PS496 Unit 10 Capstone Reflection Example

What One Pack Season Taught an HR Coordinator: A PS496 Unit 10 Capstone Reflection

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

PS496: Bachelor's Capstone in Industrial Organizational Psychology

Unit 10 Capstone Reflection

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The writer, the cannery and every event are composite; the sources cited are real.

Where I Started

When I began the BS in Psychology, I had worked in HR at the cannery for three years, mostly processing seasonal hires, payroll changes and leave paperwork. I thought of HR as administration and psychology as something that happened in counseling offices. The industrial and organizational courses changed that view slowly, then this capstone changed it quickly, because every unit asked me to use the program's ideas on the plant where I work.

What I Learned About Evidence

Rousseau (2006) argued that managers should make decisions by combining the best available research with local facts, professional judgment and the values of the people affected, and observed how rarely they do. Rynes et al. (2007) compared academic HR journals with the practitioner magazines HR professionals actually read and found that the practitioner publications covered many research findings thinly or not at all, so practitioners often never encounter what research has shown.

That described me at the start of the program. I knew the plant's habits, the five-minute hiring chat, the yearly leadership academy, the seam quiz, but I had never asked whether there was evidence for any of them. This season, nearly every project started with a practice the plant had kept for years and found that research pointed somewhere else. The academy was popular but built without a needs analysis. The hiring chat was the format most swayed by confident self-presentation. The seam course produced high quiz scores and skipped checks.

The most important skill I gained was not knowing a theory; it was learning to ask what evidence a habit rests on.

I also learned the limits of evidence. Almost every project ended with a limits section, because local data were small, many things changed at once and a single season cannot prove much. The returner analysis in Unit 6 compared six production areas; the 360 had two supervisors with only three raters each. I used to think data settled arguments. Now I think data make arguments better, which is different.

What I Learned About Ethics

Lefkowitz (2017) argues that I/O psychology carries moral responsibilities beyond technical competence, including attention to the interests of workers as well as employers, and that practitioners should be aware of the values built into their work. That idea was most real for me during the contract weeks described in Unit 9. I work for management. I was asked to keep the plant running and to support employees, and I was briefed on the legal lines I could not cross. But the deeper ethical question was quieter: the seasonal workers who voted against the agreement were the same people my returner survey was trying to bring back, and I had no way to change the wage gap that drove their vote.

Ethics also came up in smaller ways. The 360 surveys promised anonymity to line leads, and I had to decide how to handle a comment that would have identified its writer; I removed it after asking the lead's permission to paraphrase it. In the conflict between leads and technicians, I had to resist the pull toward the side with more production power. In each case, the program gave me language for what I was weighing.

What I Learned About Critical Thinking

Three years ago I took a vendor's validity claim, a satisfaction survey or a manager's explanation of turnover at face value. Now I ask what was measured, in whom, compared with what and with what alternative explanations. The seam check evaluation in Unit 4 is the clearest example. A year ago, I would have reported the 91 percent quiz average as proof the course worked. This time, the four levels pushed me onto the line at night, where I found the reason it did not.

What I Would Do Differently

Given a second try at this season, my first change would be launching the 360 sooner, so supervisors had time for two rounds. I would build the line lead academy's evaluation before the academy, not after. And I would have involved union stewards in the returner survey design, so that seasonal workers would trust it more and so that the plant would hear earlier how deeply the wage gap was felt.

Lifelong Learning

The program has given me a starting point, not a finished toolkit. I plan to keep reading research directly rather than waiting for summaries in HR magazines, beginning with a monthly hour on a research database during the off-season. I have joined the regional chapter of a professional HR association and plan to attend its sessions on evidence-based practice. Within two years, I hope to apply to a master's program in industrial and organizational psychology, focusing on seasonal and agricultural workforces, a group the research I read this term rarely studied.

Conclusion

This capstone tied together a program's worth of ideas through one plant and one season. Rousseau's evidence-based management and Rynes and colleagues' account of the research gap describe the habit I most want to keep, Lefkowitz reminds me that technical skill does not settle ethical questions, and the limits sections of every project taught me humility about what one season's data can show. I end the program asking better questions than I asked when I started.

References

Lefkowitz, J. (2017). Ethics and values in industrial-organizational psychology (2nd ed.). Routledge.

Rousseau, D. M. (2006). Is there such a thing as "evidence-based management"? Academy of Management Review, 31(2), 256-269. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2006.20208679

Rynes, S. L., Giluk, T. L., & Brown, K. G. (2007). The very separate worlds of academic and practitioner periodicals in human resource management: Implications for evidence-based management. Academy of Management Journal, 50(5), 987-1008. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2007.27151939