Caleb Morfit, PsyD, MBA, had just completed his graduate degrees when U.K.-based Kaisen Consulting launched a U.S. branch in Boston. With training in psychology and business, Morfit had a competitive edge that helped him land one of four positions at the company, which specializes in recruiting, assessing and training candidates for senior-level leadership positions.
"Even though I didn't have business experience, the MBA gave me a common language and a framework that I could work with," says Morfit, a graduate of Widener University in Chester, Pennsylvania, who joined Kaisen in 2013.
The organization's consultants in the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia and Asia use psychological techniques to help firms including pharmaceutical giant Novartis and luxury automaker Rolls-Royce improve their business performance by boosting leadership quality.
Morfit's program director considered him a good fit for Kaisen and helped him make the connection.
"Kaisen is interested in [hiring consultants] who are very passionate about psychology," Morfit says. "All the people working with them are master's-level specialists or doctoral-level psychologists — that was the important criterion." Having an MBA was the clincher.
As the business world evolves, with greater focus on workplace relationships, new opportunities are springing up for psychologists with business training, say experts in consulting and academics. Top-down management is being replaced by collaboration and teamwork. Some companies are promoting cooperation with innovative strategies: encouraging employees to share interests and solve problems by using social media, playing virtual games, or forming book clubs to discuss books with implications for their work.
That shift "reflects a newfound appreciation for the psychological side" of business, says Robert Kaiser, president of Kaiser Leadership Solutions in Greensboro, North Carolina, and editor of the APA journal Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research.
At the same time, companies increasingly want evidence-based methods to evaluate new candidates and determine current employees' executive potential, as well as to boost productivity and best the competition.
"These two trends are bringing the quantification skills that come with a background in psychology together with the people skills of psychology," says Kaiser, who has a master's degree in organizational psychology and specializes in coaching executives and helping managers become better leaders. "This really gives psychologists a seat at the table in the new world of work."
A breadth of possibilities
In fact, psychology is one of the threads that ties together many of the major issues that companies face, says David Ballard, PsyD, MBA, director of APA's Center for Organizational Excellence.
"Skyrocketing health-care costs, global competition, sustainability and building a competitive edge through human capital have one thing in common — they are related to human behavior, psychology's area of expertise," Ballard says.
Job opportunities for psychologists with business training are wide-ranging, he adds. Positions within companies may be in human resources, organizational development, or occupational health and safety, among other departments. External roles as consultants may include recruiting and assessing candidates for top-level corporate jobs, strategic planning, executive coaching, and program design and evaluation.
Psychologists who work in health-care settings, too, can prepare themselves for administrative or leadership roles by getting a business degree, Ballard says.
Independent practitioners can benefit from business training as well. "It gives them a new perspective and set of tools they can use to more effectively design and deliver services that meet emerging needs in today's competitive marketplace," he adds.
Business training also may open doors to a wider variety of academic positions because research and teaching opportunities exist in both psychology departments and business schools, says Nicholas Epley, PhD, the John Templeton Keller professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, which offers a variety of graduate degree programs in business and finance.
"Business schools are hiring more basic psychologists" as graduate business training takes a more empirical, scientific approach, he says. The business schools at Stanford, Harvard and Yale, for example, have all hired more basic psychology researchers, Epley says.
New models
Most graduate psychology students interested in the business world have pursued traditional industrial and organizational (I/O) psychology programs. These programs center on the scientific study of the workplace, applying psychology's methods to such areas as employee management, assessment, selection, training and performance; organizational development; work-life balance and more. A wealth of information about I/O psychology — including a list of I/O graduate programs — can be found at the website for APA's Div. 14 (Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology).
There are also graduate programs that teach a new model of business and psychology. Widener University, for example, offers a five-year graduate program that confers PsyD and MBA degrees. "Our students become experts in human motivation," says Hal Shorey, PhD, director of Widener's Psychology and Business Joint Degree Program. Core courses integrate the degrees; students also must complete a yearlong organizational practicum placement.
Shorey says the dual-degree program is another possible path for psychologists who are interested in working with organizations. Widener's combined degree program teaches students how to make the most of interpersonal interactions among all the players in a company's hierarchy. "We look at how people are wired emotionally, and how to capitalize on their strengths and get their vulnerabilities out of the way," Shorey says. That's a step up from traditional business training, which doesn't offer much — if any — background in personality theory, he adds.
Elizabeth Donofrio, a fifth-year student in the combined program at Widener, is one success story. She decided to enroll in the dual-degree program as a way to bolster both her near-term goal of becoming a military psychologist and the long-term possibility of opening her own clinic. Donofrio now is an executive officer, positioned to take company command of her National Guard unit, with the rank of first lieutenant. She oversees many different areas — administration, maintaining supplies, training and performance measures.
Donofrio credits her process management coursework in her MBA training with showing her how to ensure she has the correct supplies, maintains inventory properly and effectively gets provisions out to the troops. Her psychology training has prepared her for counseling work in suicide prevention, sexual abuse, and alcohol and drug abuse — important considerations in the military today. "My skills in psychology make it easier for me to talk to the soldiers if there's an issue," she says. Donofrio adds that having dual degrees strengthens her abilities in training other military leaders to support vulnerable troops.
Another new academic model can be found at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, which in 2009 established its Joint Program in Business and Psychology, a five-year program that confers one PhD degree from the two departments. It's the only one of its kind in the country.
The program exposes graduate students to a broad curriculum, including basic neuroscience courses as well as techniques in economics research.
"Our students come out clearly looking like psychologists, but in a business environment," Epley says. Most are planning academic careers, he says. "We're training scientists."
Among them is Juliana Schroeder, a fourth-year student who hopes to find a tenure-track academic position in a psychology or organizational behavior department or work for a company with a behavioral science lab, such as Google or Disney.
Schroeder feels that her dual-discipline graduate education gives her an advantage in the job market. "I've done the entire curriculum that a typical psychology PhD would do, I've learned the philosophy of science from the psychology department, but I'm also doing coursework in business," she says. "So there's a real-world component added to it."
However, earning dual degrees has its challenges. "Chief among them is maintaining strong connections in two different departments," says Epley. Students and faculty advisers must recognize "what unites them as researchers at the same university rather than what differentiates them as researchers in different departments," he adds.
At Widener, the only additional charge for adding the MBA to the PsyD is an annual $832 administrative fee. But extra time and effort are necessary, too. Students at Chicago's Booth School of Business are on full stipends, but they attend more meetings and a take a few more courses. Widener students have PsyD courses during the day and MBA classes at night or on weekends.
Without a clear career plan for dual degrees, the effort may not reap substantial benefit, according to Epley and Shorey. Graduate psychology students planning to become traditional clinicians or to focus on a specific research direction such as neuroimaging probably would not be a good fit for a joint degree program, they say.
A focus on leadership
A common theme for companies' newfound appreciation for psychological training is a clear need for leadership, says Morfit, of Kaisen Consulting. Over the last decade, he notes, a top corporate priority has been putting strong leaders into executive positions and setting up a pipeline for the flow of new talent.
Morfit says psychologists strengthen those strategies with science-based approaches to coaching and assessment, which haven't always been based on firm empirical footing.
Kaisen, for one, maintains an independent database of information from its executive candidate assessments. Reports on leadership trends generated from the data are produced in collaboration with independent academic researchers. "The systems we have in place are designed to ensure that the conclusions we draw are statistically supported," Morfit says.
Jake Waldman, PsyD, MBA, maintains a similar system. Fresh out of Widener, he snagged a plum position as director of assessment and coaching with Selekman Consulting in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, where he assesses candidates for high-level executive positions in Fortune 500 and Fortune 1,000 companies.
During a 90-minute interview, Waldman evaluates candidates' characteristics, including personality, critical thinking and motivation, and then provides clients with a detailed report of the results. As a director, he tracks all the results, which are compiled into a database that is maintained for long-term statistical analysis if clients want a quantitative perspective of Selekman's work for them.
"The more precision they have, the better [candidates] they have, the more money they save, the more productivity they can anticipate," he says.
Waldman says his dual degrees enable him to interpret and explain the data to business clients in meaningful ways — how it affects their productivity, revenue, net gains and net losses, human capital and company culture — without relying on heavy psychological terminology.
In the years to come, job opportunities for psychologists with business training could expand. "As organizations become more psychologically oriented, this [field] has the potential to blow up," Waldman says.