As a member of the British Psychological Society, a copy of
The Psychologist lands on my doormat every month. My current IT service management (ITSM) assignment contains little in the way the of formal work psychology (although informally I draw on much of the knowledge regularly), so the publication is a welcome method of staying connected to the last research findings and trends. A recent issue contained a debate about the future of occupational psychology, and while there were many interesting views expressed, Professor Rob Briner's honest and critical appraisal of the discipline chimed with me the most. He argued that practice can be compromised through too close an association with those who pay (the management), and that the practice of work psychology is often indistinct from the work of management consultants, despite being supposedly grounded in scientific method. In reality, he suggested that work psychology has only really made a lasting impact in the area of psychometric assessment.
