Evolution of Study

Psychologists were certainly not the first to study work settings and suggest
changes, or even the first to apply the scientific method to the enterprise.
For example, Frederick Winslow Taylor and Frank Gilbreth were industrial engineers who considered workers not too different from cogs in the machines
also involved in industry. Their “time and motion” studies sought to
discover how workers could most efficiently carry out their parts of the enterprise.
Although their conclusions are often now cited as examples of inhumane
manipulation of workers for companies’ benefits, Taylor and Gilbreth
envisioned that both workers and employers were to gain from increases in
efficiency. Not surprisingly, most of what industrial engineering studied was
appropriated by industrial psychology and remains part of I/O psychology—
usually under the designations “job design” and “human factors engineering”
in the United States, or the designation “ergonomics” elsewhere.
Early psychologists had an advantage over the others studying and offering
advice about work. They were popularly identified as people experts,
and for the many problems thought to be based on human characteristics or
limitations, their expertise was acknowledged, even while it was very modest.
The advantage of being expected to make valuable contributions was put to
good use, and within the first two decades of the twentieth century, industrial
psychology became a recognized discipline with the ability to deliver
most of what was expected of it.
Ironically, wars materially aided the early development of industrial and
organizational psychology. World War I provided psychologists unprecedented
opportunities to try intelligence testing on a very large scale and to
develop and implement a very large personnel program. Robert Yerkes directed
the intelligence testing of more than one million men between 1917
and 1919, and Walter Dill Scott and Walter Van Dyke Bingham interviewed
and classified more than three million men before the war ended.
Testing, interviewing, and classification were also part of industrial psychologists’
efforts during World War II, and many other lines of research
and application were also pursued. Human factors engineering, which emphasized
machine design tailored to the people who would use the device,
was greatly advanced by the necessity that people be able to control aircraft
and other sophisticated weapons.
Following each war, some of the psychologists who had successfully
worked together chose to continue to do so. Major consulting firms grew
out of their associations and remain a source of employment for many I/O
psychologists. 439