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Industrial and organizational psychology (IOP) is the scientific study of human behavior in organizations and encompasses areas related to recruitment and selection, training and development, employee motivation, leadership, organizational change, and performance appraisal. Because of its emphasis on optimizing human performance and organizational outcomes, IOP can contribute several theoretical and practical strategies to enhance the effectiveness of medical simulation training. Increasingly, IOP currently applies to a broad range of areas within healthcare, including physician selection, skills verification, and team training.[1][2][3][4] With greater awareness of its potential, the field of IOP is expected to play an even more integral role in medical simulation in the future. The sections that follow highlight just a few areas in which IOP can inform medical simulation training endeavors.

Perhaps one of the most impactful contributions of IOP to medical simulation is the incorporation of team science principles into simulation-based team training. One of the foundational contributions to medical simulation training is construct clarity, in which the conceptual and theoretical foundations of teamwork, team effectiveness, and team performance are presented.[4][12][13][14] Other work has provided empirical evidence that incorporating team science principles can improve the efficacy of simulation-based team training. For example, work has shown that team-level cognitions, such as team mental models (a team’s shared, organized understanding and mental representation about key elements of the team’s environment), team familiarity (the extent to which team members have worked with one another in the past), team situation awareness (the extent to which a team similarly perceives, understands, and interprets their task environment), and team-level goals (group-level goals that require input from all) can result in more effective team-level interventions.[15][16][17][18]