Exam questions in Industrial and Organizational Psychology are written from names. Adams and equity theory. Vroom and expectancy. Locke and Latham on goals. Hackman and Oldham on job characteristics. Schein on culture, Hofstede on national dimensions, Maslach on burnout, Edmondson on psychological safety.
This is a complete index of 87 researchers, each with their years, their field, what they are actually known for, and a single exam-ready sentence you could write straight onto a paper. Search by name if you have the person, or by idea if you have the theory and have lost the name.
Written and maintained by Muhammad Shahzeb Anwar, an Industrial and Organizational Psychologist.
87 theorists
Opened the first psychology laboratory (Leipzig, 1879) and trained the generation that carried the discipline to industry.
Psychology becomes a science when mental processes are measured under controlled conditions rather than argued about.
Wrote Psychology and Industrial Efficiency (1913); usually named as the founder of industrial psychology.
Match the worker to the job, design the job for the mind, and use psychology to sell the result — the three branches of applied psychology.
Applied psychology to advertising and, in WWI, to officer selection and rating scales.
Advertising works on suggestion and emotion, not on reasoned argument — the first psychological theory of persuasion in commerce.
Scientific Management — time-and-motion study, the one best way, piece-rate incentives.
Work can be decomposed, timed and standardised; efficiency is an engineering problem. Critiqued for treating the worker as a machine part.
Motion study and therbligs; Lillian Gilbreth brought fatigue, morale and the human factor into the efficiency movement.
Eliminate wasted motion, not wasted people — the humane wing of scientific management.
Led the Hawthorne Studies at Western Electric; founded the Human Relations movement.
Output rose whatever the lighting: social attention, group norms and being observed drive performance more than physical conditions.
Field theory, action research, the three-step change model, and the classic leadership-climate experiments.
Behaviour is a function of the person and the environment, B = f(P, E); change means unfreeze, change, refreeze.
Factor analysis and the general factor of intelligence (g); the Spearman–Brown correction for test length.
Positive correlations among all cognitive tests imply one general ability plus test-specific abilities.
Cronbach's alpha; construct validity (with Meehl); generalisability theory; aptitude–treatment interaction.
A test is not valid in the abstract — validity is the evidence for a specific inference from a specific score.
Internal and external validity and the threats to each (with Stanley); the multitrait–multimethod matrix (with Fiske).
Every design buys one kind of validity at the cost of another; name the threat before you name the finding.
Validity generalisation and psychometric meta-analysis; the landmark 85-year review of selection-method validity.
Apparent situational specificity is mostly sampling error and unreliability — general mental ability plus a work-sample or structured interview predicts performance almost everywhere.
Effect sizes (d, f², kappa) and statistical power analysis.
Significance answers 'is there an effect?'; effect size answers 'does it matter?' — report both.
The Critical Incident Technique, born out of WWII aircrew selection.
Collect concrete accounts of unusually effective and ineffective behaviour; those incidents become the job description, the rating scale and the interview.
The Position Analysis Questionnaire — worker-oriented job analysis.
Describe jobs by the human behaviours they demand, not by the tasks they contain, and jobs across industries become comparable.
Systematic reviews of test validity across occupations; the moderator-variable problem.
Ability tests predict, but how much they predict depends on the job — the question that validity generalisation later reframed.
Utility analysis — the Brogden–Cronbach–Gleser model that puts selection gains in currency.
The value of a selection system = validity × selection ratio × the standard deviation of performance in money, minus cost.
Counterproductive work behaviour, integrity testing, and the 2022 re-estimation of selection-method validities.
Corrected validity estimates were inflated by range-restriction assumptions; structured interviews and job knowledge now rank at or above general mental ability.
Behaviourally Anchored Rating Scales (with Kendall) and the Job Descriptive Index.
Anchor each point of a rating scale to an observed behaviour and raters stop drifting into general impressions.
The eight-factor model of job performance and the declarative-knowledge / procedural-skill / motivation framework.
Performance is behaviour under the person's control, not results; results are contaminated by things the worker cannot influence.
Named and mapped Organizational Citizenship Behaviour, and tied it to job satisfaction and perceived fairness rather than ability.
Discretionary behaviour that is not formally rewarded — helping, sportsmanship, civic virtue — is what makes an organisation work; it is largely driven by perceived fairness.
The law of effect; identified the halo error in rating data (1920).
A single global impression contaminates every specific rating a rater gives — the oldest documented appraisal bias.
Interpersonal expectancy effects; the Pygmalion effect in the classroom and at work.
A supervisor's expectation of a subordinate becomes true through the behaviour it produces — expectations are an intervention.
The hierarchy of needs and self-actualisation.
Needs are prepotent — a higher need only motivates once the lower one is reasonably satisfied. Intuitive, but weakly supported by data.
Two-Factor (Motivator–Hygiene) theory and job enrichment.
Pay and conditions are hygiene factors — their absence causes dissatisfaction, their presence does not cause satisfaction. Satisfaction comes from achievement, recognition and the work itself.
ERG theory — Existence, Relatedness, Growth.
Maslow's ladder collapsed to three needs that can operate at once, plus a frustration–regression path when a higher need is blocked.
Need for Achievement, Affiliation and Power; the leadership motive pattern.
Needs are learned, not innate; high nAch predicts entrepreneurial success while socialised nPow predicts managerial success.
Expectancy theory; the Vroom–Yetton normative decision model of leadership.
Motivation = Expectancy × Instrumentality × Valence. Any term at zero zeroes the product — effort must be believed to lead to performance, performance to reward, and the reward must be wanted.
Equity theory — the first formal account of fairness perception as a motivational force at work.
People compare their own outcome/input ratio with a referent other; perceived inequity produces tension that is resolved by changing inputs, outcomes, the comparison, or by leaving.
Goal-setting theory and the high-performance cycle.
Specific, difficult goals beat 'do your best' — provided the person is committed, has the ability, and receives feedback.
Self-Determination Theory and the overjustification effect.
Autonomy, competence and relatedness sustain intrinsic motivation; a controlling extrinsic reward can crowd out interest that was already there.
Social learning theory, self-efficacy, reciprocal determinism, the Bobo doll studies.
People learn by observing models, and what they attempt depends on self-efficacy — the belief that they can execute the behaviour, which is distinct from the outcome they expect.
Operant conditioning, reinforcement schedules, behaviour modification.
Behaviour is shaped by its consequences; variable-ratio schedules produce the highest, most persistent response rates.
Theory X and Theory Y — the managerial assumptions that quietly design an organisation's control systems.
A manager's assumptions about whether people avoid work or seek responsibility become self-fulfilling through the systems they build.
The Job Characteristics Model and the Motivating Potential Score.
Skill variety, task identity and task significance create meaningfulness; autonomy creates responsibility; feedback creates knowledge of results — moderated by growth-need strength.
Job crafting and the job / career / calling distinction.
Workers redesign their own jobs — changing tasks, relationships and how they frame the work — without waiting for management to do it.
The Job Demand–Control model of work strain.
Strain comes from high demands combined with low decision latitude; high demands with high control produce active, not damaging, work.
The Job Demands–Resources model and work engagement research.
Two parallel processes: demands drive the health-impairment path to burnout, resources drive the motivational path to engagement — and resources buffer demands.
The Maslach Burnout Inventory and the three-dimensional model of burnout.
Burnout is emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation/cynicism and reduced personal accomplishment — a response to chronic job stressors, not a personal weakness.
Cognitive dissonance theory and social comparison theory.
Holding two inconsistent cognitions is uncomfortable, and the cheapest fix is usually to change the attitude rather than the behaviour — which is why small commitments change minds.
Theory of Reasoned Action and Theory of Planned Behaviour.
Intention is predicted by attitude, subjective norm and perceived behavioural control — and intention, not attitude, predicts behaviour.
The three-component model of organisational commitment.
Affective (want to), continuance (need to) and normative (ought to) commitment predict very different behaviour — only affective commitment reliably predicts performance.
Procedural justice — the fair-process effect.
People accept unfavourable outcomes when they had voice in the process; how a decision is made can matter more than what was decided.
Organizational justice as a field; interactional and informational justice; the pay-cut/theft field study.
Underpayment inequity raised employee theft — unless the cut was explained with respect, which almost eliminated the effect.
The Contingency Model and the Least Preferred Coworker scale.
Leadership style is fixed; effectiveness depends on situational favourableness — task-motivated leaders win in very favourable or very unfavourable situations, relationship-motivated leaders in the middle.
Path–Goal theory and the GLOBE cross-cultural leadership project.
The leader's job is to clear the path to the goal — supplying direction, support, participation or achievement pressure depending on what the follower and task lack.
Transformational leadership (building on Burns) and the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire.
The Four I's — idealised influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, individualised consideration — add value beyond transactional exchange.
Drew the transforming / transactional distinction in political leadership.
Transforming leaders raise followers to higher motives; transactional leaders trade rewards for compliance.
Leader–Member Exchange theory, and the vertical-dyad linkage work it grew out of.
A leader does not have one style — they have a different relationship with each report, forming in-groups with high trust and latitude and out-groups managed by the contract.
Situational Leadership — telling, selling, participating, delegating.
Match directive and supportive behaviour to the follower's readiness. Popular in practice, thin on empirical support.
Servant leadership — leadership framed as stewardship rather than as command or charisma.
The leader's first instinct is to serve; the test is whether followers grow healthier, wiser and more autonomous.
The forming–storming–norming–performing (–adjourning) model.
Groups pass through predictable stages; conflict in the storming stage is developmental, not a sign of failure.
Groupthink, reconstructed from the Bay of Pigs, Pearl Harbor and other foreign-policy fiascos.
Cohesive, insulated groups under a directive leader suppress dissent and converge on bad decisions; the fix is a devil's advocate and independent evaluation.
Psychological safety, team learning, and the hospital studies that turned error reporting on its head.
Better teams reported more errors, not fewer — they felt safe enough to speak up. Psychological safety is the belief the team will not punish candour.
The Ringelmann effect — the origin of social loafing research.
Per-person effort falls as group size rises, from both coordination loss and motivation loss.
The three-level model of organisational culture; process consultation; the career anchors.
Culture is artefacts, espoused values and — the level that actually governs behaviour — basic underlying assumptions nobody debates any more.
National culture dimensions from the IBM data: power distance, individualism, masculinity, uncertainty avoidance, long-term orientation, indulgence.
Management theory is culture-bound; a practice that motivates in a low power-distance country can read as weakness in a high one.
The eight-step model of leading change, and the leadership-versus-management distinction behind it.
Change fails when urgency is not established and short-term wins are not produced — the guiding coalition matters more than the plan.
The Five-Factor Model and the NEO-PI-R, plus the cross-cultural evidence that the five factors replicate.
Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism — conscientiousness is the broadest valid personality predictor of job performance.
The meta-analysis that established the Big Five in selection.
Conscientiousness predicts performance across every occupational group studied; the other four predict only in specific jobs.
16PF; fluid versus crystallised intelligence.
Fluid intelligence is reasoning with novel problems and declines with age; crystallised intelligence is accumulated knowledge and does not.
The theory of multiple intelligences, and a sustained challenge to a single g-loaded view of ability.
Intelligence is plural — linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial and more. Influential in education, contested in psychometrics.
Defined emotional intelligence as an ability; the MSCEIT.
EI is the ability to perceive, use, understand and manage emotion — measurable with right answers, unlike the mixed trait models.
Popularised emotional intelligence as a mixed competency model.
Self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and social skill — commercially dominant, criticised for overlapping the Big Five.
Locus of control and social learning theory.
Internals believe outcomes follow their own actions; externals credit luck, fate or powerful others — internals cope better with job stress.
Implicit theories of ability — fixed versus growth mindset.
Believing ability is malleable changes the response to failure from withdrawal to effort; praise the process, not the trait.
Heuristics and biases; Prospect Theory; framing; System 1 / System 2.
Losses loom roughly twice as large as equivalent gains, and choices depend on how options are framed relative to a reference point — not on absolute utility.
Bounded rationality, satisficing and administrative behaviour — a Nobel for how organisations really decide.
Real decision makers lack the information, time and computing power to optimise, so they search until an option is good enough.
Mental accounting, the endowment effect, nudge and choice architecture.
Small changes to how a choice is presented — especially the default — change behaviour without restricting freedom.
The paradox of choice; maximisers versus satisficers.
Beyond a point, more options reduce satisfaction and increase regret — maximisers suffer most.
The six (later seven) principles of influence: reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, authority, liking, scarcity, unity.
Compliance runs on fixed-action patterns — shortcuts that usually serve us well and can therefore be triggered deliberately.
The Elaboration Likelihood Model — the dual-route account of how attitudes actually change.
Central-route persuasion needs motivation and ability and produces durable attitudes; peripheral-route persuasion uses cues and fades fast.
The conformity line-judgment studies and impression formation.
A unanimous majority produces conformity even against the evidence of one's own eyes — and a single dissenter collapses the effect.
The obedience-to-authority experiments, the small-world studies, and the ethics debate they triggered.
Ordinary people administer harm when an authority accepts responsibility — situational pressure outweighs disposition. Also the founding case for modern research ethics.
Social Identity Theory and the minimal-group paradigm.
Merely being categorised into a group produces in-group favouritism, because group membership feeds self-esteem — the root of most intergroup bias at work.
Modern marketing management; the marketing mix; social marketing.
Marketing is meeting needs profitably — segmentation, targeting and positioning come before any of the four Ps.
Positioning — the battle for the mind — and the marketing-warfare strategy books that followed it.
Positioning is not what you do to the product; it is what you do to the mind of the prospect — you win by owning a word, not by being better.
Diffusion of Innovations — the adopter categories and the attributes that decide how fast an idea spreads.
Adoption spreads through innovators, early adopters, early and late majority and laggards, governed by relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability and observability.
Psychological reactance; the free-choice paradigm behind post-purchase dissonance.
Threaten a freedom and people want the restricted option more; and after a hard choice buyers upgrade their opinion of what they picked.
Motivation research — the depth-interview tradition in advertising.
Purchases satisfy unstated emotional motives; ask why people really buy rather than what they say they want.
The Design of Everyday Things — affordances, signifiers, mapping, feedback, the gulfs of execution and evaluation.
When a door has to be labelled PUSH, the design failed — blame the artefact, not the user.
Ten usability heuristics; discount usability testing.
Five users find roughly 85% of usability problems — test early and often rather than perfectly and once.
The magical number seven, plus or minus two; chunking.
Short-term capacity is a handful of chunks, not of items — reorganising information beats shortening it.
Fitts's Law and the cockpit-error studies that founded human factors.
Time to hit a target rises with distance and falls with target size — the reason primary buttons are big and close.
Cognitive Load Theory, the worked-example effect, and the expertise-reversal effect in instructional design.
Instructional design should cut extraneous load so working memory can spend itself on the material that matters.
The forgetting curve, the spacing effect and the serial-position effect.
Most of what is learned is lost within days unless it is reviewed at expanding intervals — the basis of every spaced-repetition system.
The four-level model of training evaluation.
Reaction, learning, behaviour, results — most organisations stop at level one, which measures enjoyment, not transfer.
The transfer of training model — the framework that reframed training failure as an environment problem.
Transfer depends on trainee characteristics, training design and — most neglected — a work environment that gives the chance to use the skill.
Every theorist here is inside I/O Psychology Prep, alongside 50 modules, 632 flashcards and 410 exam-style questions. The app picks what you should study each day, and makes you write the definition before it shows you the answer.
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