Defining the Profession of Industrial-Organizational Psychology

As the coordinator of an MA-level industrial-organizational psychology graduate program, part of my (Michael Gasser) job is to develop internship opportunities for our students at area companies. Our program is located in a community of approximately 100,000 people and the field of I-O psychology is simply not very well known by local business leaders (Gasser, Whitsett, Mosley, Sullivan, Rogers, & Tan, 1998). When meeting with a business leader to discuss internships, I am often asked to explain the difference between one of our students and someone with a comparable degree from a business school. This is a very good question, and although I have an answer, other I-O profes-sionals may not share my opinion. The purpose of this study was to determine what distinguishes I-O psychology from academic training in business. In her 2003 SIOP presidential address, Ann Marie Ryan (2003) lamented the fact that industrial-organizational psychology is not very well known or understood. One solution she suggested was to change the name of industrial-organizational psychology to something that would be clearer and better received by business professionals. SIOP members voted on this issue in 2003 and our name remains unchanged. Although a name change may be beneficial in communicating with the business community and, in the least, a shorter name would be easier to say, the name change would not solve the broader problem of communicating about and advancing understanding of I-O psy-chology. Changing our name is irrelevant unless we market our profession, and we cannot carve out a market unless we have a clear understanding of our own identity. We must market our profession if others are going to understand what we do. We believe there are two relevant issues here: (a) How should we adver-tise I-O psychology? and (b) What should we say about ourselves? We pre-viously touched on the first issue, finding that word of mouth and mail brochures were the most common methods for advertising I-O psycholog