Dubuque University Offers Master’s Degree in Industrial and Organizational Psychology: What’s That?

When I first read about the University of Dubuque's new Master of Arts in Industrial and Organizational Psychology offering, I had to stop and think about what that actually meant.

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"Industrial and organizational psychology" is a pretty technical academic term. For the average person, it doesn't immediately explain what students will actually learn or what they might do with the degree after graduation. But the more I read into the program, the more familiar it sounded to me.

When I was at Wartburg College, I took a leadership minor. At the time, I saw it as a way to develop skills that could translate into management and leadership roles. It was a fairly easy minor at the time too. Just 2-3 classes if your schedule had room, and mine did. We studied things such as communication, working with teams, understanding people, leadership styles, and the challenges that come with getting people to work together toward a common goal. Looking back, I see a lot of common ground between that experience and what the University of Dubuque is now offering.

The difference is that UD is taking many of those same basic ideas and going much further in depth. Put simply, industrial and organizational psychology is the study of people at work. It looks at questions that every organization has to answer. How do you hire the right people? How do you train them? What motivates employees? Why do good employees leave? What makes one team successful while another struggles? How should managers lead? How can an organization improve employee performance and satisfaction? 

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What makes the UD program different is the emphasis on the psychology, research, and data behind the answers to those questions. Instead of simply learning that communication is important or that good leaders motivate their employees, students can study why certain approaches work, how to measure effectiveness, and how to identify what is actually happening inside an organization. So, it's not a traditional psychology program focused on counseling or mental health; it's psychology applied specifically to the workplace.

Imagine, for example, that a company has a problem with employee turnover. People are leaving, and management wants to know why. Someone with an industrial and organizational psychology background could help investigate the problem. Are employees unhappy with their managers? Are they not receiving enough training? Are jobs poorly designed? Are expectations unclear? Are employees being rewarded appropriately? Is there a problem with the organization's culture? The goal becomes understanding the problem and then helping the organization do something about it.

Credit: Unsplash / Markus Winkler

That is where I see the strongest connection to my own leadership studies at Wartburg. Leadership is not simply about being the person in charge. It is about understanding people, communicating effectively, building trust, solving problems, and then helping a group of people move towards a common goal. UD's program takes those same ideas and applies them to the larger world of organizations and workplaces.

For students, that translates into a surprisingly broad range of careers. Graduates could work in human resources, recruiting, employee development, training, organizational development, consulting, and any kind of management role.

“Industrial and organizational practitioners engage in a variety of problematic issues to improve the quality of work life for individuals, such as applying a needs analysis to determine the skills and technical training needs of employees. They study employee turnover and factors associated with job satisfaction, absenteeism, motivation, and productivity. They assist management in improving incentives and redesigning jobs to create meaningful opportunities for employees. They also might address problems associated with barriers to organizational development, as well as consumer behavior of products and services."

-Amy Baus, PsyD, Associate Professor of Psychology, University of Dubuque

The psychology side helps students understand people. The organizational side focuses on how businesses, nonprofits, schools, healthcare organizations, and other workplaces function. The graduate-level work adds research, analysis, and evidence to the leadership equation. Additionally, someone with a background in business, communications, marketing, education, healthcare, engineering, or really any other field could bring that existing knowledge into the program and add a new layer of understanding to their future organization.

For me, the most interesting part is how much this connects to something I studied years ago without necessarily having this terminology for it. My school's leadership minor was about developing the skills to work with people and lead effectively. UD's new master's program appears to take that same fundamental question and ask it on a much more analytical level: How do we understand people well enough to help individuals, teams and organizations perform better?

That's a question that can follow someone into any professional career. Every workplace has teams of people, conflicts, goals, turnover, communication problems, and opportunities to improve. The University of Dubuque's new program is essentially preparing students to understand those human factors and help organizations deal with them more effectively. At its core, it's about understanding people, understanding workplaces, and learning how to bring the two together more effectively.