Organizational psychology on the way to 2065: a challenge to scholars

In the 48 years since I started in the field of Organizational Psychology (OP), a lot of interests have shifted or changed. Some are persistent, like leadership. Our fascination and fear with the forces behind change, innovation, and power continue to provoke research. We are less concerned about efficiency and less likely to study ways to drive people harder. Placement is less of a focus of research, in terms of selection and promotion. Employee participation has morphed from T-groups and sensitivity training, quality circles, employee involvement, business process re-engineering, and bottom up processes to engagement and citizenship. We have experienced philosophical shifts like the emergence of positive and spiritual psychology as disruptive innovations in thought. Some will be the phrenology of the future and pass away as ephemeral intellectual fads, and some will be extinction level events that dramatically change our perspectives and concepts of causality. OP is becoming a leading integrative arena—truly transdisciplinary. This holds great promise for how our field can contribute into many other fields while maintaining rigor and developing our own concepts. Cleeremans (2010) challenged us to consider psychology a “hub” discipline of the fractionated and silo array of psychologies. In this same way, OP can become an integrative hub for the social sciences. Our core intent is and will be to help create or maintain a better life for all in our societies, to seek truth, justice, beauty, and love (or at least get tenure). There does seem to be eight trends emerging which, I believe, will affect the coming 30–50 years. I am not under the illusion that this list is comprehensive. Therefore, I ask the reader to use this list as their own call to intellectual curiosity to “go where no one has gone before” and help us create a desired future of rigorous and helpful insights through research in OP. One set of trends address the “what” of a possible future OP: