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Minimizing the POSH Bias Through Education: Necessity of the “How-To” Component

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 August 2017

Justina M. Oliveira*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Southern New Hampshire University
*
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Justina M. Oliveira, Southern New Hampshire University – Psychology, 2500 North River Rd., Manchester, NH 03106-1067. E-mail: j.oliveira@snhu.edu

Extract

Gloss, Carr, Reichman, Abdul-Nasiru, and Oestereich (2017) neglected the “how-to” component of their proposal for increasing humanitarian efforts in the field of industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology. Implementing change at an earlier point in the education process, through social justice awareness and applied service learning, is likely to lead to a more robust and fruitful shift away from a POSH bias compared to an attempt at persuading those currently in the field to adopt this change after their training (although I would never argue that the latter is utterly irrelevant). I hold an unwavering conviction that a natural route toward change would be to ensure that I-O psychology educators are explicitly focusing on the humanitarian workplace movement within our courses and that I-O professionals in organizations aid this cause by encouraging a humanitarian perspective as they train their newly hired, fresh-faced I-O graduates. The purposeful threading of humanitarian goals into I-O psychology education, in large part through service learning or civic education, is the key to our effectiveness. Without such a focus in the beginning stratum of I-O psychologists’ training, our other well-intentioned attempts at shifting the field's focus toward humanitarian concerns may be in vain. Below, I offer suggestions to reach this goal.

Type
Commentaries
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology 2017 

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