What is I-O psychology?
I-O psychology is the scientific study of human behavior at work and the application of that science to workplace issues facing individuals, teams, and organizations.
How can I learn more about I-O Psychology at TAMU?
We offer various related courses at the undergraduate level including Personnel Psychology (PBSI 353) and Organizational Psychology (PBSI 352). Many psychology majors who complete these courses are well positioned to earn the Work & Organizations certificate. For those seeking a deeper dive, we offer a 16-month Master’s Degree I-O Psychology which is designed to prepare students for working in industry or consulting. The department also offers a PhD in I-O Psychology for those interested in pursuing a career in research or academia.
How do TAMU I-O psychologists create meaningful change?
Within the department, we currently have 7 I-O faculty members who teach I-O psychology classes and conduct cutting-edge I-O psychology research.
Winfred Arthur, Jr. conducts state-of-the-art research on pre-employment tests and assessments, and training. He serves as an expert on a number of technical advisory boards and has also served as an expert witness on multiple cases concerning the validity of pre-employment tests.
Bisi Atoba is the director of our master’s program and partners with numerous local agencies to identify applied I-O projects for our students to complete. Some examples of these projects include a leadership assessment and development plan for the Brazos Valley Food Bank; a recruitment, selection, and retention analysis for the City of College Station; and the development of an employee engagement survey for Mathnasium.
Mindy Bergman partners with engineering faculty to foster classroom climates of inclusion that ideally result in greater retention rates of underrepresented groups in the STEM disciplines. She also currently serves in the critical leadership role as our department head.
Isaac Lindquist teaches multiple undergraduate I-O courses. He teaches some fundamental job analysis concepts to students by having them conduct a job analysis on a fictional TV/movie character.
Yumiko Mochinushi is integral to the quantitative training of our master’s students. She teaches all three statistics and research methods courses where students learn about the importance of the psychometric properties of measurement tools (e.g., reliability, validity, and item response theory) and how to visualize and communicate statistical results to business audiences so they can make data-informed decisions.
Stephanie Payne partners with TAMU Agrilife extension to conduct research on driving safety and discourage college students from driving distracted. She also collaborates with various oil and gas companies to assess their safety climate and identify ways to improve worker safety.
Ze (Mia) Zhu has a program of research on employee well-being, recovery from work stress, and work-life balance initiatives. She has developed a measure of supervisor support for employee recovery and strives to identify ways to help employees have a healthy, happy, and sustainable work life.
We cannot be more proud of our Industrial-Organizational team of trend setting psychologists and all the work they do in their research and fields. Gig em!