How Industrial-Organizational Psychology Transformed my Career in Debt Collections

By Mike Hiller:

If you’ve ever watched a slugger step up to the plate in the MLB and knock the cover off the ball, you know it’s not luck, its preparation, technique, and timing all coming together in one moment. Staking up enough moments gets you into the Hall of Fame.

For me, that’s what applying a Master’s degree in industrial-organizational psychology has felt like in my career in debt collections. It’s taken the background of fundamentals of human behavior, team dynamics, and organizational performance and turned them into a playbook for exceeding expectations, both personally and for the company and operations team I lead.

Why Industrial-Organizational Psychology Fits Debt Collections

Debt collections is often seen as a numbers-driven industry, calls made, promises to pay, dollars collected. But behind every data point is a human being: a consumer making a tough financial decision, or a collector managing the stress of high-volume calls.

That’s where I/O psychology becomes a game-changer. It reminds us that performance doesn’t happen in a vacuum; it’s shaped by motivation, communication, leadership, and the environment around us. Understanding how people think, what drives them, and how they respond to pressure allows us to design collection strategies, and workplaces that work with human nature rather than against it.

Motivation: More Than Just Quotas

A traditional approach to collections might emphasize pure results, quotas, percentages, and bottom lines. While those metrics matter, they don’t unlock sustainable motivation. Drawing on principles from I/O psychology, I’ve found that collectors perform at their best when they feel:

• Purpose: understanding that their work keeps businesses open and communities strong
• Recognition: being seen and celebrated for both effort and results
• Growth: having a career path, not just a job

When team members feel these drivers firing together, performance doesn’t just tick upward, it leaps forward. That’s when you see home-run results, the kind when it matters, where the bases are loaded.

Coaching and Feedback: Science Over Guesswork

In I/O psychology, feedback isn’t just correction, its reinforcement, goal setting, and shaping behavior over time. On the collections floor, this means managers don’t just point out where a call went wrong; they help a collector see it as an opportunity to improve the next one. It’s structured, specific, and developmental. The key to positive criticism is having banked enough brownie points and credibility through relationship building beforehand.

When coaching is grounded in psychology, timely, consistent, and framed around growth rather than punishment, collectors gain confidence. Confident collectors engage better with consumers. Engaged collectors provide more respectful, empathetic conversations.

And those conversations lead directly to higher recovery rates.

Culture: The Invisible Engine

Perhaps the biggest lesson I/O psychology offers is that culture is not soft, it’s the invisible engine behind performance. A collections floor can either be a pressure cooker that burns people out or a professional environment where empathy, compliance, and respect are standard.

By intentionally shaping culture, through hiring, training, recognition, and leadership, you can build teams that thrive under pressure and achieve results that defy industry averages. That’s when performance doesn’t just meet expectations; it breaks through them.

From Psychology to Performance

Looking back, I see my background in industrial-organizational psychology as the foundation for most everything I’ve achieved in debt collections. It allowed me to understand the people behind the processes, the motivations behind the metrics, and build the culture behind the calls.