, having served on the Fellowship Committee, Awards Committee, Program Committee, and as a member of the Organizational Frontiers Board. She has also served on a number of committees for the Academy of Management, including the HR Division Executive Committee, HR Division doctoral consortium coordination, Dissertation Award Committee, and the Scholarly Achievement Award Committee. She has provided human resource consulting to a variety of firms.

Faculty Affiliated with the Program

Michael R. P. Doughtery is an Assistant Professor in the Cognitive Psychology program in the Department of Psychology at the University of Maryland.  He received his Ph.D. in 1999 from the University of Oklahoma.  His research has followed three avenues, two of which are aimed at understanding the cognitive processes involved with judgment and decision making and one of which is directed at understanding memory and metacognition. Although most of his research bridges traditional judgment and memory paradigms, all three lines of research fall under the context of memory and decision making. His present focus involves investigating (and modeling) the importance of attentional control, working memory, and retrieval processes for understanding hypothesis generation, hypothesis assessment (probability judgment), and hypothesis testing. Although most of this research has taken place in highly controlled laboratory experiments, the constructs presumably are important for understanding decision making in real-time dynamic tasks such as firefighting, air traffic control, and military planning.

Arie Kruglanski is a professor of psychology in the social psychology area at the University of Maryland and, in 2003, he became a distinguished university professor at the University of Maryland.  He received his Ph.D. in 1968 from the University of California, Los Angeles.  His research has centered on how people form judgments, beliefs, impressions and attitudes and the consequences this has for interpersonal relations, interaction in groups and feelings about various "out group" members.  Arie has formulated a theory of lay epistemics that specifies how thought and motivation interface in the formation of subjective knowledge.  This work has branched in several directions such as (1) research on epistemic motivations with specific focus on the need for cognitive closure (2) a unified conception of the parameters of human judgment that offers an integrative alternative to previous theorizing in a variety of social judgment domains and (3) a "motivation as cognition" research program that resulted in his recent theory of goal systems.  Arie has published 8 books and he has been the author of over 150 articles and book chapters. 

Charles Stangor is professor of psychology in the social psychology area at the University of Maryland, and has also taught at the University of Tübingen in Germany. He received his B.A. from Beloit College in 1973, and his Ph.D. from New York University in 1986. Dr. Stangor is the recipient of research grants from the National Institute of Mental Health and from the National Science Foundation. He has published 7 books and over 50 research articles and book chapters, and has served as an associate editor of the European Journal of Social Psychology. Dr. Stangor's research interests concern the development of stereotypes and prejudice, and their influences upon individuals who are potential victims of discrimination. He is a charter fellow of the American Psychological Society, and currently serves as a member of the executive committee of the Society for Experimental Social Psychology.

Cynthia Kay Stevens joined the Management & Organization faculty at University of Maryland in 1990, after she received her Ph.D. in psychology from University of Washington. Her research interests focus on cognitive and social factors that affect group and individual decisions. She has studied these phenomena in the context of staffing (interviews, job search & choice, recruitment), training, and teams. Her work has appeared in Personnel Psychology, Academy of Management Journal, Organizational Behavior & Human Decision Processes, and Journal of Applied Psychology. Dr. Stevens teaches in the MBA and Ph.D. programs at the Robert H. Smith School, where she has won four teaching awards. She has consulted with businesses on leadership development and coaching, performance management, and diversity-related issues.

Paul Tesluk is an Associate Professor in Management & Organization in the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. He received his Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University in Industrial/Organizational Psychology. Some of his current research projects involve studying the factors influencing the effectiveness of virtual teams, the adoption of new technology in work teams, how managerial capabilities are developed through different types of work experiences, and the relationships between human resource management practices, employee attitudes, and firm performance. His work has been published in both leading academic journals as Personnel Psychology, Academy of Management Journal, and Journal of Applied Psychology, as well as in practitioner/executive-focused journals just as Academy of Management Executive. He is currently on the editorial boards for Journal of Applied Psychology and Personnel Psychology. He has received awards for his research on team effectiveness and work experience and development from the Society for Industrial/Organizational Psychology. His recent consulting work has been in the areas of organizational transitions to high-involvement work practices, work team design and performance, organizational climate and performance, and performance management and reward system design.