Last week as I watched Becoming Led Zeppelin on Netflix I was reminded about what an exciting and creative period the 1960s and 1970s were for rock music. There were so many innovations and unique sounds create by bands like Zeppelin that still resonate today. It occurred to me that other fields also have periods of rapid development and innovation. We saw this in early 20th century for natural science (e.g., Albert Einstein) and art (e.g., Salvadore Dali). The field of organizational science is far newer than these other fields, so our rapid period is more recent. For me the renaissance period for organizational research was the last two decades of the twentieth century. This was a time that the field expanded into many new areas that barely existed prior and are mainstream today.
Organizational Research in the Zeppelin Era
I was a student when Led Zeppelin was at their pinnacle. The field was a fraction of what it is today in terms of breadth. Industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology was focused almost entirely on finding ways to make employees more productive. Most practicing I-O psychologists were working on pre-employment assessments to improve hiring and on training. Job satisfaction was the only thing we studied that related to employee well-being, and we had to justify it by showing a link to productivity. My first try at publishing a paper in the mid 1970s on worker health showing that job dissatisfaction related to physical health symptoms was met with distain by reviewers who argued it was not an I-O topic.
The Renaissance Period for Organizational Research
A decade after my failed attempt to publish a paper on worker health, I noticed that organizational research was undergoing a transformation. I was seeing papers on new topics appearing regularly. As computers became mainstream, researchers began using more complex statistical methods. These were mainly a new generation of scientists who were attracted to the emerging technology. Between the mid 1980s and the end of the century, we saw many new topics and approaches take hold. Five are particularly important.
- Occupational Stress. The study of workplace stress and its connection to worker health and well-being began in Scandinavia and in the pre-internet days, only slowly migrated to the U.S. I published my first paper on the topic in 1987, and it would not become a mainstream topic until the late 1990s.
- Occupational Health Psychology. Just as interest in occupational stress was growing, so too was the I-O field expanding into broader issues of employee health, safety and well-being. The term occupational health psychology or OHP, first seen in the mid 1980s became widely known.
- Counterproductive Work Behavior. I published my first paper on employee misbehavior in 1975, but it wouldn’t be until 1995 when Sandra Robinson and Becky Bennett published a paper about the phenomenon calling it deviance that the topic took off. Today most people call misbehavior counterproductive work behavior, CWB which is now a major topic.
- Organizational Citizenship Behavior. Employees who are good organizational citizens will contribute beyond the demands of their job descriptions. They help one another and might volunteer to do something extra. The study of this phenomenon, referred to as OCB took off in the 1980s, eventually being linked to CWB.
- Work-Family Conflict. We can see the roots of interest in conflict between work demands and family demands earlier, but a paper by Jeff Greenhaus and Nicholas Beutell in 1985 began the explosion of interest in this topic. Where at one time the idea of work-family balance was limited to academic researchers, today it is something heard often in the workplace and seen in the media.
These, of course, are not the only advances during this time. Others include the study of organizational justice, engagement, psychological contract, personality, teams, psychological safety, and cross-cultural/cross-national issues. There was rapid growth in the use of meta-analysis and complex statistics.
Modern Malaise
Today’s journals are filled with complex statistical tests of ad hoc models no one takes seriously. Academic research is too often far removed from the realities of organizational life, focused more on theoretical ideas than scientific discovery. Perhaps it is merely a pause after such rapid expansion of the field as we all take a collective breath. Perhaps we are poised for a second renaissance that is right around the corner. At this point, it isn’t clear what it might be, but my money is that it will have something to do with technology and the rise in the use of AI.
Image generated by DALL-E 4.0. Prompt “Image that represents the Renaissance”.
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