Applied Social Psychology and Organizational Settings

John S. Carroll

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317542728
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Social Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Originally published in 1990, this title presents work that bridges social psychology and organizations. The primary goal is understanding, but that goal has two opposite sides: understanding organizations by bringing to bear the concepts and methods of social psychology (along with other social sciences), and understanding and developing social psychology by confronting it with the phenomena of actual organizational life. As such the authors break down some traditional stereotypical barriers between the academic world and the business world, between theoretical and applied research, between laboratory and field, and between various academic sub-disciplines. The result is a series of challenging forays into new research domains from which provocative ideas and provocative phenomena emerge.

1 Social Psychology in Business Organizations

John S. Carroll

Alfred P. Sloan School of Management Massachusetts Institute of Technology

DOI: 10.4324/9781315728377-1

More social psychologists are studying business organizations and business contexts. Increasingly, social psychologists are finding their academic home in business schools. Social psychologists are becoming a visible and important force among researchers interested in business organizations, marketing, and related domains. The purpose of this chapter is to present some brief ideas about why this is happening, and then to turn to the more important topics of how this can and should be done and what may come of it.

Social Psychologists and Business Contexts

Times change. I was a college student in the 1960s when we struggled against the military–industrial “Establishment.” Along with many other baby boomers, I went to graduate school in the early 1970s to make a career, work on interesting scientific questions, and improve society. Working for business or on business problems was somehow not what was dreamed of by longhaired, left-leaning students. After 10 years teaching in psychology departments I find myself one of a growing number of social psychologists who have made a permanent transition to business schools. This is an important change that should be viewed in its social and economic context.

Social Issues

During the 1970s, it became evident that social psychology was trying to deal with its conflicting orientations toward social problems and laboratory experiments. Shortly, we would be treated to pronouncements of a “crisis” in social psychology, and to the founding of the Journal of Applied Social Psychology and doctoral programs in applied social psychology that hoped to lead social psychologists out of the laboratory and toward institutions such as the schools, the courts, and the media.

In one sense, business has become a researchable social issue of the 1980s. In the mass media, the hot questions are global competition, productivity, computers in the workplace, the stock market, and the labor market. Popular culture is 110% consumerism; even Presidential candidates are marketed. Our social movements involve groups labeled yuppies and dinks, which refer to occupational classifications. The growth of two-earner households has placed working life as the focus of the modern family. As Barry Staw expressed in one of the interviews I conducted that is described shortly, “We’ve started being just as concerned with the efficiency and effectiveness of corporations as we wish to be with issues of discrimination and helping.”

Maybe this explains why social psychologists are becoming interested in business organizations. It is an extension of a long tradition of involvement with social issues such as war and peace, racism and inequality, law and crime. Social psychologists have always been sensitive to the world around them, and that world is noticeably business-oriented.

Economic Issues

The movement of social psychologists into business schools and organizational psychology departments accelerated for partly economic reasons. Beginning in the mid-1970s, psychology departments have had decreasing enrollments as the numbers of college students fell off, and as students shifted to majors that promised easier employment. As a result, hiring of new faculty decreased, as did support for graduate training, salaries against inflation, and, to some extent, research support. At the same time, business school jobs have boomed, salaries have exploded, and the resources available to researchers in business schools have become superior in some ways (although frequently deficient in lab space and doctoral students).

As the financial inducements to social psychologists were increasing, the ideological barriers between left-wing academics and right-wing businessmen were softening. The protest movements quieted and businesses accommodated to the new generations of workers and managers they hired. The movement leaders of the 1960s became the entrepreneurs, the professional staff, and the managers of the 1980s. People in business shifted a bit more to center, and people in academia did also. Business became more open to having researchers on site, and even to paying for research that had dubious immediate benefits. Researchers found in business settings a rich set of social behaviors to stimulate theory and application.

Social Psychology in Business Organizations

The issue of social psychology in business organizations brings up the same set of concerns that have always accompanied attempts at “application” or “relevance”: How do we connect an academic discipline with a real-world context? But this turns out to be too narrow a frame: There is more than just the application of disciplinary knowledge and methods because basic advances in social psychology can be promoted in this context. Indeed, there is more at stake than the development of social psychology. Some fundamental insights about social behavior could emerge—important questions, approaches, concepts, methods, and theories—that reach out across disciplinary boundaries.

Because my own experience is limited, having spent most of my career working on issues in cognitive social psychology and law-psychology, I sought to broaden my thinking by holding discussions with colleagues who really know about social psychology in business organizations. I interviewed four academic “experts” whose careers and experiences give them a deep yet diverse viewpoint on social psychology in business organizations. They are:

J. Richard Hackman, head of the Joint Program in Psychology and Business at Harvard. After receiving his degree in social psychology from Illinois, Richard did seminal studies in job enrichment, work design, and group effectiveness. He has logged many miles in airplane cockpits watching real groups carry out their jobs, and placing his life in their hands at the same time.

Barry Staw, Director of the Organizational Behavior Program at the Graduate School of Business, University of California at Berkeley. After receiving his degree in organizational behavior from Northwestern, Barry did research on intrinsic motivation, the escalation of commitment, and job attitudes. He co-edits the preeminent annual series, Research in Organizational Behavior.

Harvey Hornstein, Professor and Director of Psychology and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Harvey received his degree in social psychology from Teachers College and went on to do research on prosocial behavior, organizational change, and conformity. He coauthored Applied Social Psychology with Mort Deutsch. His most recent book is Managerial Courage.

Madeline Heilman, Coordinator of the Industrial/Organizational Psychology Program at New York University. After receiving her degree in social psychology from Teachers College, Madeline did research on attributions and gender in the workplace. She was recently involved in the writing of an American Psychological Association Amicus brief for a sex discrimination case soon to be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court.

I am sure there are more opinions out there, and more variety, than the five of us could raise during our discussions. However, the similarities that emerged and the overall picture warrants presentation. I trust that this will provoke others to help broaden our viewpoint.

The Lewinian Legacy and the Later Laboratory Legions

Each of my colleagues spontaneously mentioned Kurt Lewin as the embodiment of a desirable style of research and linkage between theory and application. The essence of this approach is that social psychology must “confront the world,” in the words of Hackman, who called himself an “unabashed Lewinian.” As Staw said, “social psychology was most, not just useful, but interesting theoretically when it had its eyes and ears open to the outside and was trying to solve social problems.” Hornstein and Heilman suggested that the challenge of social psychology was and is to do “scientifically rigorous work on annoyingly soft problems.”

When we look back to the time of Lewin in the 1940s and 1950s, we see a time when social psychology and organizational psychology could not be told apart. Dan Katz and Bob Kahn, Mort Deutsch, Ted Newcombe, others in the Michigan group with John French and Doc Cartwright, and the various students of Lewin were doing social psychology in organizations, whether businesses, colleges, or summer camps. As Hackman put it, “Dan Katz was on the one hand the coauthor of one of the first textbooks on the social psychology of organizations and was also the editor of JPSP and that would be very unusual to see now; at the time it was the most natural thing in the world.” Heilman suggested that, “when Mort [Deutsch] studied conflict, [and when] people studied groups, communication … leadership, these things were directly relevant to people's experience in organizations.”

The social psychologists of this time were not simply trying to solve social problems. In Hornstein's words, the goal was to find “essential issues” and to investigate “theoretical questions implied by these issues” rather than to aim only at solving applied problems. As Hackman said, their strategy was to do “basic research trying to understand fundamental social processes.” The stubborn phenomena of real contexts provide challenges that cannot be avoided by manipulating or selecting “subsets … that lend themselves … to our methodologies and existing theories.”

With the development of laboratory experimental social psychology in the 1950s and 1960s, the field created a sociological phenomenon with at least two major features. First, laboratory experimentalists could out-compete fieldworkers on accepted criteria of scientific productivity. A researcher in a large university with hundreds of captive subjects and several graduate assistants could produce a high volume of publishable studies unmatched by any other method. These studies were clearly “scientific” because they had carefully developed theories and highly controlled methods. Second, once attracted into the lab, social psychologists gravitated toward studies and theories that were best suited to the lab, providing a major impetus to the already influential studies of cognitive processes.

What emerged was a “parting of the ways,” in the words of Hackman, with organizational psychologists moving away from the core to management schools, education schools, and other places, while social psychology went cognitive. In their interviews, my colleagues described 1980s mainstream social psychology in terms such as micro, narrow, remote, and insular, but the organizational psychologists could easily be perceived as soft and applied.

One of the benefits of the growing rapprochement between the social psychology of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology or the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and the social psychology of Lewin and Deutsch would be a softening of the barriers separating different aspects of social psychology. Hackman argued that distinctions such as lab versus field or quantitative versus qualitative have us in a “Which camp are you in?” trap. Research questions should come first, with appropriate use of multiple methods and approaches following.

Social Psychology's Worldview

All of my colleagues expressed their belief that social psychological training was an excellent way to approach business organizations, or any sort of social behavior. Hornstein asserted that people trained in social psychology “have an approach that is exciting for people in organizations and forces them to ask questions that otherwise might not be asked.” Heilman added that training in social psychology produces “special ways of thinking about social phenomena.” Staw suggested that social psychology “is particularly useful for studying organizations in general.” Hackman seemed sincere when he said, “I feel blessed by my social psychology training.”

The analytical approach of experimental social psychology is “a search for causal, deductive theories using systematic, programmatic studies in precise, small steps,” as Heilman stated. We generate “very detailed theories … [with] lots of information about moderator variables.” Hornstein continued together with Heilman in suggesting that the “primary span in the bridge between research and application is theory, i.e., concepts, generalizations.” Staw found it useful that social psychologists had “injected the experimental perspective into the field of organizations … [A realistic experiment] might tap some more general processes … which can have external validity; … it is absolutely ludicrous to think that you have external validity because you did a study in Sears.” Conceptually, this training leads social psychologists to look for interactions; as Lewin said, “nothing happens across the board.” Heilman stated that, “if you can figure out what the mediator is, then you can always figure out when it shouldn't happen … which is a tremendous game of mental discipline.”

The substance of social psychology provides both a corpus of knowledge and a way of developing further understanding. The theories and frameworks are a “quiver with a bunch of arrows” (Staw), or a “backboard off which to bounce [ideas]” (Hackman), or the “conceptual grounding critical to organizational research” (Heilman). Staw felt that social psychology has a “broader perspective [than industrial psychology]” and is “more interdisciplinary [than sociology]” with “some appreciation of having to mix levels [from micro to macro].” The mix of topics such as attitudes, social influence, and groups seems central to any investigation of social systems. The “array of methods” (Hackman) is broad and really helpful.

However, the focus on real organizational problems suggests that researchers not limit themselves to the paradigms and ideas of one field. Staw argued that organizational behavior is a new basic field that is more interdisciplinary than social psychology, including micro (cognition) to macro (social structure) levels. He sees the study of organizations as a “potential growth point for the social sciences … one of the few areas where the various kinds of social sciences can all have something to say and … have to talk to each other.” Hackman added that it is “hard to bound social psychology,” because so much is shared with fields such as cognitive psychology and sociology. “If our methods and theories are inadequate [to deal with phenomena as they exist], then we should change them … and start doing social psychology that is congruent with the way the world works.”

Application As a Goal

My colleagues seemed to agree about two major points in regard to the “application” of social psychology to business organizations. First, application was not their immediate goal. Instead, the development of basic knowledge, or comprehensive theory developed through rigorous research, was the key to understanding and to application. Second, to achieve a higher rate of application or knowledge transfer, we would have to change elements of our training or identify and nurture a different type of professional, a “translator,” to facilitate the application process. Finally, my colleagues did not agree on what has already been applied.

Staw stated that organizational behavior is “not just applied social psychology; it is new basic knowledge.” His goal was expressed by saying that “we understand rather than improve organizations.” Hornstein suggested that social psychology “develops paradigms which encourage others to look at the world in ways that might be new and unfamiliar.” One might add that new viewpoints can be painful: The difficulties of translating knowledge into action were illustrated in a story told by Staw about his attempt to extend his studies of escalating commitment to the tendency of banks to throw more money into bad loans. A big bank declined to participate in the proposed research project; the underlying reason was that they “did not want to know what the deficiencies of the system were … if it is not working well they will get fired.… They don't want anything that will highlight … bad loans.” Thus, “room for improvement” is not simply an opportunity, it is also a threat to the “entrenched status quo.”

Hornstein pointed out that our empirical data are sometimes irrelevant to management. “You can show up and down that no one can do a performance appraisal without distortion or bias. [Yet,] they have to do them anyway … We’ve got to promote people; we can't promote everybody; they have to decide.”

For application to occur, in Hornstein's insightful analysis, there must be attention to the precision of theory and the politics of theory. The former depends on rigorous research and generalizable theories that attend to moderator variables in real contexts. Unfortunately, as Staw and Hackman suggested, social psychologists have shied away from some of the big issues such as authority structures, reward systems, task variables, and time constraints that are really central to organizations. Hackman noted that “playing in a real social system is hard, there are uncontrolled strong factors” that are ignored in many social psychological theories.

The politics of theory deals with practicality and analogy, or workable and communicatable ideas. Heilman observed that, “our solutions ar...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Social Psychology in Business Organizations
• 2 Negotiator Behavior and Decision Processes in Dyads, Groups, and Markets
• 3 The Impact of Layoffs on Survivors: An Organizational Justice Perspective
• 4 Beyond Formal Procedures: The Interpersonal Context of Procedural Justice
• 5 Top-Management Teams: Preparing for the Revolution
• 6 Perceptions of Leadership and Their Implications in Organizations
• 7 Putting Information Technology in its Place: Organizational Communication and the Human Infrastructure
• 8 Intellectual Teamwork and Information Technology: The Role of Information Systems in Collaborative Intellectual Work
• Author Index
• Subject Index