Organizational Psychology

The goal is a constructive discussion of the problems of the development of industrial organizational psychology (IOP) in Russia. The reason for the discussion was the content of the article: Ones, D., Kaiser, R., Chamorro-Premusik, T., Svensson, S. Industrial-Organizational Psychology: Deadlockor a New Stage of Development? Organizational Psychology, 2017, 7(2), 126–1361. Design. The article critically examines the complex and undesirable aspects of the development of discipline, formulates possible and affordable ways to optimize the development of IOP. The history of the formation of the scientific and practical discipline, social and personal determinants of this formation (discontinuities in evolution, separation and subsequent delimitation of the “theory” and “practice”, “theorists” and“practitioners”, features of the professional work of the first and second) have been analyzed. There were discussed factors that influence for the formation of discipline and associated “troubled nodes” (the spontaneous beginning of the formation of discipline, distancing in the relations of “practitioners” and “academic psychologists”, short time plans for work, the problem of universalism, the typical organization of work, the phenomenon of “Russian government”, understanding the content of the social order, the difference in the understanding of the subject and the methods of his cognition, etc.). There is a crucial in the difference in understanding the subject of the discipline — “theorists” operate with concepts and describe “ideal theoretical objects” and “ideal empirical objects” (according to V. S. Stepin), where as “practitioners” — with “real empirical objects” cognized through the method of hermeneutics, which leads to a difference and the languages of the description of objects and subjects of research (transformation). Methodical problems of describing complex social objects (questions of sample homogeneity, the apparatus of mathematical statistics, results of analysis, typical models offragments of reality, limitations of the existing factual base) are considered. Conclusions. There are opportunities and available means to improve the efficiency of scientific research and scientific and practical work in industrial organizational psychology. The following are the “sufficient and necessary” initial conditions for optimizing the prospects for the development of discipline: an active correction of the contents of the social order by psychologists, the formation of a new type of teams as the integration of different professionals, adequate temporal parameters of the expected transformations in the organization, the creation of a bank of empirical data.