--> Europe's Journal of Psychology ejop.psychopen.eu | 1841-0413 Interview On Social and Organisational Psychology: Interview with Alex Haslam

In this interview Prof. Alex Haslam discusses his past and present work in social and organisational psychology and the multiple ways in which these two fields are inter-connected. He considers the guiding threads within his scientific activity from the famous BBC Prison Study to more recent work on leadership. Covering both theoretical to applied considerations, this interview addresses important questions for psychologists working in organisations and elsewhere in society. It offers a glimpse into the fascinating world of humans as social beings capable of forming groups and sharing identities, of including but also excluding, of both following and leading.

Alex Haslam: I don't think it's possible to have viable models of organizational psychology without a good understanding of social psychology.However, I think this is true for all sub-branches of our discipline, since, as I see it, all psychology is social psychology -for the simple reason that, at core, humans are social animals whose psychology has evolved to support group life and to make it possible.At the same time, the problem with a lot of social psychology is that it isn't very social psychological.For me the great thing about organizational psychology is that its social dimensions are unavoidable.Accordingly, it forces us to deal with the fundamentally social nature of our psychology, and its subject matter throws out the most important challenges for psychology as a whole.So, in addressing the nature of things like leadership, communication, and innovation -indeed to grapple with what it is that makes organizational behaviour possible -we are addressing the biggest and most important questions in the discipline.
Vlad Glăveanu: Perhaps one of the most visible research projects you have coordinated in the past, together with Professor Steve Reicher, is the famous BBC Prison Study (Haslam & Reicher, 2006;Reicher & Haslam, 2006).How did you come to do this large-scale project and how did its findings influence your research since then?Alex Haslam: It's hard to underestimate the impact this had on me -at a number of levels.First, the study opened my eyes to the ways in which our understanding of psychology is constrained by sub-disciplinary and topic boundaries.That is, in the study it clearly wasn't the case that social psychology (e.g., influence, stereotyping) was going on in one corner, organizational psychology (leadership, planning) in another, and clinical psychology (anxiety, depression) in another.Instead, these things were seamlessly interdependent.At the same time, though, the analytical tools provided by social identity theorizing allowed us to integrate across these domains and to see conceptual relationships that we hadn't seen before.
In particular, it became apparent that at the same time that social identity is the basis for group processes like influence, communication and leadership, its erosion is a basis for disorganization, stress, and depression.And here the great thing about the study was that it allowed us to see these processes both in the flesh and as they unfolded.Prior to this I hadn't really noticed how much time I (and others) had devoted to studying phenomena that we never in much depth at how these interact with physiological and physical processes.Accordingly, these are issues I want to explore with colleagues like Jolanda Jetten and Catherine Haslam.
At the same time, I'm also keen to do more research into the social identity approach to organizational behaviour and, in particular, leadership (after Haslam, 2004).In part this will expand on work with Inma Advares-Yorno and Tom Postmes which has looked at the way in which creativity is structured by social identity and self-categorization processes -such that what people create and how it is received depends on how they understand themselves in relation to others (Adarves-Yorno, Postmes, & Haslam, 2007;Adarves-Yorno, Haslam, & Postmes, 2008).I also want to do more work with Steve Reicher on the idea that successful leadership involves identity impresarioship -the embedding of identities in the practices, rituals and habits of everyday group life (Reicher, Haslam, & Hopkins, 2005).This is an idea we discuss a lot in our book, but which remains to be properly explored in psychological research.
Vlad Glăveanu: How do you see the relationship between theory and practice for a social and organisational psychologist as well as in your own work?
Alex Haslam: This is something I agonize quite a lot, because of all the questions I get asked when I give external talks (e.g., on leadership or stress), the most common is "This is great, and I believe everything you say; but how do I translate these ideas into practice?"And certainly "I don't know" isn't a very satisfactory answer.Accordingly, my colleagues and I have devoted quite a bit of energy to trying to develop answers, and to testing their efficacy.
The clearest example of this is in the ASPIRe model (Haslam, Eggins, & Reynolds, 2003) -which has now been supported in quite a wide range of settings, and in our specification of the three R's of leadership (reflect, represent, realize) at the end of NPoL.In all this, I follow Lewin's dictum that nothing is so practical as a good theory, but equally see practice (or more broadly 'what is going on in the world') as an essential testing ground for theory and as an agenda setter.Certainly, much of my work is stimulated by the impracticality of bad theory -and, unfortunately, there is a lot of this about.
Vlad Glăveanu: What would you say are some of the most interesting developments taking place today at the intersection between social and organisational psychology?Alex Haslam: I think this has always been a very fertile niche in the discipline -as seen in work on topics like leadership, communication, negotiation, and diversity.As always, there is lots of interesting work being done on these and other topics at the moment, but one topic that I am currently fascinated by concerns the relationship between identity and space: on the one hand, the way that who we are determines how we create, manage, and respond to space, and, on the other, the way that the spaces we inhabit determine how we see ourselves and how we act.Some of our own work has looked at these issues in offices and care homes (Knight & Haslam, 2010;Knight, Haslam, & Haslam, 2010) -and the results have convinced me that there is much more to be done.

Vlad Glăveanu:
Finally, what would be your advice for young and developing scholars (in social and organisational psychology but not only) on how to succeed in today's academic and professional world and make an impact through their psychological research?Alex Haslam: I think there are two things that I would stress.First, collaborate.Apart from the fact that it's incredibly hard to make progress on your own, it's also a lot less fun.Second, choose your collaborators carefully, and when you find someone good to collaborate with, stick with them.The best collaborators force you to think straighter, On Social and Organisational Psychology Europe's Journal of Psychology 2012, Vol.8(3), 321-326 doi:10.5964/ejop.v8i3.494