The Fifth Scenario: Identity Expansion in Organizational Psychology

Ryan and Ford (2010) have argued that organizational psychology is at a tipping point in terms of its distinctiveness from other fields. Although the four scenarios they propose for organizational psychology's future cover a wide range of potential outcomes, we propose that there is another, more expansive, more optimistic scenario for our field: our identity needs to continue to evolve, expand, and extend itself to accommodate the evolving and expanding nature of the modern organizations we study. We suggest that the way forward for organizational psychology is to continue what we have done in the past: integrate theories from multiple disciplines, adopt multiple perspectives to the questions we face, and embrace the ambiguity inherent in the organizations we study. This additional scenario, which we term identity expansion, follows both from the history of the field and from research on professional identity. Below, we argue that both historically and theoretically such a future for our professional identity makes the most sense. Furthermore, we believe that organizational psychologists are in an excellent position to both shape and benefit from this expansion in identity.