"Psychology in the Corporate Laboratory: A History of Human Resource Management Consulting"

In 2015, the global consulting firm Korn Ferry acquired Hay Group, a human resources firm, in a $452 million deal that gave them access to Hay’s databases, tools, and research into the psychological characteristics of good managers. Since its founding in 1943 by an industrial psychologist, and subsequent merger with another firm founded by Harvard social psychologists, the Hay Group had developed an arsenal of techniques for evaluating jobs and people alike according to psychological capacities and competencies. For the consulting psychologists who worked for these firms, corporations served both as clients and as experimental sites to test out their psychological techniques, including personality tests and organizational climate surveys. These techniques were grounded in the expertise and methods of psychology, and applied to business, making them a prime instance of corporate social science in action. Building on existing business histories of consulting, this paper shows how psychology, not only law and accounting, has been a crucial disciplinary origin for management consulting. In foregrounding the methods and tools of the Hay Group, this paper bridges the insights of science & technology studies, which emphasizes the historical and epistemological importance of tools, with the insights of management scholars and business historians on the increasing prominence of management consultants. Human resource consulting firms like Korn Ferry capture hundreds of millions of dollars in the consulting marketplace. Their techniques and methods for evaluating competencies, benchmarking compensation, and training managers can be found in hundreds of companies around the world, making them crucial for circulating management knowledge. Human resource management consultants, I argue, have served as key knowledge brokers for American companies as importers of new knowledge and techniques—in this case, from psychology—and as figures who legitimate existing corporate practice