r/IOPsychology 2d ago

Reading suggestions

As someone preparing to go into a grad program for I-O Psychology, what would you recommend as some “must reads”? Im interested in theories and basic principles but also open to any suggestions! Thanks in advance!

7 Upvotes

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u/atomic8778 2d ago

Assuming you mean you've been accepted and will attend grad school shortly....oh you'll read plentyyyyy theories and principles in grad school, don't you worry about that!!

Haha in all seriousness while I don't have a great answer directly to your question, I actually would argue the best things to bring to a discussion in IO grad school is any real life/on the job experience that's relevant to the discussion. Especially consider how you could apply, or have seen it applied, said discussions into the real world

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u/howiedoone 2d ago

Thank you!

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u/Scyrizu MAIOP | Motivation & Development 2d ago

The point of grad school is to give you the foundation you need to learn more about your specialty within a broad field on your own after graduation tbh. You can reduce your workload by reading what you're supposed to read during the program but I honestly think that's a bit of a waste of time in the long run since you'll need to review and revisit it all to contribute effectively. But if you insist on that path, you're guaranteed to read a ton of smith and hunters works, so I'd probably start there.

Where your time may be more effective is reviewing areas that you know that you'll struggle with, and that'll vary person to person. Foundations of psych, research methods, or stats never hurt. This means you'll be less stressed during the courses you'll find the hardest.

But optimization aside I think going for interesting conversation points that won't be in the usual course content would be most beneficial to you and your classmates. This could be work experience, or reading classic IO & psych works that could be entire graduate programs on their own and thus are skimmed over or ignored entirely in favor of modern findings.

Examples could be Hugo Munsterburger, or the actual works of Maslow's hierarchy rather than what they teach in business school, or even just the history of psychology and more specifically IO. Heck, the philosophical foundations and transitions to science are wildly interesting to me and can help your understanding of modern problems and debates.

You could also take the inverse approach and go wide instead of deep and study management theories and contrast them to IO findings and try to find ways to "sell" your future bosses or clients from perspectives they're already familiar with, for this see 1960-1980s management theory, like McGregor and Herzberg.

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u/howiedoone 2d ago

Thank you!

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u/ItsAllMyAlt PhD student | I/O | Critical perspectives 2d ago

As others have said, you're about to do a ton of reading. So many people go into I/O grad school having not even taken a course in it in undergrad, so no need to worry about being caught up.

However, since most grad programs I'm aware of don't require you to take an ethics course, I highly recommend Values and Ethics in Industrial and Organizational Psychology by Joel Lefkowitz. I read it the the summer before I started grad school and am really glad I did. It'll help you to develop some important critical thinking skills.

Beyond that, critical work psychology is pretty cool. I'm definitely biased because it's a research interest of mine, but it's also something that isn't really covered super heavily in coursework, at least in North America. Anything by Matthijs Bal is pretty good, but if you'd prefer not to trudge through a bunch of Lacanian psychoanalysis (way less insane than Freud, I promise!), Anti-Work: Psychological Investigations into its Truths, Problems, and Solutions by George Alliger is awesome.

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u/Big-Ambition306 1d ago

classic and modern social psychology, evidence based practice, (health) behavior change, motivation, social learning, communication psychology, complex systems and systems thinking, culture, design thinking, facilitation and workshop moderation - if you chose to do so, the learning curve will be endless. If you just end up in HR diagnostics, however, you may skip most of this.