Thursday 23 July 15:40
- 17:10
Hall: 01 - Basilica
Chair and Presenter:
Sandall Hugo
Co-Chair:
Neves Pedro
Division: Division 1: Work and Organizational Psychology
This session explores how Work and Organizational Psychology can contribute to disaster preparedness, response, and recovery by reframing performance management, leadership, and human resource management practices as protective and developmental tools. Drawing from cases in Brazil, Puerto Rico, and Spain, the presentations showcase frameworks, reviews, and applied research that integrate behavioral self-management, volunteer leadership, human resource management strategies, co-designed community interventions, and organizational practices. Together, they highlight innovative ways to sustain decent work, restore well-being, and build resilience in contexts of climate emergencies and other disruptive events. The session also features the SBPOT open-access initiative after Brazil's 2024 floods, demonstrating the potential of collective scientific action for equitable global access to evidence-based practices. By connecting situated experiences from Latin America and Southern Europe, this session advances a Global South-rooted and decolonial perspective that directly challenges the hegemony of Northern frameworks in organizational psychology. The Brazilian contributions emphasize behavioral performance management and competencies for volunteer leadership under resource constraints; Puerto Rico's case shows how human resource management and organizational practices shaped recovery across consecutive disasters; European interior regions bring forward co-designed, technology-supported interventions to restore well-being in vulnerable mountain and semi-rural communities—contexts often marginalized in global debates. Complementing these, a systematic review from Brazil maps human resource management practices in disaster contexts across the literature. Together, these contributions emphasize precarious, resource-limited, and community-centered responses, revealing how context-sensitive knowledge from the Global South and non-hegemonic European regions enriches international debates and unsettle universalizing assumptions in organizational psychology.
