Psychology applied to work : an introduction to industrial and organizational psychology / Paul M. Muchinsky

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Section One. Introduction -- Introduction -- Research methods in I/O psychology -- Section Two. Personnel Psychology -- Criteria -- Predictors -- Personnel decisions -- Personnel training -- Performance appraisal -- Section Three. Organizational Psychology -- Organizational influences on behavior -- Job satisfaction -- Worker motivation -- Leadership -- Organizational communication -- Section Four. The Work Environment -- Job design and organization development -- Union/management relations -- Work conditions.

In some ways, revising a book is even more difficult than writing it in the first place. The author has to decide what material to retain, eliminate, expand upon, and reduce. Readers often give conflicting opinions on what to do. The most commonly received (and gratifying) compliment on the first edition concerned the book's readability and clarity, Not wanting to fix what wasn't broken, I strove to make the second edition equally readable. Second, readers seemed to like the scientific/scholarly research basis to the book, but they wanted more applications and examples. This edition still has a strong scholarly foundation, but it is laced with many more applications than its predecessor. Next, readers asked whether the next edition would cover recent developments in the field, and whether it would include topics missing from the first edition. I kept a running tab of all the "new topics" I planned to cover in the second edition, and was surprised to find forty topics on the list. Issues such as job evaluation, comparable worth, graphology, nonverbal communication, personnel recruitment, burn-out, and many more are included in this edition, making the book as complete and up-to-date as possible. Finally, my experience through the years in teaching, consulting, researching, and practicing industrial/organizational psychology has given me a wealth of specific examples and applications. I often related my professional experiences to students, who commented on the relevance and applicability of these episodes to the lecture material and advised me to include them in this book. So I did. In each chapter you will find three or four field notes, short but practical illustrations of how the text material relates to "real life." (This material is in the shaded sections of each chapter.) These field notes help the reader understand how the book's content applies to the world of work and help to balance the science of industrial/organizational psychology with its practice.