Psychology in the Workplace
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Lecture 2
There will be 2 assesments.
Are Individual Differences Relevant?
To test this, lets tap into our implicit theories
• Focus on one of these occupations:
• Accountant, (serious man, nicely dressed, does not talk enthusiastic, on the computer all day working with numbers, organized)
• Event Coordinator, and (enthusiastic talking, busy with phone calls)
• Heavy Equipment Operator (not proper dressed, dirty hands
• Close you eyes, and imagine the typical ________. What are they like? Quickly, brainstorm a list of personality characteristics, abilities or other personal characteristics.
What do Individual Differences Tell Us?
• Personality
• Captures what people are like as individuals
• Ability
• Capture what people can do as individuals
Personality
• The structures and propensities inside a person that explain his or her characteristic patterns of thoughts, emotion, and behavior
• For our purposes today:
• Traits are defined as recurring regularities or trends in people’s responses to their environment
• While we could come up with thousands of traits adjectives, most of them would cluster around five general dimensions
• We call these dimensions the “Big Five”
[note: enkele afbeeldingen uit het college zijn door de WorldSupporter redactie verwijderd wegens vermoedelijke inbreuk op het auteursrecht]
How Important is Personality?
• C and ES (reflected N) are positively correlated with job performances in virtually all jobs
• O,C, and A predicted discretionary pro-social and proorganizational behaviors across jobs Question: How might this knowledge be applied at work? people choose jobs that match their personalities. Some kind of jobs require some kind of personalities, so we have to filter on that.
Abilities
• The relatively stable capabilities people have to perform a particular range of different but related activities
• In contrast to skills, which are more trainable and improvable
• As with personality, about half of the variation in ability levels is due to genetics
Types of Human Abilities
• Cognitive Abilities
• Capabilities related to the acquisition and application of knowledge in problem solving
• Examples: Verbal, Quantitative, Reasoning, Spatial, Perceptual
• Emotional Intelligence
• Capabilities related to the management and the use of emotions when interacting with others
• Physical Abilities
• Capabilities related to the performance of physical work
• Examples: Strength; Stamina; Flexibility and Coordination; Psychomotor; Sensory
How Important Is Ability?
• Cognitive ability predicts job performance in vitually all jobs
• Emotional intelligence predicts performance only when jobs involve a high degree of emotional labour (e.g., flight attendant; emergency-room nurse; salesperson)
• Physical abilities predicts performance only when jobs require a high level of these capbilities (e.g., professional athletes)
INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES AND ASSESSMENT
“Individual Differences” model:
• Adults have a variety of attributes (e.g., intelligence, personality, interests) that are relatively stable over a period of time
• People differ with respect to those attributes
• These differences remain even after training
• Different jobs require different attributes
• These attributes can be measured
Research suggests that approximately 50% of the variation we observe in people’s personalities (e.g., neuroticism) can be attributed to genetic factors (“nature”).
“Am I doomed by my genes… Or can I change?”
If you are shy, there is not much that can be done to really change that.
Agree: Entity theorist
Disagree: Incremental theorist
People also differ in their “self-theory”
Individual differences are important for our understanding of human behavior, cognition, and affect.
People with a high need for control will suffer more from Insomnia (sleeping problems).
Research Question:
Does perceived “Job Demands” predict perceived “Job Strain”?
1. Is this a direct relationship? OR—remembering our Contingency Approach,
2. Does it also depend on (“is it moderated by”) individual differences?
INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN PERCEPTIONS
Job demands:
1. Do you have to work fast?
2. Do you have too much work to do?
3. Do you have to work extra hard to finish a task?
4. Do you work under time pressure?
5. Do you have to rush?
6. Can you do your work in comfort (reversed item)?
7. Do you have to deal with a backlog at work?
8. Do you have too little work (reversed item)?
9. Do you have problems with the pace of work?
10. Do you have problems with the workload?
11. Do you wish you could work at an easier pace?
Job strain:
1. I find it difficult to relax at the end of a working day.
2. At the end of a working day, I feel really fatigued.
3. Due to my job, I feel rather exhausted at the end of a working day.
4. I mostly feel rather fit after dinner (reversed item).
5. I usually do not calm down until my second day off.
6. After work, it takes effort to concentrate in my spare time.
7. When I just come home, I have little interest in other people.
8. In general, it takes me more than an hour to recover completely after work.
9. When I come home, they must leave me alone for a while.
10. After a working day, I frequently feel too fatigued to engage in any other activity.
11. During the last stage of a working day, I often feel too fatigued to perform well.
Job control:
1. Can you choose the methods to use in carrying out your work?
2. Do you plan your own work?
3. Do you set your own pace?
4. Can you vary how you do your work?
5. On your job, do you have the freedom to take a break whenever you wish to?
6. Do you decide on the order in which you do things?
7. Do you decide when to finish a piece of work?
8. Do you have full authority in determining how much time you spend on particular tasks?
9. Can you decide how to go about getting your job done? 10. Does your job allow you to organize your work by yourself?
11. Do you have full authority in determining the content of your work?
Why study I-O psychology?
High job demands are associated with high job strain among employees who are low in job control.
High job control buffers the negative effect of high job demands on job strain.
That is, job control moderates the link between job demands and job strain.
A practitioner can change the design of employees’ jobs or the rules or the procedures for doing the jobs to enhance job control. For example, by allowing employees to plan their own work schedules or to decide how the work should be performed, see job enrichment. Enhancing job control rather than reducing job demands and sacrificing productivity may reduce job strain.
What kind of information actually predicts the individual’s future job performance?
Valid employee selection techniques
1. Biographical inventory: covers an applicant’s past behavior, attitudes, preferences, and values. (past behavior good predictor for future behavior) Companies google you
2. Structured interviews: preferably with more than one interviewer, that use a predetermined list of questions that are asked of every person applying for a particular job. Valid employee selection techniques. Brings fairness and objectivity to the process.
3. Assessment center and Work Sample Tests: A method of selection and training that involves a simulated job situation in which candidates deal with actual job problems.
4. Psychological tests
Assessment center techniques
§ In-basket technique: present a number of problems, candidate must solve these problems
§ Leaderless group discussion: interviewer would bring question and then observe what the candidates would discuss about
§ Fact finding: test how one can retribe information (dedectives_
§ Oral presentation
§ Dialogue
Principles of psychological testing
§ Standardization: questions and how to ask them should be identical
§ Objectivity (i.e., unbiased, no cultural content)
§ Norming (i.e., comparing to other scores so that the test has meaning)
§ Reliability and Validity
Types of psychological tests
Cognitive abilities
Intelligence as “g”: involves ability to reason, plan, solve problems, comprehend complex ideas, and learn from experience
Is “g” important at work? = Yes ↑ job complexity = ↑ predictive value of general intelligence tests
Speed vs. power tests !
Speed tests have rigid & demanding time limits
• Focus: Is the person both fast and accurate
• Benefit: Lots of variation across different test-takers
• Requirement: Questions must be relevant to job
• Risk: May increase the risk of legal challenges !
Power tests have no rigid time limits
• ”Fix this broken machine… take all the time you need.”
Do people differ in thinking styles?
Yes: Type 1: Intuitive and Type 2: Analytic
The relevance of cognitive science to I-O Psychology is increasing: In 2015… the World Bank called for decision makers to use more Type 2 thinking to avoid financial errors, and the Institute of Medicine urged health care providers to use Type 2 thinking to avoid deadly mistakes
A cognitive ability for psychologists: Learn how to distinguish Theory from Speculation – but use both to solve problems
Interest tests
Motor skills tests
Personality tests
Integrity tests
Additional Proposed Individual Differences
! Skills
! Knowledge
! Competencies
! Emotional intelligence
There will be 2 assesments.
Why do people work?
For money? Would people still work if they did not need the money? If you became an instant millionaire.. would you still work?
Work Values
Intrinsic Values
▪ Interesting work ▪ Challenging work ▪ Learning new things ▪ Making important contributions ▪ Responsibility and autonomy ▪ Being creative
Extrinsic Values
▪ Pay ▪ Social contacts ▪ Status in wider community
Organizations can serve different work values
What is I-O psychology?
I-O psychology applies psychological principles, theory, and research to the work setting (p. 4-5)
Scientists who derive principles of individual, group, and organizational behavior through research. They are employed at (semi-)public organizations (e.g., universities, TNO) and private organizations. 21 What is I-O Psychology? Consultants and staff psychologists who develop scientific knowledge and apply it to the solution of problems at work. They are employed in (semi-) public and private organizations and consulting companies.
Teachers who train in the research and application of I-O psychology.
Consultants and staff psychologists who develop scientific knowledge and apply it to the solution of problems at work. They are employed in (semi-) public and private organizations and consulting companies.
Industrial-organizational psychology helps develop strategies that build better organizations
An I-O Psychologist can help organizations with:
1. Staffing and workforce development (Personnel or Industrial Psychology)
2. Enhancing motivation, team effectiveness, and organizational development (Organizational Psychology)
3. Work design and workplace climate issues (Human Engineering)
Common issues:
-employment discrimination
-psychosocial or physical health
-concept of ‘work-life balance’
-the ‘new world of work’
Special issues:
-sports
-humanitarian
-conflict areas
- special assessment
Scientist-Practitioner Model : Using scientific tools and research in the practice of I-O psychology (vs. relying on “best practices” or experience)
•Selection and placement
•Training and development
•Organizational development
•Performance measurement
•Quality of worklife
•Engineering psychology
The bottom line in any organization is performance.
26 What is I-O Psychology? Performance (job performance, creativity), motivation, leadership, and well-being are the key dependent variables in the I-O research program at the RuG
Changes in the Workplace since 1980
▪ Personal computing
▪ Telecommuting & virtual teams
▪ Videoconferencing
▪ Service vs. manufacturing
▪ Teams vs. the individual
▪ Little stability
▪ Family-friendly workplaces
▪ Global workplace
▪ Greater diversity
Why study I-O psychology?
Knowledge about I-O psychology pays off for your own professional career, regardless of profession.
▪ I-O psychology applies theories, models, and principles from all areas of psychology.
▪ Studying I-O psychology improves your understanding of how individuals and groups act, think, and feel in organizations.
▪ Our lay theories and beliefs about I-O psychology may be false, or may be correct only under a narrow set of circumstances.
Think about the similarities and differences about theories.
The Hawthorne Experiments (1927-1933):
The purpose was to investigate how characteristics of the work setting, i.e., intensity of illumination, rest
Lecture 2
There will be 2 assesments.
Are Individual Differences Relevant?
To test this, lets tap into our implicit theories
• Focus on one of these occupations:
• Accountant, (serious man, nicely dressed, does not talk enthusiastic, on the computer all day working with numbers, organized)
• Event Coordinator, and (enthusiastic talking, busy with phone calls)
• Heavy Equipment Operator (not proper dressed, dirty hands
• Close you eyes, and imagine the typical ________. What are they like? Quickly, brainstorm a list of personality characteristics, abilities or other personal characteristics.
What do Individual Differences Tell Us?
• Personality
• Captures what people are like as individuals
• Ability
• Capture what people can do as individuals
Personality
• The structures and propensities inside a person that explain his or her characteristic patterns of thoughts, emotion, and behavior
• For our purposes today:
• Traits are defined as recurring regularities or trends in people’s responses to their environment
• While we could come up with thousands of traits adjectives, most of them would cluster around five general dimensions
• We call these dimensions the “Big Five”
[note: enkele afbeeldingen uit het college zijn door de WorldSupporter redactie verwijderd wegens vermoedelijke inbreuk op het auteursrecht]
How Important is Personality?
• C and ES (reflected N) are positively correlated with job performances in virtually all jobs
• O,C, and A predicted discretionary pro-social and proorganizational behaviors across jobs Question: How might this knowledge be applied at work? people choose jobs that match their personalities. Some kind of jobs require some kind of personalities, so we have to filter on that.
Abilities
• The relatively stable capabilities people have to perform a particular range of different but related activities
• In contrast to skills, which are more trainable and improvable
• As with personality, about half of the variation in ability levels is due to genetics
Types of Human Abilities
• Cognitive Abilities
• Capabilities related to the acquisition and application of knowledge in problem solving
• Examples: Verbal, Quantitative, Reasoning, Spatial, Perceptual
• Emotional Intelligence
• Capabilities related to the management and the use of emotions when interacting with others
• Physical Abilities
• Capabilities related to the performance of physical work
• Examples: Strength; Stamina; Flexibility and Coordination; Psychomotor; Sensory
How Important Is Ability?
• Cognitive ability predicts job performance in vitually all jobs
• Emotional intelligence predicts performance only when jobs involve a high degree
.....read moreLecture 3
Why should we care about job performance?
Performance is the bottom line in any organization.
Effective Performance Productivity
What is job performance?
Multi-dimensional approach to performance
Job performance includes:
Over periods of time:
Immediately:
Actual performance, all of it, and nothing else
Understanding performance
[note: deze afbeelding uit het college is door de WorldSupporter redactie verwijderd wegens vermoedelijke inbreuk op het auteursrecht]
Lecture 5
Training and development
Managing ability in organizations
1.Employee selection
Identify tasks to be accomplished Identify abilities needed to accomplish tasks Develop accurate measures of abilities Select the individuals who meet the requirements
2. Placement (P-E fit)
Match workers to jobs to capitalize on their abilities
3.Training
The systematic acquisition of skills, concepts, or attitudes that results in improved performance in another environment
Training: Systematic acquisition of skills, concepts, or attitudes resulting in improved performance in another environment
Training increases probability of learning, and learning increases probability of better job performance.
Training Needs Analysis
! 3-step process to develop systematic understanding of where training is needed (organizational), what needs to be trained (task), & who will be trained (person)
In general, organizations benefit from investing in learning and development programs:
! Improve the bottom-line performance of the organization by giving employees the skills needed to perform well.
! Reduce external recruiting costs by preparing current employees for greater tasks or leadership roles.
! Increase employee retention by visibly demonstrating to employees an investment in their career development and growth.
Grim example: Need for assertiveness training
[note: deze afbeelding uit het college is door de WorldSupporter redactie verwijderd wegens vermoedelijke inbreuk op het auteursrecht]
Impact of trainee characteristics, e.g.:
1. Ability Mental ability (“g”) Metacognitive skills (understanding one’s cognitions)
2. Self-monitoring
3. Self-theory (perceptions about self)
4. Achievement goals (performance/mastery)
5. Feedback seeking behavior: Self-enhancement vs. selfimprovement
[note: deze afbeelding uit het college is door de WorldSupporter redactie verwijderd wegens vermoedelijke inbreuk op het auteursrecht]
Learning: Social Comparison Theory
Festinger (1954): There is a “drive” within individuals to gain accurate self-evaluations to (i) reduce uncertainty about the self and (ii) learn how to define the self.
Theoretical advances (1970’s – 1980’s):
• Self-evaluation: If motivation is accuracy, then choose a comparison target similar to oneself • Self-enhancement: If motivation is to increase positive self-regard, one might Interpret, distort, or ignore information when making self-evaluation
• Upward and downward social comparison: Choosing a comparison target of people better/worse off. - opposing effects for self-improvement - opposing effects for self-regard
Vicarious Learning: Learning that occurs when one person (the learner) learns a behavior by watching another person (the model) perform the behavior (e.g., “watch and learn”, imitation, social contagion)
Learning: Contagion Effects
Goals, motives, values, and beliefs are socially contagious Achievement motivation (and apathy) is socially contagious Burnout spreads among teachers & medical professionals. Media exposure facilitates “mass shooting contagion”
In 2013, scientists at Facebook showed massivescale emotional contagion by manipulating news feeds to include more positive (vs. negative) posts from friends.
Benchmarking: Putting Social Comparison
.....read moreLecture 6 Nanxi Yan
Motivation to Work
What Does It Mean to Be a Good Performer?
Task Performance (+)
Ø Job-specific, unique to one’s job Ø
Citizenship behavior (+)
Ø Job-general
Ø Directed towards individuals
Ø Directed towards the organization
Counterproductive behavior (-)
Ø Job-general
Ø Targeted to other individuals or the organization
Ø Can be minor or major
Where Does Job Performance Come From?
! Assuming people have the knowledge, skills, abilities, and personality to perform the job, what else….?
• Commitment (Next Lecture)
• Motivation
Motivation: a brief history
[note: deze afbeelding uit het college is door de WorldSupporter redactie verwijderd wegens vermoedelijke inbreuk op het auteursrecht]
tivation pertains to control
Human beings generally want to be effective – at exerting control and establishing what is true and real (Bandura, 1977; Higgins, 2011)
Motivation can be automatic and non-conscious (Chartrand & Bargh, 1996)
[note: deze afbeelding uit het college is door de WorldSupporter redactie verwijderd wegens vermoedelijke inbreuk op het auteursrecht]
Motivation: A set of forces that originates both within and outside an employee, and determines the direction, intensity, and persistence of work effort.
[note: deze afbeelding uit het college is door de WorldSupporter redactie verwijderd wegens vermoedelijke inbreuk op het auteursrecht]
Job performace = (motivation x ability) – situational constraints
Motivation theories
• Self-Determination Theory
• Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
• Herzberg’s Motivation-Hygiene Theory
• McClelland’s Learned Needs Theory
• Social Justice Theories (e.g., Equity Theory)
• Reinforcement Theory and Behavior Modification
• Social Learning Theory
• Goal Setting Theory
• VIE (Expectancy) Theory
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Theory
[note: deze afbeelding uit het college is door de WorldSupporter redactie verwijderd wegens vermoedelijke inbreuk op het auteursrecht]
! Employer needs to know at what need level individual worker is operating
! Group of workers may all be functioning at different need levels
! Fits person-as-machine
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