The Nature of Work, the Context of Organizational Behaviour, and the Application of Industrial-Organizational Psychology

Abstract Three themes occasioned by the other papers in this special issue of Canadian Psychology are discussed with regard to their implications for the science and practice of industrial/organizational psychology. These include the changing nature of work, the impact of work context on organizational behaviour, and the need to increase the application of valid psychologically based human resources management practices in organizations.The introduction of virtually every article in this special issue speaks to the changes in the world of work that are occurring as we approach the year 2000. The authors of these articles conclude quite rightly that these changes represent both challenges and opportunities for industrial/organizational (I-O) psychology. On one hand, much research and practice in I-O psychology does not as yet speak to these trends. On the other hand, I-O psychology is the most well equipped among the disciplines to address them.Trying to synthesize the wealth of insights offered in the accompanying articles is a daunting task. I will try to do this indirectly by posing and then offering some commentary on three questions that the articles suggested to me. Two of these questions stem from common themes that ran through many of the selections. First, what is a job, and how can I-O psychology better address an emerging ambiguity in the nature of jobs? Second, how can I-O psychologists better incorporate work context into their research? It is, after all, this very context that the authors in this issue tell us is changing as we approach the year 2000. My final question derives from an issue that is generally omitted from the other articles in this issue: How can we get more of the insights from psychological research applied in organizations?What is a Job?Not so long ago, managers, employees, unionists, and I-O psychologists all had a similar view about what constituted a job, both descriptively and prescriptively. Jobs were static devices, closely attached to organizations, clearly demarcated from other jobs, and closely associated with particular incumbents. The notion of a job is in fact socially constructed, and as several of the contributions in this issue indicate, this social construction is changing. On one side, managers appear to be expanding the scope of many jobs to include factors such as flexibility, teamwork, self-management, and so on. At the same time, many jobs are being broken away from their former social context via mechanisms such as outsourcing, limited contracts, and part-time status. While I-O psychologists scramble to keep up with these changes, unionists often resist them.In a Fortune cover article, Bridges (1994) used the provocative title "The End of the Job" to underline the changes alluded to in many of the articles in this issue. Bridges did not mean that work was ending, only the traditional division of labour by which work is accomplished. Although there are many reasons for this, advanced information technology is most salient. In fact, it is instructive to consider how many of the technological advances in the Canadian workplace described by Methot and Phillips-Grant (this issue) underlie the other subjects discussed in this issue. One of the most critical consequences of contemporary information technology is that organizations have many more options about who performs work and how, when, and where it is performed. Given this flexibility, the static concept of a job is fading. To take a transparent example, work is still involved when bank customers choose to extract cash from their accounts. Yet, within a few years, who does this work, as well as how, when, and where it is done, have changed radically with the advent of automatic teller machines that incorporate some labour on the part of the customer. As a consequence, teller jobs have decreased in number, even though work remains.A joke among I-O psychologists goes like this: Question: How do you get an A on your I-O comps? …