Summary Work and health: Lectures, book, exam questions
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Course
Work and health psychology (761004B6)
Institution
Tilburg University (UVT)
Book
An Introduction to Contemporary Work Psychology
This is a complete summary of the book An introduction to Contemporary Work Psychology, in combination with extra information from the lectures, as well as 50 exam questions! The course in my year was called Work, Well-being and Performance but the book, thus the summary, is the same.
Lecture 4: Job control, social aspects, and recovery..................................................................................................21
Chapter 7................................................................................................................................................................................21
Lecture 7: Safety and sickness............................................................................................................................................33
Chapter 14............................................................................................................................................................................. 33
Chapter 15............................................................................................................................................................................. 35
Lecture 8: Interventions and why they work...............................................................................................................38
Lecture 9: The worker and individual characteristics..............................................................................................44
Chapter 10............................................................................................................................................................................. 44
Lecture 10: Across the lifespan..........................................................................................................................................49
Bonus topic: Aging..............................................................................................................................................................49
Book questions....................................................................................................................................................................54
Lecture questions............................................................................................................................................................... 58
LECTURE 1: AN INTRODUCTION
Chapter 1
Work has an important place in most people’s activities and it has an effect on health, well being and
performance. Work is defined as a set of coordinated and goal-directed activities that are conducted
in exchange for something else, usually some form of monetary reward. Work is goal-directed
because actions at work are intended to bring a result, like producing a good. It consists of
coordinated activities, interrelated actions with routines, procedures and guidelines. Lastly, it is in
exchange for something else.
Work psychology has the central aim to use insights from psychology (related to people’s behavior,
motivation, thoughts, and emotions) to help workers achieve their work-goals in an optimal manner,
and to help organizations achieve their goals. Contemporary work psychology aims to promote what
might be called sustainable performance, maximizing work performance as well as worker health
and well-being. It is about the activities, and not about the context or personnel.
- Workers are difficult to define. The world labor force comprises people aged 15 and older
who meet the International Labor Organization (ILO) definition of the economically active
population: all people who supply labor for the production of goods and services during a
specified period. National practices vary, but this usually includes armed forces, fist-time job
seekers, and excludes homemakers and unpaid caregivers. Taken together, 205 million
are unemployed (6% in 2011). Work sectors are agriculture (36%), industry
(21%), and services (42%). The number of people working in the service sector
is growing fast.
- WP research generally looks at Western countries, white collar, professional
and middle to highly educated employees working in large organizations.
There is little research on the lower segment of the labor market and on ethnic
or racial minorities.
This limits the ability to generalize findings and to develop theories.
For WP, it is a challenge how to design work so that it is motivating, enjoyable (emotions), offers
learning opportunities, and does not induce stress (health). It looks at organizational goals as well as
the workers. Work psychology is important:
1. Because of the amount of time we spend working: People work way more than they spend
time on any other activity.
2. Because work has the potential to make us happy
3. Because work has the potential to make us sick
4. Because of the increasing expectations of employers
People who work are happier than people who don’t work. It makes life easier, and it contributes to
health and well-being. A good theory is the relative deprivation model of Jahoda. A job provides not
only income, but also five classes of social benefits: time structure, opportunities for social contact,
sharing of a common purpose, social identity or status, and regular activity.
T HE ROOTS OF WORK PSYCHOLOGY
WP now looks at sustainable performance, namely stimulating high work performance as well as
maintaining worker health. In earlier times, work was more important, leading to capitalism. In the
Greek times, Hippocrates described certain tasks. The Roman army also used simple rules and
manuals. Here they also saw that psychological processes could influence the execution of these
tasks. In the 1500’s books were published about mining, and other occupations.
From 1850 until 1930 work started to gain importance. The pre-industrial/agrarian period revolved
around surviving and farming. The industrial revolution started with inventions like the sugar mill.
Processes were mechanized and industrialized. The tasks in the factories were characterized by a
high level of division of labor and were usually simple, repetitive and boring, requiring few skills.
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, Stella Barenholz 2019-2020
Psychotechnics is the practical or technological application of psychology, as in an analyses of social
or economic problems. Like Münsterberg said, “the psychological experiment is systematically to be
placed at the service of commerce and industry”. Pioneers in this field are:
- Jean Marie Lahy: from 1903 onwards. He did experiments on the selection of streetcar
operators and develop a general method for employee selection (normed tests).
- Munsterberg: from 1913. He said “selection of those personalities which by their mental
qualities are especially fit for a particular kind of economic work.” He did work on the
selection of drivers, typists, army gunners and more.
It became popular in the industrial revolution. Later on, there was a lot of thinking about letting
people work efficiently. Taylor introduced scientific management. It focuses on the task and
simplification of tasks. Taylor assumed workers are lazy, and stupid. The solution for him was 1) the
simplification of tasks, 2) examining the best way to conduct the tasks, 3) training workers in the one
best way to conduct these, 4) separating the planning of tasks from their executions, and 5) selecting
workers for particular tasks.
Taylorism may be construed as being the start of contemporary work science, with
standardization and efficiency as its core concepts. The Gilbreths also looked this and
developed their time and motion studies in which they looked at every action an employee did.
Although it improved the output from the work, scientific management reached a lot of negative
attention because working conditions worsened. From 1930, unions were formed to support
workers. They held strikes and demanded better conditions. The Human Relations Movement
began investigating working conditions and worker performance to improve this. Rather than
fitting the worker to the job (as scientific management had attempted), the adage of
the human relations movement was to fit the job to the worker, paying special
attention to the human side of working.
The Hawthorne studies were done between 1924 and 1932. The researchers were the National
Research Council, Fritz Roethlisberger, Lloyd Warner, and Elton Mayo. They did several
investigations:
1. Effects of lighting intensity on productivity
2. Relay Assembly Test Room: 5 women in a secluded room and 13 experimental manipulations
3. 2nd Relay Assembly Test: Incentive schemes (team-based)
4. Mica Splitting Test Room: Seclusion as a small group
5. Interviews: Importance of empathic listening and participation
6. Bank Wiring Observation Room: 14 workers and an Informal system and group norms
From the time of the publication of the results of the Hawthorne Studies onward, no one interested in
the behavior of employees could consider them as isolated individuals. Rather, such factors and
concepts as group influences, social status, informal communication, roles, norms, and the like were
drawn upon to explain and interpret the voluminous data from these studies and other field
investigations that followed them.
C ONTEMPORARY WORK PSYCHOLOGY
This course combines work psychology with health psychology as it looks mostly at the well-being of
employees. Well-being is the state of being comfortable, healthy or happy. Health is a state of
complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.
Health thus includes multiple factors:
- Health (physical well-being): Work as a source of disease and injuries, stress, and health
benefits
- Relationships (social well-being): Work as a source of trust, support, reciprocity,
exploitation, and power abuse
- Happiness (psychological well-being): Work as a source of pleasure and satisfaction
(passive) and fulfillment / engagement (active) or the opposite thereof
Performance is the action or process of performing a task or function. It is also a task or operation
seen in terms of how successfully it is performed. Work performance revolves about both the action
and the outcome, the action being “Performance is what the organization hires one to do, and do
well” and the outcome being “The consequence or the result of the individual worker’s behavior”.
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