Largervery Large Improvementon Pages Discussion

By /

Largervery Large Improvementon Pages Discussion

Organizational Change

In almost all cases, an organization employs an I/O Psychologist to recommend steps for, or to oversee, organizational change. If everything were fine, there would probably be no need to engage a human behavior expert to modify the behavior of the organization or its staff! I/O Psychology, like all fields of Psychology, is grounded as much as possible in an evidence-base emerging from research studies. Therefore, it is essential for you when working in the field of I/O Psychology to understand the studies that have been conducted on organizational change. You will be exploring these in greater depth during this unit’s Discussion.

Chapter 26 in your textbook presents the results of a meta-analysis of hundreds of organizational change studies. Following proper meta-analytic procedure, the results of these studies were translated into a common metric of effect size, called d. The d-Effect is interpreted as follows:

d

Degree of Improvement

.01 – .24

Very small improvement

.25 – .49

Small improvement

.50 – .74

Moderate improvement

.75 – .99

Large improvement

1.00 & larger

Very large improvement

On pages 631–637, the authors present the effect sizes for organizational change efforts aimed at many different aspects of organizations, such as productivity and employee withdrawal behaviors. They also present the effect sizes for organizational change efforts in different types of organizations, such as government versus private sector, small versus large companies, etc.

For this discussion:

  1. Select two (2) of the effects presented on pp. 631–637.
  2. Present each effect size (d) you have selected, and briefly describe what aspect of organizations or type of organization it refers to.
  3. In everyday language, explain what your chosen effects mean.
  4. Then, synthesizing the information from across this week’s Readings and prior Readings in this class, as well as your general knowledge of psychology, explain why you believe this particular effect size was found, rather than a larger or smaller effect size. For example, if a certain effect was found to be larger for government organizations versus private organizations, why do you believe this effect is larger in government organizations?

Please have a copy of: Lowman, R.L. (Ed.). (2002). Handbook of organizational consulting psychology. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.