Psychology in the Workplace
Lecture 1: General introduction
It is mainly thought that the reason why human beings work has to do with money; to earn things so
that they can live. This statement is based on particular human needs: material/logical needs (having
a roof over your head, food, clothes) or status/power oriented needs. However, people are not
necessarily working for the money, people who have enough money for all these needs are still
working. If you became an instant millionaire, would you still work? What are the underlying reasons
for this?
The whole human experience is written in the idea that we do leave the house: people will always
seek out activities and do things that they think are important, interesting or gives them a sense of
purpose.
Work is a big part of our lives. Even in times of the lockdown, whether you’re in the office or at home
you still fill your day with work activities. So, that shows the importance of work in our daily life.
The definition of work has changed. Work is not the manual
labour activities anymore, but now remote and digital work
has become the norm. Why do people work? Research
indicates that people have intrinsic (internal/inherent needs)
and extrinsic values. We can value both, but some people
value one thing more than the other. We often put ourselves
in a certain career path based on our values. The reason that
people work and return to work is because they miss
something about work when they are retired or unable to
work (due to the pandemic for instance).
Organizations can serve different work values, based on what their goals are.
What is I-O Psychology?
I-O psychology applies psychological principles, theory, and research to the work setting. They are:
- Scientists who derive principles of individuals, group and organizational behaviour through
research. They are employed at (semi-)public organizations (e.g., universities, TNO) and private
organizations.
- Teachers who train in the research and application of I-O psychologists.
- 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 and industrial psychology)
2. enhancing motivation, team effectiveness, and organizational development (organizational
psychology)
3. work design and workplace climate issues (human engineering)
Common issues in I-O Psychology
,• Employment discrimination – e.g., aging and generational differences
• Psychosocial or physical health (e.g., stress, safety, joblessness) → being unemployed can make
people feel stuck as they see others have a job and they don’t. Instead of motivating, joblessness
and stress can be demotivating.
• The concept of “work-life balance” → is there an optimal amount of work hours?
• The “New World of Work” → the work life is increasingly digital and online.
Scientist-Practitioner Model:
Using scientific tools and research in the practice of I-O psychology (moving away from creating basic
psychological theories). With the notion that workplace organizations need better knowledge,
because now they are only relying on “best practices” or experience → example doctor needs to keep
up with information, otherwise his or her experiences will be outdated. It’s risky to rely on personal
experiences, because every experience is different and people can be wrong.
Common areas of concentration for I-O psychologists:
- Selection and placement - Performance measurement
- Training and development - Quality of work life
- Organizational development - Engineering psychology
When an individual is part of an organization, the assumption is that that person is serving or assisting
or advancing the organizations goals. The organization is not a person, it’s just a shared set of beliefs,
understandings and sometimes legal concepts.→The bottom line in any organization is performance.
Performance (job performance, creativity), motivation, leadership, and well-being are the key
dependent variables in the I-O research program at the RUG.
I-O Psychology is a Multilevel Science
The workplace has changed as well and is accelerated by COVID-19 right now. Examples are:
- Personal computing - Little stability
- Telecommuting & virtual teams - Family-friendly workplaces
- Video conferencing - Global workplace
- Service vs. manufacturing - Greater diversity
- Teams vs. the individual
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. There are countless possible lay beliefs out there and some can be
quit damaging. Some examples:
o Job satisfaction is meaningfully associated with job performance
o Managers often agree about what the best ways of increasing organizational effectiveness
are
o Group cohesiveness is a group property that managers should encourage
o Punishing is a good way to increase job performance
o Managers’ basic task is to closely supervise and control subordinates
o Brainstorming groups generate more ideas than individuals working separately.
Important Dates in the Evolution of I-O Psychology
The Hawthorne Experiments (1927-1933):
• The purpose was to investigate how characteristics of the work setting, i.e., intensity of
illumination, rest breaks, and work hours, affect worker fatigue (so that workers would be less
tired) and performance → how do we get people to build as many things as possible without
getting tired, meaning how do we improve performance?
o Hypothesis: light intensity affects worker productivity (more light better performance)
o Discovery: the presence of the researchers was affecting the results because the
employees enjoyed receiving attention and being the subject of the study; so the light
wasn’t even changed and performance went up → the Hawthorne-effect.
• “Any” factor (e.g., level of illumination, number and length of rest periods, hours of work, job
design) seems to influence employees’ behaviours or attitudes as a result of increased attention.
• Psychological and social factors are important in explaining employees’ job performance →
Human Relations Movement
• Afterwards, the scientific value of the Hawthorne studies has been criticized. However, the studies
are still considered the major impetus behind the emphasis on understanding and dealing with
human resources.
Why conduct I-O Psychology Research?
I-O psychology provides a set of tools that allows people to understand, analyse, describe, and predict
behaviour in organizations.
However:
- Don’t think of theories in terms of “right” or “wrong”
- Think of theories as either “helpful” or “not helpful”
- Theories, models, or approaches complement each other
- There is NO one “right” or “only” solution for (I-O) problems.
The contingency approach
• The effectiveness of any person, trait, or strategy often depends on another factor such as the
situation. If we’re going to hire someone, we want to hire the right person for the right job at the
right time.
• I-O psychologists specify situation-type variables (contingency factors, conditions, or moderators)
that permit certain traits and behaviours to be effective within a given organizational context.
• If leadership behaviour is going to be effective on employee behaviour, really depends on
something else.
,o Fiedler’s contingency theory of leadership: argues that the effectiveness of leader style
depends on the kind of situation the leader is dealing with. It depends on the interaction
of leader style and three situational characteristics:
▪ two distinct leader styles: relationship-oriented vs task-oriented
▪ three situational characteristics (contingency factors):
• leader-member relations (good versus poor)
• task structure (structured versus unstructured)
• position power (strong versus weak)
,Lecture 2: Individual differences and assessment
People are (psychologically) different from each other. People not only differ in terms of their
demographics, but also cognitively, emotionally and self-regulation tendency. This creates all kinds of
challenges for experiments → maybe people that participate have a certain type of personality
characteristic.
Personality
When employers try to hire people they often give certain kinds of personality tests to try to screen
in a suitable person for the job. It’s of course not full prove, but it’s a good starting point.
People differ and these differences can show at a early time. Example: marshmallow experiment →
setting children in a room with a marshmallow. The researcher leaves the room and says that if the
kid waits with eating the marshmallow, he/she will get another marshmallow so will have 2 instead of
one. There are kids that couldn’t resist the temptation and ate the first marshmallow, and there are
kids that waited so that they could have 2 marshmallows.
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 → personality can always vary a bit, but they are quite stable over
longer periods 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
If you get a job that doesn’t fit your personality, it is proved that you will lose after a certain time. You
will make the wrong decisions etc. and you’re just not suitable. That’s why it employers search for the
“perfect” fit for the job.
Research suggests that personality is to a large extend genetic (nature: biological heritage), but life
experiences (nurture) do have an influence, we just don’t know how much. We do know that
personalities are stable.
What matters is that people believe that there personalities can change, because this can change over
time. If you are shy, but saying that you can change that over time, it improves all kinds of things, so
,you’re not really doomed. (incremental theorist thinks in this way, while the entity theorist thinks it’s
impossible to change personality and that people are doomed). There is still research going on how
stable and fixed personality really is.
Individual differences are important for our understanding of human behaviour, cognition, and
affect. Those personality traits might matter when it comes to dealing with some challenges of a given
position.
Contingency approach
One of the challenges right now is that we spend so much time in front of a screen, that our sleep
rhythm is disturb, or our sports. However, this is not a direct influence, but there can be a third variable
that leads to the sleep deprivation or less exercise → personality.
We know that organizations are going to change (stressor) which leads to insomnia (response).
Individuals may respond differently to the same stressor, particularly in weak situations, the
personality = the moderation. People have a need for control.
Job control is the moderator variable (an added third variable). Maybe job demand does not really
matter for job strain if people have high control. What really matters in job demands in predicting job
strain if people have low job control, those are the people at risk. If you want to predict whether high
job demand has an influence on the job strain people experience you have to look at their amount of
job control. People that have high job control experience less job strain with high job demand.
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 procedure for doing the job
to enhance job control. For example, by allowing employees to plan their own work schedules or
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.
I-O psychology provides a set of tools that allow: people to understand, analyse, describe, and predict
behaviour in organizations and practitioners to improve, enhance, or change work behaviours so that
individuals, groups, and the whole organization can achieve their goals.
Key question in employee section: What kind of information actually predicts the individual’s future
job performance?
For every person that is hired, a lot of other people are rejected. This is useful to keep in mind. How
do organizations make decisions and select people that should be a “good fit”?
, Valid employee selection techniques
1. Biographical inventory: covers an applicant’s past behaviour attitudes, preferences, and
values. These things predict current behaviour. Past behaviour is one of the best ways to
predict future behaviour.
a. Advise: shut down social media accounts and google yourself, to see what information
is out there about you. Employers do this to see if a person could be harming a
company’s reputation.
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. Employers can
use this to create scores to find the best candidate. Employers try to create a fair process.
3. Assessment centre and Work Sample Tests: A method of selection and training that involves
a simulated job situation in which candidates deal with actual job problems. Assessment
centre techniques:
a. In-basket technique (giving people a real-world experience what the job is, to see if a
person has the skills needed for the job)
b. Leaderless group discussion (bring all the applicants together, to see how people
respond, who are too dominant, and who are too shy. See the social skills)
c. Fact finding (figuring out who that person is)
d. Oral presentation
e. Dialogue
4. Psychological tests → huge and difficult task. How do we know that our tests are actually any
good and measure what we intend? Different principles that are developed over the years:
a. Standardized: you want one version of the test, so you can make general inferences.
b. Objectivity: it actually measures what you’re trying to measure. This is one of the big
challenges. E.g., there was once a test that had questions for which a particular
cultural background was needed in order to understand the questions.
c. Norming: If we are creating scores, we want those scores to have meanings. If I score
27, is that good is that bad? You want to be able to compare higher and lower scores
in a way that they have meaning.
d. Reliability and Validity: reliability is if people take the test, the test should measure
the same thing everything, regarding that people take the test at different times. Valid
means you measure what you want to measure, it’s not contaminated by other
concepts.
Types of psychological tests
Cognitive abilities
• General intelligence tests
o Intelligence as “g”: involves ability to reason, plan, solve problems, comprehend
complex ideas, and learn from experience.
o Is “g” important at work? = yes
o The more complex a job, the more predictive a test of general intelligence is on
average → a higher job complexity = a higher predictive value of general intelligence
tests. “g” is the best predictor; it is a collection of many specific abilities, which is a
useful predictor for performance (at least for complex jobs).
• Speed vs. power tests
o Speed tests have rigid & demanding time limits
▪ Focus: is the person both fast and accurate
