Organizational Psychology and poverty reduction: Where supply meets demand

Developing a globally responsive Science-Practitioner-Humanist model (Lefkowitz, 2008) means articulating professional values (supply) and meeting global demand. The United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) seek to halve human poverty by 2015 and how organizations respond to this constitutes a formidable demand on organizational psychology. A key process for delivering more effective aid is the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, which seeks collaborative contributions from a plethora of organizations, including business organizations and professions like ours. We argue that a thoughtful articulation of what organizational psychology uniquely stands for, and can offer, is therefore needed. It is proposed that a key mechanism for addressing this challenge is a Task Force, whose functions will include the coordination of institutions within psychology, and linking them to those in development. We describe such a task force and outline its core mission (Reichman, Frese, Schein, Carr, MacLachlan, & Landy, 2008). Organizational psychology’s response to poverty reduction should meet Lefkowitz’s criteria for developing a more humanist model of science and practice as the MDGs are inherently humanist and valuesbased.