Doing business is a risky enterprise. Whether it’s renting a mover's truck to transport customers’ belongings from the West Coast to the East Coast, trading stocks at the Stock Exchange, running an online market front, flying passengers from one country to another, managing a hospital, or overseeing the affairs of an academic institution—the struggle is real. One of the reasons why conducting a business is challenging is because people are involved. Whenever people come together for any reason, the potential for conflict is present. Learning what to do and how to accommodate people with different ideas without losing focus requires a skillset. And that expertise is necessary in today’s global village. In the United States, only 33 percent of workers are engaged and aligned with their employer for high productivity. Behavioral experts can be crucial in an organization for understanding and correcting such misalignment.

Industrial-organizational (I-O) psychologists, also known as work or business psychologists, are trained to study human behaviors in the workplace and translate those behaviors into data for the purposes of humanizing the work environment and increasing job satisfaction, work engagement, and, ultimately, performance and productivity. I-O practitioners also use advanced analytical techniques to forecast workforce outcomes in ways that help businesses plan and position........

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