13.1 What Is Industrial-Organizational Psychology?

• Industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology: a branch of psychology that studies how human behavior and psychology affect work and how they are affected by work.

• Industrial and organizational psychologists work in four main contexts: academia, government, consulting firms, and business.

• The field of I-O psychology can be divided into three broad areas: industrial, organizational, and human factors.

  • Industrial psychology: concerned with describing job requirements and assessing individuals for their ability to meet those requirements.

  • Organizational psychology: a discipline interested in how the relationships among employees affect those employees and the performance of a business.

  • Human factors psychology: the study of how workers interact with the tools of work and how to design those tools to optimize workers’ productivity, safety, and health.

The Historical Development of Industrial and Organizational Psychology

• Industrial and organizational psychology had its origins in the early 20th century.

• Walter Dill Scott was one of the first psychologists to apply psychology to advertising, management, and personnel selection.

• Robert Yerkes organized a group under the Surgeon General’s Office (SGO) that developed methods for screening and selecting enlisted men during WWI.

  • They developed the Army Alpha test to measure mental abilities.

  • The Army Beta test was a non-verbal form of the test that was administered to illiterate and non-English-speaking draftees.

• Scott and Walter Bingham organized a job-description system and a system of performance ratings and occupational skill tests for officers.

• After the war, work on personnel selection continued.

• From 1929 to 1932 Elton Mayo conducted a series of studies at Western Electric’s Hawthorne Works.

  • These studies mark the origin of organizational psychology.

  • They began as research into the effects of the physical work environment, but the researchers found that the psychological and social factors in the factory were of more interest than the physical factors.

  • These studies also examined how human interaction factors, such as supervisorial style, enhanced or decreased productivity.

  • Hawthorne effect: the increase in performance of individuals who are noticed, watched, and paid attention to by researchers or supervisors

  • The original researchers found that any change in a variable led to an improvement in productivity; this was true even when the change was negative.

• Kurt Lewin conducted research on the effects of various leadership styles, team structure, and team dynamics, and is considered the founder of social psychology and influenced organizational psychology.

• Frederick Taylor was an engineer who saw that if one could redesign the workplace there would be an increase in both output for the company and wages for the workers.

• Gilbreth was another influential I-O psychologist who worked to make workers more efficient by reducing the number of motions required to perform a task.

• Taylor and Gilbreth’s work improved productivity and the fit between technology and the human using it.

  • Human factors psychology: The study of machine–human fit

From WWII to Today

• World War II drove the expansion of industrial psychology.

• Bingham developed new systems for job selection, classification, training, ad performance review, plus methods for team development, morale change, and attitude change.

• In the years after the war, both industrial psychology and organizational psychology became areas of significant research effort.

  • Concerns about the fairness of employment tests arose, and the ethnic and gender biases in various tests were evaluated with mixed results, and a great deal of research went into studying job satisfaction and employee motivation.

13.2 Industrial Psychology: Selecting and Evaluating Employees

• Industrial psychology: focuses on identifying and matching persons to tasks within an organization.

  • It involves job analysis

  • Job analysis: accurately describing the task or job.

  • Organizations must identify the characteristics of applicants for a match to the job analysis.

  • It involves training employees and appraising their performance along the way.

Selecting Employees

• There are two related but different approaches to job analysis

  • The first approach is task-oriented and lists that detail the tasks that will be performed for the job.

  • The second approach is worker-oriented, and describes the characteristics required of the worker to successfully perform the job.

    • This approach has been called job specification.

      • For job specification, the knowledge, skills, and abilities that the job requires are identified.

  • Observation, surveys, and interviews are used to obtain the information required for both types of job analysis.

• Once a company identifies potential candidates for a position, the candidates’ knowledge, skills, and other abilities must be evaluated and compared with the job description.

• These evaluations can involve testing, an interview, and work samples or exercises.

• Personality tests in the I-O context are used to identify the personality characteristics of the candidate in an effort to match those to personality characteristics that would ensure good performance on the job.

• Other types of tests that may be given to candidates include IQ tests, integrity tests, and physical tests, such as drug tests or physical fitness tests.

• Information derived from job analysis usually forms the basis for the types of questions asked during interviews.

• Interviews can provide a more dynamic source of information about the candidate than standard testing measures.

• Social factors and body language can influence the outcome of the interview.

  • There are two types of interviews: unstructured and structured.

  • Unstructured interview: the interviewer may ask different questions of each different candidate; the questions are often unspecified beforehand; the responses to questions asked are generally not scored using a standard system.

  • Structured interview: the interviewer asks the same questions of every candidate, the questions are prepared in advance, and the interviewer uses a standardized rating system for each response.

• Training is an important element of success and performance in many jobs.

• An important goal of orientation training is to educate the new employee about how the organization is run, how it operates, and how it makes decisions.

• Mentoring: a form of informal training in which an experienced employee guides the work of a new employee.

Evaluating Employees

• Industrial and organizational psychologists are typically involved in designing performance-appraisal systems for organizations, which are designed to evaluate whether each employee is performing her job satisfactorily.

• Industrial and organizational psychologists study, research, and implement ways to make work evaluations as fair and positive as possible

• Fairly evaluated work helps employees do their jobs better, improves the likelihood of people being in the right jobs for their talents, maintains fairness, and identifies company and individual training needs.

• Performance appraisals: typically documented several times a year, often with a formal process and an annual face-to-face brief meeting between an employee and his supervisor; part of it’s function is to document poor performance to bolster decisions to terminate an employee.

• 360-degree feedback appraisal: the employee’s appraisal derives from a combination of ratings by supervisors, peers, employees supervised by the employee, and from the employee herself; the purpose is to give the employee and supervisor different perspectives of the employee’s job performance

Bias and Protections in Hiring

• Some hiring criteria may be related to a particular group an applicant belongs to and not individual abilities. Unless membership in that group directly affects potential job performance, a decision based on group membership is discriminatory

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commision (EEOC)

• U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC): responsible for enforcing federal laws that make it illegal to discriminate against a job applicant or an employee because of the person's race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability, or genetic information.

• The United States has several specific laws regarding fairness and avoidance of discrimination.

  • Equal Pay Act: requires that equal pay for men and women in the same workplace who are performing equal work

  • Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964: makes it illegal to treat individuals unfavorably because of their race or color of their skin

  • Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978: it prohibits job discrimination of a woman because she is pregnant as long as she can perform the work required.

• Federal legislation does not protect employees in the private sector from discrimination related to sexual orientation and gender identity.

Americas with Disabilities Act (ADA)

• Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA): states people may not be discriminated against due to the nature of their disability.

• Disability: a physical or mental impairment that limits one or more major life activities.

• An employer must make reasonable accommodations for the performance of a disabled employee’s job.

• The premise of the law is that disabled individuals can contribute to an organization and they cannot be discriminated against because of their disabilities.

• The Civil Rights Act and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act make provisions for bona fide occupational qualifications (BFOQs), which are requirements of certain occupations for which denying an individual employment would otherwise violate the law.

• Sex (gender) is the most common reason for invoking a BFOQ as a defense against accusing an employer of discrimination.

13.3 Organizational Psychology: The Social Dimension of Work

• Organizational psychology: focuses on social interactions and their effect on the individual and on the functioning of the organization.

Job Satisfaction

• Job satisfaction: the degree to which individuals enjoy their job.

• Job satisfaction is impacted by the work itself, our personality, and the culture we come from and live in.

• Job satisfaction is typically measured after a change in an organization to assess how the change affects employees. It may also be routinely measured by an organization to assess one of many factors expected to affect the organization’s performance.

• Job satisfaction is measured using questionnaires that employees complete.

• Measures of job satisfaction correlate to organizational citizenship or discretionary behaviors on the part of an employee that further the goals of the organization.

• Job satisfaction is related to general life satisfaction.

• Job satisfaction is related to organizational performance, which suggests that implementing organizational changes to improve employee job satisfaction will improve organizational performance.

• Job stress affects job satisfaction.

• Job stress is caused by specific stressors in an occupation.

• Stress: the perception and response of an individual to events judged as ovewhelming or threatening to the individual’s well-being.

  • The events themselves are the stressors.

• Stress is a result of an employee’s perception that the demands placed on them exceed their ability to meet them.

• Job stress leads to poor employee health, job performance, and family life.

• Job insecurity contributes significantly to job stress.

  • Two increasing threats to job security are downsizing events and corporate mergers. Businesses typically involve I-O psychologists in planning for, implementing, and managing these types of organizational change.

  • Downsizing: an increasingly common response to a business’s pronounced failure to achieve profit goals; involves laying off a significant percentage of the company’s employees.

    • Industrial-organizational psychologists may be involved in all aspects of downsizing.

  • Merger/Acquisition: corporations often grow larger by combining with other businesses.

    • Commonly involves a reduction of staff which leads to organizational processes and stresses similar to those that occur in downsizing events.

Work-Family Balance

• Work-family balance: to juggle the demands of work life with the demands of home life.

• Greenhaus and Beutell first identified three sources of work–family conflicts:

  • time devoted to work makes it difficult to fulfill requirements of family, or vice versa

  • strain from participation in work makes it difficult to fulfill requirements of family, or vice versa

  • specific behaviors required by work make it difficult to fulfill the requirements of family, or vice versa.

Management and Organizational Structure

• Douglas McGregor combined scientific management and human relations into the notion of leadership behavior.

  • Scientific management: a theory of management that analyzes and synthesizes workflows with the main objective of improving economic efficiency, especially labor productivity

• Douglas’ theory lays out two different styles called Theory X and Theory Y.

  • Theory X: managers assume that most people dislike work and are not innately self-directed; managers perceive employees as people who prefer to be led and told which tasks to perform and when.

  • Theory Y: managers assume that most people seek inner satisfaction and fulfillment from their work; employees function better under leadership that allows them to participate in, and provide input about, setting their personal and work goals.

• Donald Clifton proposed the strengths-based management, which focused on how an organization can best use an individual’s strengths.

  • Strength: a particular enduring talent possessed by an individual that allows them to provide consistent, near-perfect performance in tasks involving that talent.

  • Clifton argued that our strengths provide the greatest opportunity for growth

• Leadership is an important element of management.

• Bass popularized and developed the concepts of transactional leadership versus transformational leadership styles.

  • Transactional leadership: the focus is on supervision and organizational goals, which are achieved through a system of rewards and punishments.

  • Transformational leadership: possesses four attributes to varying degrees: charismatic (highly liked role models), inspirational (optimistic about goal attainment), intellectually stimulating (encourage critical thinking and problem solving), and considerate.

• Women tend to practice an interpersonal style of leadership and men practice a task-oriented style.

• Similarities between the sexes in leadership styles are attributable to both sexes needing to conform the organization’s culture and sex-related differences reflect inherent differences in the strengths each sex brings to bear on leadership practice

Goals, Teamwork, and Work Teams

• Work teams: bring together diverse skills, experience, and expertise.

• Team-based approach: teams are brought together and given a specific task or goal to accomplish.

• The popularity of teams may in part result from the team halo effect: teams are given credit for their successes, but individuals within a team are blamed for team failures.

• Diversity can introduce communication and interpersonal-relationship problems that hinder performance, but on the other hand diversity can also increase the team’s skill set, which may include skills that can actually improve team member interactions.

• There are three basic types of teams: problem resolution teams, creative teams, and tactical teams.

  • Problem resolution teams: created for the purpose of solving a particular problem or issue

  • Creative teams: used to develop innovative possibilities or solutions

  • Tactical teams: used to execute a well-defined plan or objective

Organizational Structure

• Organizational culture: encompasses the values, visions, hierarchies, norms, and interactions among its employees; it’s how an organization is run, how it operates, and how it makes decisions

• Different departments within one company can develop their own subculture within the organization’s culture.

• Ostroff, Kinicki, and Tamkins identify three layers in organizational culture: observable artifacts, espoused values, and basic assumptions.

  • Observable artifacts: the symbols, language, narratives, and practices that represent the underlying cultural assumptions.

  • Espoused values: concepts or beliefs that the management or the entire organization endorses.

  • Basic assumptions: generally unobservable and unquestioned.

• Diversity training: educates participants about cultural differences with the goal of improving teamwork.

• One well-recognized negative aspect of organizational culture is a culture of harassment, including sexual harassment.

• Quid pro quo: organizational rewards are offered in exchange for sexual favors.

  • Often between an employee and a person with greater power in the organization.

• Hostile environment: a form of sexual harassment where an employee experiences conditions in the workplace that are considered hostile or intimidating.

• Harassment does not have to be sexual; it may be related to any of the protected classes in the statutes regulated by the EEOC: race, national origin, religion, or age.

Violence in the Workplace

• Workplace violence: any act or threat of physical violence, harassment, intimidation, or other threatening, disruptive behavior that occurs at the workplace.

  • Ranges from threats and verbal abuse to physical assaults and even homicide.

• Murder is the second leading cause of death in the workplace and the primary cause of death for women in the workplace.

• There are many triggers for workplace violence. A significant trigger is the feeling of being treated unfairly, unjustly, or disrespectfully.

• Procedural justice: the fairness of the processes by which outcomes are determined in conflicts with or among employees.

13.4 Human Factors Psychology and Workplace Design

• Human factors psychology: concerned with the integration of the human-machine interface in the workplace, through design, and specifically with researching and designing machines that fit human requirements.

  • The integration may be physical or cognitive, or a combination of both.

  • Focuses on the individual worker’s interaction with a machine, work station, information displays, and the local environment

• Human factor professionals are involved in design from the beginning of a project or toward the end in testing and evaluation

• Another important role of human factor professionals is in the development of regulations and principles of best design. These regulations and principles are often related to work safety.

• Many of the concerns of human factors psychology are related to workplace safety.

• One of the methods used to reduce accidents in the workplace is a checklist.