Cross-Pollination in Applied Psychology Research

While this blog relates to applied psychology, I will in effect be focusing largely on applied research in the I/O, educational, sport and exercise domains. In short, achievement domains! For my mind, research in this area has become a series of silos with researchers working only within their fields, with their own sample targets, testing their own, independently developed theories.

This would seem strange as all domains share a single dominate characteristic -achievement. While there are clearly unique aspects of each domain that require some level of silo activity, achievement and its effect on self-worth, stress, motivation, self-regulation, and well-being seem to be common enough to warrant more cross-pollination.

Therefore, instead of starting this blog with new research I will first discuss a couple of articles that have utilised research and theory from one domain to produce fascinating new research in other domains.

The foremost leader in this cross-pollination approach for my mind is Dr Andrew Martin, an Associate Professor in education at the University of Sydney. First highlighting the potential of cross-pollination in vol 24 (1-2) of the Journal of Organizational Behaviour Management, the case was made empirically in the Journal of Research in Personality 42 (6). Here Dr. Martin took his use-inspired framework of motivation and explored its applicability and validity across school, university, work, sport, music, and daily life domains. Dr. Martin showed that "there are many conceptual congruencies in motivation and engagement theory across diverse performance [domains]" and "constructs such as self-efficacy, mastery orientation, anxiety, self handicapping and the like are relevant in any situation where individuals are required to perform or are evaluated in some way".

The benefit of the current silo approach has been that research traditions and theories have developed in relative isolation from each other providing a diversity from which cross-pollination attempts can now be cultivated to produce a great deal of creative and diverse research. As a final example, VandeWalle, Brown, Cron, and Slocum in Vol 84 of the Journal of Applied Psychology take Carol Dweck's implicit theory and goal orientation approach (developed in education) and apply it to sales personnel.

Surprisingly, despite the appearance of a gulf between the pressures of schools and the pressures of sales, Dweck’s theory and constructs work almost identically across both domains. That is that, just like in the classroom, a learning orientation mediated by task-focused self-regulation strategies predicts performance in sales.

As a final note, it seems apparent that no matter how much of a gulf we think separates school life, work life, and sport and physical activity, much of the same struggles and stresses faced remain oddly consistent. Importantly, this includes not just the type of psychological struggles faced but the consistency in the way they are approached and coped with.