ABSTRACT
Although historical treatments of our early pioneers tend to romanticize their efforts at applying behavioral science to real-world organizational problems, many of the most celebrated interventions resulted in making things no better than before and sometimes resulted in making things worse. By looking closely at these early organizational applications of psychology, I set out to provide a more accurate picture of how organizational psychology came into being and provoke some reflection over how much of the field’s assumptions and prescriptions may be founded on myth and legend. My approach in this chapter was to spotlight a handful of celebrated interventions. This allowed me to dig deeper into individual stories and to introduce the reader to some of the behind-the-scenes material. For a more traditional historical review of organizational psychology applications, the reader is directed to the chapter by Cardy and Selvarajan (2001) in the Handbook of Industrial, Work and Organizational Psychology.
