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Abstract

In the last two years, the Romanian Association of Industrial and Organizational Psychology (APIO) has proposed to develop a series of actions to create bridges between the Work and Organizational psychology (WOP) community and the HR specialists from the Romanian market. In order to better understand the specifics of the practitioners in this field and to subsequently reduce the gap between them and Academia, in 2016, APIO conducted a survey in the Romanian HR community. The data were collected through an online questionnaire and 215 HR specialists and organizational practitioners participated in the survey (83% women). The HR specialists expressed their interest for implementing or optimizing a variety of diagnosis intervention services concerning all levels of analysis within a workplace: individual, group, and organization. The majority of the HR professionals who participated in our survey acknowledged the need and reported an increased interest in being better informed and keeping up-to-date with scientific data regarding various topics at the intersection of HR and WOP. Only 20% of the respondents expressed very little interest in such activities. In line with these conclusions, APIO proposed a set of possible measures in order to bridge the gap beween WOP researchers and HR practitioners that would benefit from the support of APIO members within the following years.

Keywords

evidence-based practice; information asymmetry; W&O psychologists; HR specialists needs

Introduction

In the current competitive, intense paced, fast changing, and sometimes disruptive business environment, both Human Resources (HR) specialists and Work and Organizational (W&O) psychologists working with client organizations need to be up-to-date with reliable, validated, and updated data about relevant trends and practices that concern intra and inter-organizational dynamics. Despite the fact that knowledge regarding such practices is the main common ground between science (as the producer) and practice (as a user) irrespective of the domain, both fields invoke a significant gap that seems tough to bridge. While the former frequently invoke the practitioners' lack of interest in scientific research and the decoupling of organizational interventions from scientific evidence, the latter argue for the decoupling of scientists' research from practical issues. In a similar vein, Bartlett and Francis Smythe (2016) found that when analyzing the clients' organizational problems and choosing the right approach or intervention, WOP practitioners preferentially rely on their...

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