NSF Work Climate Workshop @ PSU

The “Work Climate in Organizations Workshop” was hosted by Dr. Alicia Grandey at Penn State on May 12-13th, 2016, with the goal of increasing cross-disciplinary collaboration among scholars in psychology, management, and engineering. This workshop seeks to foster communication among leaders in the fields of engineering design, business, and organizational psychology, to advance the science of organizations through interactions between these disciplines. You can read more about the event on Penn State News.

Many scholars want to optimize organizational innovation and effectiveness but each discipline tends to have a different approaches and metrics. Engineers tend to focus on optimizing the process (e.g., the resources, procedures and decision-making), psychologists tend to focus on optimizing the people (e.g., the team composition and motivation levels), and business scholars tend to focus on optimizing the organizational context (e.g., leadership, strategy, culture). Although scholars are becoming more aware that process-, people- and context-oriented approaches all matter to organizational effectiveness, this does not mean that they understand how these should be integrated.