Wright State among top universities for industrial organizational psychology

Nathan Bowling, industrial organizational psychology area leader and professor of psychology

Wright State University is among the top third of universities worldwide in faculty research productivity in the field of industrial organizational (I-O) psychology, a new study shows.

Wright State ranks No. 20 out of 62 universities with I-O psychology Ph.D. programs, according to I-O psychology researchers at Auburn University.

The findings were published in The Industrial-Organizational Psychologist, the newsletter for the Society for Industrial Organizational Psychology.

“We were quite pleased to see that,” said Nathan Bowling, Ph.D., a psychology professor who directs Wright State’s I-O psychology Ph.D. area. “It’s nice to get some objective verification of what we already knew by researchers at a university that have no connection to us.”

Industrial organizational psychology is the science of applying research and the principles of psychology to solving the everyday problems in the workplace and making employees more productive, healthier and happier.

“We are interested in things like helping organizations hire people who have the personal qualities that would make them good employees, a scientific approach to hiring people,” Bowling said.

In similar rankings 10 years ago, Wright State was ranked No. 43.

The new rankings, which evaluated the publication records in the top 10 scientific journals within the discipline from 2003 to 2012, place Wright State on par with several top schools such as Penn State and North Carolina State.

“Whenever I go to our conference, people know about Wright State,” Bowling said. “We have a national reputation within the field.”