August 2019 Newsletter
Communications From Your Executive
WOP Challenges around the World: Updates
Your Division 1 Executive is making great progress on the initiative entitled WOP Challenges Around the World. This project is ambitious and challenging because we would like to know what the current needs of our Work and Organizational Psychology (WOP) professionals are in the areas of research and intervention in different parts of the world.
The main goals of this work are to identify current initiatives among WOP professionals around the world, to assess the needs reported by WOP in different countries, and to compare how these efforts align with UN goals, specifically as they relate to decent work, no poverty, innovations, gender equality and good health and well being.
The first phase of our project has been completed. We invited all Division 1 IAAP members to participate - see December 2018 IAAP division Newsletter - https://iaapsy.org/site/assets/files/1689/wop_around_the_world12_12a_18.pdf and ensured that a member within each country in which our members live, participated. We recieved replies from 41 people representing 36 countries. This enabled us to create a database of national associations of work and organizational psychology, national associations of psychologists, and research institutes (academic and non-academic) in the area of WOP in 36 of our member countries.
The survey also requested that participants indicate the top three WOP topics/issues which are (a) the most popular in their country among WOP researchers and practioners and (b) the topics/issues that require interest from, or attention by, WOP psychologists, taking into account the current situation and specific needs of their country.
We found some interesting results when we compared the issues that were reported as most popular with the issues identified as needing increased attention. Notably, the most popular topics within the WOP profession are not always aligned with the immediate needs of the country. For example, while burnout is a popular topic among WOP in one country, that country also reports needing more involvementin the area of diversity at work.
We wanted to thank all those that participated in the survey and we look forward to sharing our results with you!
Conference Updates
Promoting Decent Work: The Challenge of a Primary Prevention Perspective
