Crazy Productive: What Is Industrial Psychology?

July 16, 2007 — -- Starting a city from scratch is no small feat: You need a mayor, a city council, a police chief and … a psychologist?

Since incorporating in December 2006, the city of Milton, Ga., has been experiencing some growing pains. The mayor and the six members of the city council aren't just getting used to running a town, they're also just getting used to one another.

And that's caused a few problems. So, the city council decided to address them with the help of retreats and an industrial psychologist.

But their attempts to bring some harmony to city hall, have been, well, less than civil.

According to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, a council retreat mediated by the Carl Vinson Institute of Government turned into a meeting about respecting one another's feelings, and despite new rules of conduct, members continue to accuse other members of lying in open council meetings.

"We're all new at this, and we just need time to figure things out," Mayor Joe Lockwood told ABCNEWS.com. "We've all got strengths and we've all got weaknesses, and we hoped an industrial psychologist could help us maximize those strengths."

Plans to hire a psychologist to advise the council on how best to work together were, according to the mayor, met with a certain degree of skepticism by the local media and some people in town. But, he said, industrial psychologists regularly advise major corporations.

"A city is like a company, the council is like the board of directors and the mayor is like the chairman of a company," Lockwood said. "It wouldn't be any different for a big company. We'll do team building and organizational training. … In the private world this is totally normal."

That's true, according to David Nershi, the executive director of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology.

Some 3,000 corporations, including most Fortune 500 companies, employ industrial psychologists, Nershi said.

Members of the society have made presentations in the past year at PepsiCo, Anheuser-Busch, Nike, Starbucks and Payless Shoes conferences, he said.