Lefkowitz and colleagues’ (Reference Lefkowitz, Zickar, Cascio and Kochan2026) central critique is that, despite ethical imperatives foundational to the field of applied psychology, research and practice of I-O have prioritized management perspectives and led some to ultimately fulfill roles as “servants of power” (Baritz, Reference Baritz1960). Although we contend this problematization does not capture the entirety of the field and its sustained prosocial aims (e.g., humanitarian work psychology and positive organizational scholarship; Carr, Reference Carr2025; Tay et al., Reference Tay, Batz-Barbarich, Yang and Wiese2023), we affirm there are opportunities to reinforce the field’s dual commitment to “enhance human well-being and performance” (SIOP, 2026). In this commentary, we argue: (a) I-O psychology has a strong, growing history of emphasizing human well-being, which naturally extends to labor union research; (b) I-O and industrial relations (IR) converge on some fundamental values despite distinct frames of reference, and both fields have sought to adapt to shifting contexts while maintaining proworker orientations; and (c) meaningful engagement with unions requires deep, sustained interdisciplinary collaboration supported by structural mechanisms that prioritize worker-centered research and practice.
I-O psychology’s contributions to worker well-being
The focal article contrasts I-O with allied fields in the study of work (e.g., IR, sociology, economics), noting the latter’s historical emphasis on labor-management relations and unions. However, this characterization risks obscuring the extent to which I-O psychology has increasingly centered workers and their well-being. Although the field’s origins focused on efficiency and productivity (e.g., principles of scientific management), its contemporary trajectory reflects a shift toward human flourishing and social justice. This evolution is evident in the rise of subdisciplines, frameworks, and perspectives that move the field toward prosocial goals including safety, decent work, and poverty reduction (e.g., occupational health psychology and humanitarian work psychology; Barling & Griffiths, Reference Barling, Griffiths, Quick and Tetrick2011; Carr, Reference Carr2025; Tay et al., Reference Tay, Batz-Barbarich, Yang and Wiese2023). The field’s most significant engagement with structural issues in the human experience of work has been seen in efforts to understand the psychology of precarity (Blustein et al., Reference Blustein, Grzanka, Gordon, Smith and Allan2025). Through continued development and empirical support of the psychology of working theory (Duffy et al., Reference Duffy, Blustein, Diemer and Autin2016), applied psychologists have critiqued the field’s traditional focus on individual volition and explicitly identified economic constraints and marginalization as structural barriers that limit access to decent work. Importantly, this framework reconceptualizes behaviors typically labeled “counterproductive” to the organization’s goals (e.g., resignation and resistance) as rational responses to structural inequality. These developments suggest that explicit engagement with labor unions represents a logical next step for I-O psychology rather than a departure from its core tenets.
At the same time, the relative absence of research on labor unions in I-O scholarship may reflect the discipline’s orientation toward the individual as a unit of analysis rather than a willful neglect of labor. As the focal article rightly emphasizes, I-O psychology’s strength lies in microlevel measurement and analysis. This focus on individuals means that collective actors like unions have historically received less attention in mainstream I-O research on well-being. As a result, I-O scholars often study outcomes like burnout or fairness without fully situating them within the broader institutional context of union density decline and powerful corporate union-busting tactics. Unfortunately, to the extent that macrolevel perspectives have become embedded in I-O psychology, they are most often informed by the fields of management and organizational behavior, resulting in a disciplinary tension and professional identity crisis that remains today (Highhouse & Schmitt, Reference Highhouse, Schmitt, Weiner, Schmitt and Highhouse2012; Ryan & Ford, Reference Ryan and Ford2010). From this perspective, the “benign neglect” of unions also reflects structural and disciplinary boundaries rather than a lack of concern for workers. Addressing this requires engagement beyond traditional I-O boundaries with fields that have long examined the institutional context of work and foregrounded the inherent conflict of interest in the employment relationship.
Intersecting values and shared challenges of I-O and IR
Like I-O psychology, the field of industrial relations (IR) has evolved in response to shifting economic, institutional, and organizational contexts. Historically rooted in the work of institutional economists like John R. Commons, IR focused on unions as the primary solution to the “labor problem” (e.g., poor wages, unsafe working conditions, and labor unrest) caused by rapid industrialization. In the first half of the 20th century, IR scholars played an active role in drafting labor legislation and designing collective bargaining systems to improve employment relations and achieve social stability. However, as union density declined, IR scholars broadened their scope beyond unions to include high-performance work systems, technological change, and the rise of contract and gig work (McKersie, Reference McKersie2019). This coincided with a similar expansion to the HR and OB disciplines that has characterized I-O’s trajectory and in many cases led to the restructuring or closing of standalone IR schools. Yet, IR retained its normative belief that worker voice matters, regardless of whether that voice is expressed through a formal union or other mechanisms.
Although sharing this normative commitment, beyond methodological differences, the two fields operate from distinct frames of reference about the employment relationship (Fox, Reference Fox1966) that may have historically hindered collaboration. I-O psychology, and its bent toward HR/OB, has traditionally adopted a unitarist perspective, assuming that employers and employees share common goals (i.e., firm performance) and that conflict is a resolvable dysfunction. Although IR has at points in history also taken this perspective, over time the field has more often adopted pluralist or radical frames, assuming that conflicts of interest between workers and employers are inherent and structural, requiring institutional mechanisms to resolve them (Barry & Wilkinson, Reference Barry and Wilkinson2021). Although these differences can make collaboration challenging, such varied perspectives and approaches can complement each other, resulting in knowledge generation that is more comprehensive and robust. I-O psychology’s methodological strengths in measurement can clarify the microfoundations of collective action, whereas IR’s pluralist frame can help I-O scholars understand the structural context of well-being. We therefore go beyond Lefkowitz and colleagues’ suggestion to “use I-O methods” to study IR topics and argue that both fields would benefit from deep interdisciplinarity.
Institutional mechanisms for sustained interdisciplinarity
We use the term “interdisciplinarity” broadly to refer not only to interdisciplinary research outputs but also to the intellectual and empirical engagement across fields that underpins them, including shared values, conceptual frameworks, and sustained scholarly attention to societal and institutional concerns (e.g., labor unions). For I-O psychologists in particular, interdisciplinary engagement has previously led the field to prioritize management perspectives, but it also has the potential to help realign our core commitments to worker well-being and voice. As the focal paper notes, collaboration between I-O psychology and IR can situate psychological insights about attitudes, voice, and well-being within broader employment relations contexts that shape how unions operate and influence workers’ experiences.
Although the intellectual case for integrating I-O’s psychological depth with IR’s institutional breadth is compelling, realizing it requires overcoming significant barriers. Individual intention may drive meaningful collaboration, but its success relies on institutions (National Academy of Sciences, 2005). Below, we outline three institutional mechanisms to support sustained interdisciplinarity. For each, we describe the common barriers they help to address and provide examples of how this has been implemented in our own academic unit to support prolabor research and graduate training.
Strategic intellectual socialization
Interdisciplinarity is an inherently social and metacognitive process, so it requires formal and informal mechanisms for socialization that support not only understanding but also integrating multiple perspectives. Housing scholars from various disciplines “under one roof” offers necessary structural alignment. Given that even psychology departments vary in social norms for intradepartmental collaboration, it is also important for individual faculty and leaders to model this intellectual immersion.
The School of Human Resources and Labor Relations (HRLR) at Michigan State University has implemented formal and informal structures to support such interdisciplinary intellectual socialization within and across the academic unit. Formally, faculty hiring prioritizes alignment with the school’s commitment to labor, unions, and worker voice alongside traditional evaluations of disciplinary expertise and scholarly excellence. Job candidates are well-informed of the interdisciplinary nature of the school and expectations that their research and teaching contribute to the school’s mission to integrate and advance both HR and LR. This commitment is reflected in the current faculty composition, which includes 18 scholars from six distinct backgrounds, including I-O, IR, economics, HR/OB, law, and education. Of importance to IOP readers, organizational psychologists are represented in all levels of the unit including leadership, advanced and early career research faculty, and scholar-practitioners leading labor education programs and evidence-based outreach and engagement with the local community. Informally, the school’s social norms have led to multiple collaborative projects between unit faculty from different disciplines including publications on vocational education and training (Chuan & Ibsen, Reference Chuan and Ibsen2022), and union member satisfaction and striking (Tapia et al., Reference Tapia, Ibsen, Strolle, Lima Aranzaes and DeOrtentiis2025), and several externally funded projects on technology and the future of work and institutional mechanisms for increasing representation in STEM.
This collaboration extends beyond the boundaries of the HRLR academic unit. For example, the Future of Work Initiative was established in our unit and expanded by the College of Social Science to address pressing questions about how technology and automation are reshaping the workforce and how workers and organizations can adapt to these changes. By intentionally bringing together researchers from psychology, IR, economics, communications, computer science, engineering, and related fields, the Initiative creates sustained opportunities for interdisciplinary engagement in which researchers, including I-O psychologists, are regularly exposed to institutional perspectives on work, including the role of unions in shaping how new technologies are introduced, governed, and experienced in the workplace. Through the Initiative’s impactful events and funding opportunities, researchers have formed valuable interdisciplinary connections. Early outcomes include seed funding for graduate student projects with clear implications for Michigan’s workers and an edited volume that brought together scholars spanning disciplines, institutions, and industry focus to provide insights on human–technology partnerships at work (Behrend, Reference Behrend2025).
Aligned incentives and evaluation criteria
Institutional efforts to encourage interdisciplinary socialization can become disingenuous if the results of such collaborations are not incentivized or evaluated appropriately. As such, the most common recommendations for institutional support for interdisciplinarity go beyond fostering collaborative environments to align incentives in hiring, tenure, funding, and recognition. Further, evaluations of interdisciplinary research should reflect its drivers, which most often include understanding and solving societal problems (National Academy of Sciences, 2005).
MSU HRLR uses incentives and evaluation criteria to promote labor research within and across disciplines in several ways that may be applied elsewhere. First, the unit evaluates scholarly excellence using a flexible publication list that values high-impact research in each scholar’s home discipline, other disciplines represented in the unit, and multidisciplinary outlets. This structural incentive allows faculty to pursue interdisciplinary questions without risking career progression. For example, HR/OB faculty publications in outlets like ILR Review or IR faculty publications in outlets like Management Science receive full consideration in research quality evaluation. Second, the unit supports the funding of faculty’s interdisciplinary pursuits by providing seed grants for projects that consider multiple perspectives to support worker well-being and offering workshops on writing successful external grant proposals for interdisciplinary research on the future of work. Third, the unit appoints regular faculty with differing workloads and associated criteria, promoting outreach and engagement with labor leaders and employers to encourage real-world impact in the local community.
Integrated graduate training
Silos often begin at the graduate training level, where historically the primary learning outcomes center deep expertise in a singular discipline’s epistemology, theoretical frameworks, and methods. However, the intellectually stimulating environment of a graduate program is the ideal space to encourage both the “disciplinary grounding” and meaningful integration of competing and complementary perspectives required for interdisciplinary research. Integrated graduate training models target common issues in interdisciplinarity, including the jingle-jangle fallacy, where identical terminology masks differences at the intersection of theory (construct clarity) and methodology (levels of analysis). The focal article’s discussion of voice provides an illustration of this phenomenon, where I-O and IR scholars use the same term to describe fundamentally different mechanisms (individual discretionary contribution versus collective negotiation of power). Programs that expose graduate students and early career scholars to these differing perspectives and evaluate their ability to integrate them are an important precursor to sustaining interdisciplinarity and promoting research with social impact for workers (National Academy of Sciences, 2005).
Despite hiring faculty who were mostly trained in a single discipline, MSU HRLR’s doctoral program pursues an integrated training model by requiring students to engage across disciplines while centering proworker values. Students are required to intellectually engage with colleagues through both informal events and formal coursework in our school and other departments. For example, PhD students must complete core seminars in both HR and LR as well as methods and theory courses in other social sciences (e.g., psychology, management, and sociology). Furthermore, at the end of each semester, students present their own research in a roundtable format where an interdisciplinary panel of faculty and peers provide substantive feedback. This encourages students to integrate theoretical perspectives from I-O and IR while considering the future audience for their work and its application of the foundational prolabor values of the unit. Aligned with best practice, at the conclusion of formal core coursework, students take up a primary concentration in either HR or LR, and are evaluated on their deep expertise in this area as well as their working knowledge and integration with the secondary area. Throughout their training, students are also encouraged to seek mentorship from faculty from different disciplines. Such collaborative mentorship has resulted in students leading and publishing conceptually integrated microlevel union member research (e.g., Lima Aranzaes et al., Reference Lima Aranzaes, Lyhne Ibsen, DeOrtentiis and Tapia2024).
Conclusion and call to action
The challenges facing workers today are too complex to be addressed by any single discipline. As highlighted by Lefkowitz and colleagues, labor unions have remained relatively peripheral in much of I-O psychology’s research, despite their importance in shaping workers’ experiences. However, responding to the focal article’s critique requires more than encouraging individual I-O psychologists to “study unions.” Specifically, we view interdisciplinary engagement as a constructive response to the focal article’s concern. By systematically exposing I-O psychologists to institutional perspectives, such engagement can broaden the scope of I-O research, deepen its relevance to workers’ lived experiences, and strengthen the field’s capacity to contribute to more equitable and humane futures of work. Importantly, this engagement will need the explicit support and investment of academic units and leadership.
Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge Tara Behrend for her early feedback on this commentary and John Beck and Dyan Smith for sharing their institutional knowledge about the history of the MSU School of Human Resources and Labor Relations.
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