The paper is devoted to the overview of the creative heritage of prof. E.A. Klimov (1930—2014) in relation to his 85th anniversary of the birth. There are described the main topics of his research; the proposed by him understanding the essence of psychology in the framework of modern issues on “science of sciences”; the role of systemic methodology in psychological researches, the main problems of teaching on psychology at universities; a specificity of practitioners’ thinking in comparison with a theoretical thinking; depicting the psychological qualities of psychologists as professionals. Special attention is paid to his outlooks on the history of psychology, to the relations between scientific and everyday comprehension of psychology, and to a responsibility of the scientific psychology to a society and a practice.

The article discusses the relationship of the general psychological theory of activity and work-psychology. The achievements of labor psychology as a scientific and technical discipline that combines concrete scientific concepts and theories focused on the problem of social practice. These concepts include: approaches and methods of psychological study of professional activities, research projects psychological classification of occupations; theory of work motivation; research problems of intra-individual variability of human performance under the influence of workload, theory of functional states of the subject of work, including the correction of adverse varieties; the theory of differential and developmental psychology used in professional selection and career counseling; options for teaching about the psychology of erroneous actions used in quality management and safety; complementing studies of individual forms of labor; psychosemantic professional approach to the study of consciousness and self- work experience in the psychological study of foreign object activity as the basis of analysis of the mental processes and properties of the subject of work. As a result, the analysis concluded that the general psychological theory of activity performs in relation to the role of labor psychology philosophical and methodological framework and general scientific theory in understanding the psyche of the human subject of labor. It has the status of concrete scientific theory as applied to problems of professional development and training. Psychology of work, beyond training and development, require the development of specific scientific concepts and theories that complement general psychological theory of activity.

The Author discusses the subject, main problems, the social status of psychology of labour, engineering psychology and ergonomics, a parity of these directions of the Russian science in the second half of the ХХ—the beginning of the XXIst century.

The paper is devoted to consideration of the main research domains on the problems of human reliability and stress management that recently developed in the Laboratory of work psychology (Faculty of Psychology, Moscow State University). There are discussed a new paradigm for the structural analysis of worker’s functional states and a hierarchical model of occupational stress elaborated in the framework of Leontiev’s activity theory. The appropriate set of criteria and methods for evaluation of personnel mental health and efficiency of organizational interactions were produced as a basis for creating goal-oriented stress management technologies, i.e. «Personal diagnostic and prevention of stress», «Assessment of the individual level of stress-resistance», «Self-regulation training and restoration program». They were carried out as the complex systems that provide a support in the work of psychologists in practice and demonstrate an efficient way of integrating the new conceptual approaches to the modern issues in the field of work, organizational and health psychology.