Professor of Psychology Alicia Grandey hosted a workshop for students and scholars in organizational psychology, business, and engineering design.
“A key point of our workshop is that, despite attempts to design and optimize creativity and production using rational algorithms based on rigorous decision theory, in the end, people in groups make decisions and engage in behaviors that are not always rational, due to the climate in which they work,” said Grandey. “Unfortunately, organizations are often studied through only one lens, at the detriment of complete understanding of productive and innovative workplaces.”
While engineers tend to focus on optimizing the process, psychologists tend to focus on optimizing the people, and business scholars tend to focus on optimizing the organizational context. Grandey and Simpson brought together 45 scholars and students in the three fields because they believe moving forward requires cross-disciplinary discussions from scholars across academic silos.
For more information about the workshop, see the full story at Penn State News.