Declining productivity in the UnitedStates has become widely accepted as a root cause of our national economic woes. This productivity problem has multiple causes and defies simplistic analysis. As a group, psychologists are affected by the decline due to the reduction and shifting of resources away from the health and human services fields. Reversing this decline requires actions at both the national policy and organizational levels. This article addresses the challenges that efforts to improve organizational productivity offer to psychologists. The first challenge involves clarifying what productivity means at the organizational level and recognizing that psychologists must function as part of an interdisciplinary organizational team. Psychologists who are skilled and interested in working with specialists from other fields have valuable insights and techniques. These contributions span process and content dimensions and are discussed in the context of a simple productivity management process model.Unless we solve the problem of productivity, our children will be the first generation in the history of the United States to live worse than their parents.-NBC White Paper, 1980The author wishes to acknowledge the contributions of former colleague Robert E. Wilkinson to the development of the ideas expressed. This article
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