Paul E. Levy - Industrial/organizational psychology: understanding the workplace

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2016944022

ISBN-13: 978-1-319-01426-1

ISBN-10: 1-319-01426-7

With Instructors Resource Manual

ISBN-13: 978-1-319-03296-8

ISBN-10: 1-319-03296-6

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To my brother, Jerry, who was larger than life and always managed to make me feel special. Although I miss him and the pain lingers, Im blessed that I will always be able to see his smile and hear his voice whenever I summon them. P.E.L.

Paul E. Levy was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, the youngest of his familys five children. He received his BA in psychology and economics from Washington & Lee University and earned his MA and PhD in industrial/organizational (I/O) psychology from Virginia Tech. A faculty member at The University of Akron since 1989 and Chair of the Department of Psychology since 2005, Dr. Levy has been very involved in the development and training of hundreds of graduate students there. During his tenure, he has also provided many undergraduates with their first exposure to the field of I/O psychology through his Introduction to Industrial/Organizational Psychology course. Dr. Levys consulting and research interests include performance management, feedback, coaching and development, and organizational justice. He has published his scholarly work in many psychology and management journals, including the Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Organizational and Human Decision Processes, Personnel Psychology, and Academy of Management Journal. Dr. Levy is married to Sylvia Chinn-Levy and has three sonsChristopher, Sean, and Jaredwho have always managed to keep things interesting. Dr. Levy is an avid baseball and basketball fan, a servant leader at his church, a youth sports coach, a basketball player, and a lifelong fan of the Baltimore Orioles.

Each edition of Industrial/Organizational Psychology: Understanding the Workplace has been a unique experience for me. In the first edition, I made every effort to realize the original goals behind writing the book in the first place. In the second edition, I endeavored to further refine our approach to meet the expectations of instructors. For the third edition, I had the opportunity to work with a new publisher, Worth, and placed a greater emphasis on the changing field of industrial/organizational (I/O) psychology. In the fourth edition, I worked with the publisher to improve the look and design of the text as well as add new features that should benefit both instructor and student. The fifth edition represents a pretty substantial revision with some major in-chapter structural changes and significant content-related updates, adjustments, and additions. Yet the reasons I look forward to each revision mirror the reasons why I originally sat down to write the first edition.

Ive been teaching Introduction to Industrial and Organizational Psychology at The University of Akron since 1996 and also taught it for a few years at Virginia Tech. Ive always loved teaching the course but was never quite happy with the available textbooks; most tend to be quite dryand a dry textbook for a technical field is not the best combination. My students always had concerns about the textbooks as well, so I wondered if I might make a meaningful contribution to the I/O textbook market.

Therefore, my primary goal for the first edition was to write a textbook that was more interesting, more accessible to students, and a consistently better read. I worked very hard to produce a book that would engage students, excite them, and, of course, teach them a great deal about the scope of I/O psychology. From the very beginning, what attracted me to this task was the potential to write a book that would draw students into the story of I/O psychologyand that has been my guiding principle for the subsequent editions as well.

Focusing on writing a student-friendly text would have been difficult enough in and of itself. However, my second goal was to also achieve the highest quality in terms of its research orientation. I have been fortunate enough to be a member of one of the finest I/O programs in the country for 27 years; thus, high-quality I/O research is important to me and to my colleagues. So the real task for me was to maintain the rigorous research focus that is critical to understanding I/O psychologybut to do it in a way that students would find interesting and stimulating.

This book was written to serve as the main text in an Introduction to I/O class, which is usually taught at a sophomore or junior level, but I know of quite a few colleagues who have used it in basic or introductory graduate-level courses. It is also more current than most of the other I/O books on the market. Because I also teach separate graduate courses in industrial psychology and organizational psychology, I have to stay current on the research in both areas.

I held fast to the same overriding principles in the design and writing of the fifth editionto develop interesting, reader-friendly, current, research-based coverage of I/O psychology. In particular, I revised each chapter based on comments provided informally by colleagues who used previous editions and on formal reviews submitted by a diverse cross section of I/O psychology instructors from community colleges, four-year schools, and universities with graduate programs in I/O psychology, who have used previous editions of this book or competitors books. I attempted to tighten up the writing, expand on the real-world examples, and broaden the coverage to other areas that have emerged more recently on the I/O scene. One of the newer themes for this edition is an increased focus on technology, which is infused throughout the field and is now better infused throughout the text.