Job Satisfaction: I/O Psychology and Organizational Behavior Management Perspectives

Abstract

Perspectives on job satisfaction and its relations with job performance among members of the Industrial/Organizational Psychology (IOP) and Organizational Behavior Management (OBM) cultures are identified and compared. Comparisons include vantage points of each culture on the roles of theory and data regarding the definitions of behavior, job performance, job satisfaction, and the potential causal relations among them. Literature reviewed suggests the IOP culture has validated technologies that some members of the OBM culture recognize as useful for purposes of assessing what members of the OBM culture call Social Validity (SV). Given similarities among values of the two cultures, reflected in their mutual concern for assessing Organizational Responsibility and SV, the author proffers the following recommendation: Members of the OBM culture should not eschew the IOP culture's practices that might contribute to OBM practitioners' ability to effectively establish the SV of their interventions, particularly large-scale interventions.

Keywords:

• ahistoric theory
• applied behavior analysis
• behavior analysis
• culture
• experimental analysis of behavior
• historic theory
• industrial and organizational psychology
• job performance
• job satisfaction
• operant behavior
• Organizational Behavior Management
• Organizational Responsibility