People analytics and organizational psychology: building a high-performance, innovative culture in the pharmaceutical industry

Pharmaceutical and biotech organizations advance therapies through a sequence of interdependent stage-gates in which delays, rework, and knowledge discontinuities have outsized economic and patient consequences. Here, we argue that people strategy should be treated as an explicit pipeline–risk control. We introduce the People Analytics + Industrial-Organizational Psychology for R&D, (PA‑IOP‑R&D) framework, which fuses people analytics with organizational psychology to reduce avoidable rework, protect time-to-milestone, and preserve tacit expertise. The framework centers psychological safety (to enable learning, voice, and error reporting in high-uncertainty R&D) and the job demands–resources (JD-R) model (to calibrate resources that buffer high demands and sustain engagement); perceived organizational support provides the reciprocity mechanism that retains scarce late-career know-how. We codify governance guardrails (purpose limitation, transparency, access control, and bias/fairness review) to prevent analytic harms that would otherwise chill voice. We translate leading indicators (e.g., network bottlenecks, demand–resource imbalance, and safety climate) into tested interventions and stage gate-aligned metrics, and specify quasi-experimental evaluation to distinguish signal from noise.