Rutgers GSAPP New Brunswick
Comparisons with Related Fields

Organizational psychology has common interests with both organizational behavior and industrial/organizational psychology. But the field also differs from these related disciplines. All three fields of study, for example, concern themselves with such topics as motivation, leadership and group dynamics. The related fields, however, differ in institutional location, intellectual emphasis, orientation to education for practice, and employment objectives of graduates. Organizational behavior tends to be located in schools of business or management, focuses mainly on profit-making enterprises, employs conceptual frameworks from economics, sociology, and psychology, and prepares students for academic positions in schools of business or management. Industrial/organizational psychology, for instance, tends to be located in academic departments of psychology, focuses on questions about selection, performance and satisfaction of individuals in organizations, emphasizes inductively derived statistical models and prepares students for academic positions in psychology departments or schools of management. Organizational psychology, in contrast, tends to be located in schools of professional psychology and focuses on organizations from all sectors of society, utilizes primarily psychological theories about individuals, groups and systems, teaches explicitly about the relations between practice and research, and prepares students for careers as practitioners and teachers.