Going Global: Internationalizing the Organizational Psychology Curriculum

Abstract

Organizational psychology focuses on enhancing human well-being and performance in organizational and work settings. According to 2008 APA membership statistics, 3.1% of APA members belong to Division 14 or the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. The field of organizational psychology has a century old tradition in the USA. However, its topical focus on behavior at work has much older global roots. For example, the ancient Chinese used ability testing to match individuals to jobs and the use of rice grains to detect faking, the ancient Greek philosophers discussed match of individuals to leadership roles, the Old Testament discussed what constitutes a virtuous organization, and Sun Tzu described how to combat groupthink in the Art of War. Thus in many ways organizational psychology has a short past but a long history. As a science that aspires to be global in its reach, we set out in this chapter to examine how international the training is in organizational psychology, beginning with a look at how internationalized the curriculum (and the focus of the field as a whole) is currently, followed by a discussion of why we feel changes are needed. We present ideas as to how to change the curriculum, at the level of the individual program as well as at the level of the profession, ending with advice for individual instructors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)