PsyAsia International is a psychological consultancy specialising in the application of psychology to the workplace. This is called work psychology or industrial/organisational (I/O) psychology. To many in Asia such terms might be meaningless. The same was true in the West until relatively recently. In the West, with the help of various psychological societies, the profession of organisational psychology has become synonymous with the ethical and professional application of science to workplace performance issues. In the USA, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, parts of Europe (and soon in the UK), psychologists must be registered with the state or federal registration boards before they can call themselves psychologists. Before registration they must undergo years of training (both Bachelor and Master degrees as a minimum) in psychology and more years of supervised practice. This brings the public and the client organisation confidence in provision of service. Even after this lengthy training and experience route, Psychologists must partake in CPD activities and are subject to board review should they practice incompetently or unethically.

In Asia, our company has tended to press the terms Human Resource Training and Human Resource Consulting to assist clients in grasping what organisational psychologists do. We are not strictly human resource consultants however. We have always retained our identity as psychologists. It is organisational psychologists who, with their firm grounding in science, often inform the HR process and HR activities.

At the June 2007 Industrial/Organisational Psychology conference organised by the Australian Psychological Society in Adelaide, Professor Sally Carless (Monash University) presented a paper that documented differences between organisational psychologists and HR practitioners in their HR knowledge and application of that knowledge . In her discussion, she writes:

"Overall, I/O Psychologists were significantly better informed about research findings in HR than HR practitioners."

The main short fallings in the knowledge of the HR practitioners appeared to be in areas related to Management Practices and Recruitment and Selection.

Professor Carless continues:

"I/O Psychologists' reputation as recruitment and selection experts and evidence-based practitioners was verified. There is merit in the argument that scientific integrity is a key differentiating feature of I/O psychologists."

Click here to download PsyAsia's short paper on Organizational Psychology in HRM