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.