Abstract

A variety of changes are expected to happen in the 21st century. Important changes related to industrial and organizational psychology are a change from traditional hierarchical structure to horizontal structure, a change from relatively fixed job to continuously changing tasks and activities, and a change from individual tasks to team's tasks. Employees in service companies as well as women employees increase. Mergers and downsizing also increase. Because of these changes, industrial and organizational psychologists need to approach differently to a various areas of tasks. For example, career development of employees needs to focus on developing a variety of abilities due to a change of an organizational structure. This research was intended to examine a wide variety of changes more closely, and discuss the effects of these changes to tasks of industrial and organizational psychology.