• Industrial/Organization (I/O) Psychology: The study of human behavior in the workplace

• Hawthorne Effect: The finding that workers who were given special attention increased their productivity regardless of what actual changes were made in the work setting

Personnel Selection

The Typical Job Interview

• An agent of the company and an applicant meet in person to evaluate each other

• Very few employers would consider hiring a complete stranger for a responsible position without an interview

• Civils rights laws explicitly forbid employers to discriminate on the basis of sex, race, age, religion, national origin, or disability

• Black and Hispanic applicants receive interview ratings only slightly lower on average than those obtained by their white counterparts

  • Face-to-face interactions humanize applicants

• Supervisor ratings of Black, white, and Hispanic workers are more similar to one another than “objective” measures of performance

• Beauty is not relevant to job performance, yet people tend to favor others who’re attractive

  • Physical appearance has a large impact in the interview process

  • An applicant may be adversely affected by a scar or stain on the face

• Cultural similarity plays a role in the hiring process

• Interviews sometimes lack predictive validity

  • Some interviewees engage in more self-promotion than others

  • Some interviewees are more confident in their interviewing skills than others, and confidence predicts success

  • Quality of an applicant’s handshake predicts how likely they will be rated by an interviewer after an interview

  • Faking in an employment interview: When a job applicant consciously presents themselves in distorted ways in order to create a favorable impression

    • May compromise the predictive validity of the process

    • Questionnaires can measure faking

  • Employers often have preconceptions that can distort the process

    • Managers’ pre-interview expectations influenced the kinds of interviews they conducted as well as the outcomes

      • The higher their expectations, the less time they spent evaluating and the more likely they were to make a favorable evaluation

    • Interviewers with positive expectations sounded warmer, more outgoing, and more cheerful

    • Job interviews can become part of a self-fulfilling prophecy

    • Employers subconsciously use the opportunity to create realities that bolster their preexisting beliefs

• Cybervetting

  • Cybervetting: When employers use the Internet to get informal, noninstitutional data about applicants that they didn’t choose to share

  • Now a common but controversial selection practice

  • Employers say that they’re merely trying to seek honest signals about an applicant’s ability, character, and fit

    • Honest signals: Information that is hard for applicants to fake

  • What kinds of information do employers seek and get in their Internet searches of applicants?

    • Most employers reported cybervetting good applicants after receiving their resumes

    • Use visual information, textual information, relational information, and technological information

      • Visual Information: avatars, site designs, and pictures

      • Textual Information: content, communication skills, spelling, and grammar

      • Relational Information: number and quality of friends and contacts within the industry

      • Technological Information: professional look of a Facebook page or time spent playing games on social media sites

    • Half of the employers said that the complete absence of an online presence has caused them to lower their evaluations of an applicant

  • What effects does this new approach to personnel selection have on who gets hired?

    • No research on how this affects the quality of hiring decisions

“Scientific” Alternatives to Traditional Interviews

• Standardized Tests

  • Tests of intelligence: Tests designed to measure intellectual and cognitive abilities, job-specific knowledge and skills, or “street smarts” and common sense, all of which may contribute to success on the job

    • Useful because they’re predictive of job success in high stakes work settings

    • Don’t discriminate against minorities and others who lack the resources to pay for test preparation courses

    • Although general intelligence is a relevant factor, it’s not fully captured by standardized tests

      • Other factors should be considered as well in personnel selection

      • Both cognitive and and noncognitive selection measures should be used

  • Personality Tests: Tests designed to measure traits that predict such work-related outcomes as leadership, productivity, helpfulness, absenteeism, and theft

    • People who score high in the trait of conscientiousness are more likely in general to perform well on the job

    • People who score as extroverted are especially likely to succeed as business managers and salespersons

    • Young adults who have high self-esteem, self-confidence and a sense of control tend to seek out more challenging lines of work

      • More satisfied with their jobs later in life

    • People who have a certain cluster of traits are more likely to exhibit good organizational citizenship behaviors

      • ex: emotional stability, conscientiousness, and agreeableness

    • Although certain personality factors may relate to job performance, researchers would need to devise tests that are more predictive and rely less on self-reporting

  • Integrity Tests: Questionnaires designed specifically to assess an applicant’s honesty and character by asking direct questions concerning illicit drug use, shoplifting, petty theft, and other transgressions

    • Easy to administer

    • Responses scored by computer

    • Concern: Applicants can use these tests to present themselves in overly positive ways

    • Overt integrity tests: Integrity tests where the purpose is obvious to the test-taker

    • Covert integrity tests: Integrity tests where items measure broad personality characteristics that aren't clearly related to the workplace

      • Prevent faking

    • Both types of tests predict various work-related behaviors

    • Test scores were highly predictive of job performance and of counterproductive behaviors such as theft, absenteeism, lateness, and other disciplinary problems

    • Integrity test scores were predictive of job performance and counterproductive behaviors but to a lesser degree

• Structured Interviews

  • Structured Interview: An interview in which each job applicant is asked a standard set of questions and evaluated on the same criteria

  • Helps employers stop themselves from unwittingly conducting biased interviews that merely confirm their preexisting conceptions

  • More informative than conventional interviews in the selection of insurance agents, sales clerks, and other workers

  • More predictive than paper-and-pencil personality tests because they are more difficult to fake

  • Can be conducted by phone and later scored from a taped transcript

  • Impressions interviewers formed in the pre-interview were highly predictive of post-interview evaluations

  • Assessment Centers: A structured setting in which job applicants are exhaustively tested and judged by multiple evaluators

    • Widely assumed to be more effective than traditional interviews at identifying applicants who will succeed in a particular position

    • Assessments are sometimes streamlined to involve fewer evaluators, exercises, and other types of shortcuts

    • Good way to make hiring decisions that are predictive of job performance

• Personnel Selection as a Two-Way Street

  • Organizations and applicants size each other up

  • People see concrete, job-specific tests and interview situations as the most fair

  • People dislike impersonal standardized tests of intelligence, personality, and honesty

  • Perceived fairness of the selection process that is used may influence whether top applicants accept the offers that are made

  • Applicants of in-person interviews saw the process as more fair, saw the outcome as more favorable, and were more likely to accept the job if offered

    • Compared to applicants of telephone or video conferencing interviews

Affirmative Action

• Affirmative Action: A policy that gives special consideration to women and members of underrepresented minority groups in recruitment, hiring, admissions, and promotion decisions

• Opposing opinions

  • Preferential treatment is necessary

    • Overcome historical inequalities

    • Bring the benefits of diversity to the workplace

    • Accuse opponents of harboring conscious or unconscious prejudice

  • The policy results in unfair reverse discrimination

    • Supports meritocracy

    • Meritocracy: A form of justice in which everyone receives an equal opportunity and then rewards are matched to contributions

• Women are more supportive than men, and African Americans and Hispanic Americans are more supportive than whites

• Some minorities aren’t seen as full-fledged members of their group and equally entitled under affirmative action

  • ex: Latino Americans who don’t speak Spanish, biracial individuals

• People’s reactions depend, and can be changed by, how the policy is implemented

  • Soft forms of affirmative action include outreach programs designed to identify, recruit, or specially train applicants from underrepresented groups

  • Hard forms of affirmative action include giving preference to applicants from targeted groups who are equally or less qualified than others

  • People are most favorable toward softer forms of affirmative action

• Many people who don’t personally benefit from affirmative action react negatively to the policy and to those who benefit from it

• Women who believed they were chosen because of their gender later devalued their own performance, even after receiving positive feedback

• Preferential selection policies may have negative effects

  • People perceive a procedure as unjust if it excludes those who are qualified simply because of their nonmembership in a group

  • The recipients become less able to attribute success on the job to their own abilities and efforts, leading them and coworkers to harbor doubts about their competence

  • Preferential selection is seen as a form of assistance

    • Can lead recipients to feel stigmatized by what they assume to be the negative perceptions of others

• When individuals are hired in a preferential selection process, a chain of events is set into motion

  • Others assume that these individuals lack competence or social warmth

  • Stigma leads these individuals to question their own qualifications

  • Self-doubts increase the risk of failure

• People need to know they’re selected on the basis of merit

Culture and Organizational Diversity

• Affirmative action programs increase the number of women and minorities who populate most organizations

• Worldwide trend toward globalization has brought people from disparate cultures into daily contact with each other as coworkers

• Every individual worker has a multidimensional identity that can be placed within a cultural mosaic consisting of the various tiles of their demographic groups, geographical background, and personal associations

  • Demographic Groups: Age, gender, race, and ethnic heritage

  • Geographic Background: Country of origin, region, climate, and population density

  • Personal Associations: religion, profession, and political affiliation

• Diversity can cause increased conflict and less social integration in a group, but can also lead to greater creativity and overall satisfaction

• Businesses with greater racial and gender diversity earned greater revenue and had higher profits than those with less diversity

• The more multicultural the dominant white employees were in their diversity beliefs, the more engaged their minority workers felt

Performance Appraisals

• Performance Appraisal: The process of evaluating an employee’s work and communicating the results to that person

• Provide a basis for placement decisions, transfers, promotions, raises and salary cuts, bonuses, and layoffs

• Give feedback to employees about the quality of their work and their status within the organization

• Often based on subjective measures

Supervisor Ratings

• Halo Effect: A failure to discriminate among different and distinct aspects of a single worker’s performance

• Evaluators differ in the average numerical ratings they give to others

• Restriction of Range Problem: Some people provide uniformly high, lenient ratings, while others are inclined to give stingy, low ratings, and still others gravitate toward the center of the numerical scale

  • People who use a restricted range fail to make adequate distinctions

  • Individuals who have agreeable personalities tend to be lenient in their ratings of others

  • Individuals who are highly conscientious tend to be harsher in their ratings of others

  • People in power consistently give lower performance ratings to others who are in subordinate positions

• Supervisors may intentionally distort their evaluations depending on their objectives within the organization

  • Raters gave higher ratings overall when their goal was to ensure fairness and accuracy or to motivate those they were rating

  • Performance evaluation serves social and communication purposes

Self-Evaluations

• Input is often sought from coworkers and clients

• Self-evaluations in the workplace are consistently more positive than the ratings made by supervisors

• Less predictive of job success

• Workers tend to underestimate the number of times they’d been absent compared with coworkers

• Individuals differ in the extent to which they tend to present themselves in a positive light

  • The more power people have in an organization, the higher their self-evaluations are

  • Men boast more than women and are more likely to overestimate their own performance

  • These differences put both subordinates and female employees at a disadvantage

New and Improved Methods of Appraisal

• Challenge: Find ways to boost the accuracy of the evaluations that are made

• Evaluations are less prone to error when made right after performance (compared to when there’s a delay of days, weeks, or months)

  • Evaluators should take notes and keep clear records of their observations

  • Once memory for details begins to fade, evaluators fall back on stereotypes and other biases

• Teach raters some of the skills necessary for making accurate appraisals

  • Accuracy can be boosted by alerting evaluators to the biases of social perception

• 360-degree performance appraisal: Tactic in which organizations collect and combine a full circle of ratings from multiple evaluators

  • This approach is an improvement over single-rater methods

Due-Process Considerations

• Perceptions of fairness

• Performance ratings may be biased and sometimes deliberately distorted by those motivated by political and self-serving agendas in the workplace

• Due-Process Model of Performance Appraisal: A model designed to guard the rights of employees in the same way that the criminal justice system seeks to protect the accused

  • Adequate Notice: Clear performance standards that employees can understand and ask questions about

  • Fair Hearing: Employees are evaluated by a supervisor who knows their work and receive timely feedback as well as an opportunity to present their own case

  • Appraisals should be based on evidence of job performance

Leadership

• Leader: Someone who can move a group of people toward a common goal

• Good leadership is about social influence

The Classic Trait Approach

• Great Person Theory of History: Exceptional individuals rise up to determine the course of human events

• Certain traits are characteristic of people who go on to become leaders

• Certain stable characteristics are associated with successful leadership among business executives

  • Cognitive Ability: Intelligence and an ability to quickly process large amounts of information

  • Inner Drive: A need for achievement, ambition, and a high energy level

  • Leadership Motivation: A desire to influence others in order to reach a common goal

  • Expertise: Specific knowledge of technical issues relevant to the organization

  • Creativity: An ability to generate original ideas

  • Self-Confidence: Faith in one’s own abilities and ideas

  • Integrity: Reliability, honesty, and an open communication

  • Flexibility: Ability to adapt to the needs of followers and changes in the situation

• Various aspects of leadership can best be predicted by unique combinations of attributes rather than by single traits

• Leaders who exhibit more positive emotions than negative are more effective

• Leadership is the product of a unique interaction between the person and the surrounding situation

• Great leaders are endowed with emotional intelligence

  • Emotional Intelligence: An ability to know how people are feeling and how to use that information to guide their actions

  • Flexible in their style, serving as whatever’s needed at that time

Contingency Models of Leadership

• Contingency Model of Leadership: The theory that leadership effectiveness is determined both by the personal characteristics of leaders and by the control afforded by the situation

  • Primarily task oriented: Single-mindedly focused on the job

  • Relations oriented: Concerned about the feelings of employees

  • High situational control: When leaders have good relations with their staff, a position of power, and a clearly structured task

  • Task-oriented leaders are the most effective in clear cut situations that are either low or high in control

    • High-control situations: When conditions are favorable, these leaders maintain a relaxed, low profile

    • Low-control situations: Groups need guidance, which task-oriented leaders provide by staying focused on the job

  • Relations-oriented leaders perform better in situations that afford a moderate degree of control

    • High-control situations: Meddle too much

    • Low-control situations: Offer too little guidance

    • Ambiguous situations: Motivate workers to solve problems in creative ways

  • Good leadership requires a match between an individual’s personal style and the demands of a specific situation

• Normative Model of Leadership: The theory that leadership effectiveness is determined by the amount of feedback and participation that leaders invite from workers

  • Highly autocratic and directive leaders invite no feedback from workers

  • Highly participative leaders frequently seek and use suggestions from workers

  • People generally prefer leads who involve them in important decisions

Transactional Leadership

• Top-down Views of Leadership: Workers are portrayed as inert, passive, faceless creatures to be mobilized at the management’s discretion

• Leadership is a two-way social exchange

  • Mutual and reciprocal influence between a leader and followers

• Transactional Leader: A leader who gains compliance and support from followers by setting clear goals for them, offering tangible rewards, and providing assistance for an expected level of job performance

• Rests on the leader’s willingness and ability to reward subordinates who keep up their end of the bargain and to correct those who didn’t

Transformational Leadership

• Transformational Leaders: Leaders who motivate others to transcend their personal needs in the interest of a common cause, particularly in times of growth, change, and crisis

• Articulate a clear vision for the future and then mobilize others to join in that vision

• Charisma, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, and an individualized consideration of others

• More extroverted than the average

• More likely to exhibit positive emotions

• Multi-factor Leader Questionnaire: A method of measuring the extent to which individuals possess the attributes of transactional and transformational leadership styles

  • Inspiration is universally a more powerful motivator than reward

  • Transformational leaders are more effective than transactional leaders

• Pseudo-transformational Leaders: Leaders who appeal to emotions rather than to reason and manipulate ignorant followers to further their own personal interests

Leadership Among Women and Minorities

• “Glass Ceiling”: A subtle barrier that keeps women and minorities from reaching the top of the hierarchy

• “Glass Walls”: A subtle barrier that keeps women and minorities from moving laterally within an organization

Leadership Among Women

• Many women are highly qualified for positions of power

• Female leaders in the workplace are as task oriented as their male counterparts

• Male and female leaders in general are equally effective

• Men are more controlling and women more democratic in their approaches

• Men may be more effective as leaders in positions that require a more directive style, whereas women may be more effective in managerial settings that require openness and cooperation

• Female managers interact more with subordinates

• Men and women differ in their style, not in the capacity for leadership

• Female leaders may even be slightly more transactional and transformational than men

• Impediments

  • Many women are conflicted about having to juggle a career and family and often feel as though they have to pick one or the other

  • Some women shy away from highly competitive, hierarchical positions that offer the potential for leadership in favor of professions that involve helping people

  • Lingering stereotypes portray women as followers, not as having the leadership traits commonly associated with masculinity

    • Some people are uneasy about women in leadership roles

• Women had to overcome more barriers to get where they were gong

• People in general exhibit a bias against motherhood when it comes to recommending women with children for promotion

Leadership Among Minorities

• Research is mixed on the question of whether employee evaluations are biased by race

• Business leaders should be aware of the indirect ways in which minorities are handicapped in the pursuit of leadership

• Felt excluded socially from informal work groups, were not “networked”, and lacked the sponsors and mentors needed for advancing in an organization

• Less likely than others to have mentoring relationships

• Minority managers have to build a solid foundational early

• Mentors played a key role

Cultural Influences on Leadership

• There are universal aspects of leadership

• There are also aspects that are culture-specific

  • Canadian managers were seen as visionaries

    • Realistic visions of the future

    • Conveyed a clear sense of direction

    • Set realistic goals

  • Taiwanese managers were seen more as mobilizers

    • Helped make the work challenging

    • Gave constructive feedback and praise

  • Paternalistic leadership styles are dominant in East Asian contexts

    • Authoritarianism: A form of leadership in which superiors have control, power, and authority to command obedience, compliance, and respect from subordinates

    • Benevolence: A gentle and nurturing concern for those in their care

    • Moral character: Serve as an ethical role model, demonstrating the virtue others are expected to follow

  • People in collectivist cultures perceive leaders as proxies for the group they hold responsible

Motivation at Work

Economic Reward Models

• Someone’s overall satisfaction with their compensation depends on salary, raises, how income is distributed, and what benefits and employer offers

• Many rewards are not monetary, but symbolic (titles, office size, etc.)

• Expectancy Theory: The theory that workers become motivated when they believe that their efforts will produce valued outcomes

  • Their effort will result in an improved performance

  • Their performance will be recognized and rewarded

  • The monetary and symbolic rewards that are offered are valuable and desirable

• Goal setting is important for motivation

  • People perform better at work and are more productive when they’re given specific goals and clear standards for success

  • Financial incentives can boost worker productivity without compromising the quality of the work

  • People should set specific and difficult goals for themselves

  • Goal setting functions at the group level in the same way that it does for individuals

Bonuses, Bribes, and Intrinsic Motivation

• Reward systems that increase extrinsic motivation may undermine intrinsic motivation

  • Extrinsic motivation: When people engage in an activity for money, recognition, or other tangible rewards

  • Intrinsic motivation: When people engage in an activity for the sake of interest, challenge, or sheer enjoyment

  • When people start getting paid for a task they already enjoy, they sometimes lose interest in it

  • Various extrinsic factors commonly found in the workplace also have adverse effects on motivation and performance

  • To be maximally productive, people should feel internally driven, not compelled by outside forces

• Controlling rewards tend to lower intrinsic motivation, but informational rewards have the opposite positive effect on motivation and creativity

  • For people who are highly focused on the achievement of certain goals at work, tangible inducements tend to boost intrinsic motivation

Equity Considerations

• Equity Theory: People want rewards to be equitable

  • The ratio between inputs and outcomes should be the same for the self as it is for others

  • The more effort you exert, and the more you contribute, the more money you should earn

• If you feel overpaid or underpaid, you will experience distress and try to relieve it by

  • restoring actual equity by working less or getting a raise

  • convincing yourself that equity already exists

• Satisfaction also depends on the belief that the means used to determine those outcomes were fair and clearly communicated

  • Workers whose pay had been cut stole more from the company to restore equity, but only when they weren’t provided with an adequate explanation for their loss

  • People are most dedicated to their jobs when they believe they’re being treated fairly

• Feelings of unfairness, underpayment, and maltreatment can cause stress and compromise a person’s health

  • Those who felt victimized by injustice in the workplace reported the most fatigue, anxiety, and depression

  • Combination of feeling underpaid and unfairly treated is particularly stressful

• Equity in the workplace is more important for men than for women

  • Women typically pay themselves less than men do and react less strongly when they’re underpaid by others

  • Men were more likely than women to negotiate starting salaries that were higher than the salaries the companies initially offered

  • Men negotiate more aggressively than women do

• Gender wage gap

  • Women expect less pay than men do, even when they’re equally qualified

    • Stems from a long history of discrimination

  • Women sometimes care less about money and more about interpersonal relationships

  • Women may be satisfied with less money because they compare themselves with other women instead of with their more highly paid male counterparts

  • Women on average tend to rate themselves less favorable than men do, so even when they work harder and perform better, they feel less entitled

  • Working women are not content to remain underpaid relative to men

The Progress Principle

• People work primarily to make a living and money is a powerful motivator

• People’s level of satisfaction at work is only weakly correlated with how much they’re paid

• People’s sense that they’d made meaningful progress in their work was the aspect of their day most frequently associated with a positive mood

• Managers can motivate workers by facilitating progress

Economic Decision Making

The Symbolic Power of Money

• When college students were primed to think about money, they became more self-sufficient, more autonomous, and less social in relation to others

• Those who are exposed to money cues later become more independent

• Rejection increases the subjective value of money

• Money serves to buffer students from the distress normally caused by social rejection

• Priming money has two effects on us

  • People become less interpersonally attuned, less prosocial toward others, less caring, and less interdependent

  • People primed with money start to focus on matters of price, trade, economics, and the virtues of a free market

    • Exhibit a heightened work ethic

    • Put more effort into challenging tasks

    • Become more likely to succeed

Social Influences in the Stock Market

• Choosing stocks is a form of gambling

• Some analysts and brokers perform better than others do for a period of time

• Short-term stock market predictions are fraught with error

• The only way to guarantee profit is to have and use confidential inside information, which is illegal

• Predictions of the stock market are heavily influenced by social psychological factors

  • Social comparison and conformity: When people feel they can’t clearly and concretely measure their own opinion, they turn to others for guidance

• Most participants indicated that they would buy stocks that had risen and sell stocks that had fallen

• Might also buy stocks that are climbing (based on the assumption that they would continue to do so) and sell those on the decline (based on the same principle of continuity)

• Endowment Effect: A tendency to inflate the value of objects they already own

• Disposition Effect: A tendency for people to sell stocks that have risen too early and to hold stocks that have declined too long

  • People value gains and losses relative to the price they paid for their shares

  • We are more likely to take risks in order to avert possible losses than to maximize our gains

Commitment, Entrapment, and Escalation

• Many investors lack the self-control necessary for sound investment decisions

• Individuals and groups can become entrapped by their own initial commitments as they try to justify or salvage investments they’ve already made

• Escalation Effect: The tendency for people to persist in falling investments to avert loss, which causes losses to mount

  • While people ordinarily avoid taking large financial risks to gain money, they are often willing to take risks to keep from losing money

  • Individuals who make the decisions that lead to loss are more likely than others to persist or even to invest further when they feel personally responsible

    • People are trained to finish what they started

    • Sometimes people remain committed to a failing course of action in order to justify their decisions, protect their self-esteem, or save face in front of others

  • Escalation effects can be minimized in organizations by removing the individuals who made the initial investment from the decision making later on

  • Initial investors can learn to use various de-escalation strategies designed to make them more responsible to available evidence

    • Sunk Cost Principle: Only future costs and benefits, not past commitments / sunk costs, should be considered in making  a decision

    • Participants trained in mindfulness mediation were nearly twice as likely to resist the sunk cost bias

    • People can resist the sunk cost trap when they’re encouraged to think about the present and the future, not the past