Summary Work and Health Psychology
An introduction to Contemporary Work Psychology (Peeters, M. C. W., De Jonge, J., & Taris, T. W., 2014)
Chapter 1: Introduction
1.1. What we talk about when we talk about work psychology
Work can be defined as “a set of coordinated and goal-directed activities that are conducted in exchange for something
else, usually some form of monetary reward.” There are three key elements:
1. Work consists of a set of goal-directed activities; actions at work are intended to bring about a particular previously
specified result. The goal of work is to produce a good or to deliver a particular service.
2. Work consists of a set of coordinated activities; to achieve the intended goal, workers do not act randomly.
Successful task accomplishment often requires that workers execute a series of interrelated activities following
work routines, procedures and guidelines, and often using tools and machinery especially devised to bring about
the intended goal. Without coordination, the intended goal will be difficult to achieve, if it is achieved at all.
3. The activities involved in working require some degree of physical, emotional and/or mental effort, and this effort
is usually compensated in some way; work is conducted in exchange for something else.
Psychology refers to people’s behaviour, motivations, thoughts and emotions related to a particular topic. Work
psychologists are not only interested in pushing workers’ performance to the limit, but they are also interested in
maximizing worker health and well-being. This interest partly follows from the idea that happy, satisfied workers are
presumed to be productive workers. In this view maximizing well-being is the same as maximizing work performance.
Work psychologists are not solely there for the benefit of organizations or employers, but surely also for the benefit of
workers. Focus on employee health and well-being may also be beneficial for organizations. Work can have adverse effects
on employee health and well-being. Since many organizations frequently face difficulties in finding suitably trained
personnel, it is important to them that their current staff remain healthy and motivated. Contemporary work psychology
aims to promote what might be called sustainable performance, maximizing work performance as well as worker health
and well-being.
Work psychology is the way workers’ behaviours, motivations, thoughts, emotions, health and well-being relate to each
other, and about ways to influence these concepts. Work psychology is not about the context in which these activities are
conducted (organizational psychology). Work psychology is not about the characteristics of the person conducting a
particular work task or selecting or hiring new staff (personnel psychology). Work psychology is about the tasks that are
carried out at work; the specific activities that are conducted to achieve a particular goal.
1.2. Who do we mean when we talk about workers?
The world labour force comprises people aged 15 and older who meet the International Labour Organization (ILO)
definition of the economically active population: all people who supply labour to produce goods and services during a
specified period. It includes both the employed and the unemployed. Homemakers and other unpaid caregivers and
workers in informal sector are excluded. Out of a world population of more than 7 billion people, 3 billion are employed
and 205 million are unemployed. When considering international labour statistics, a distinction is generally made between
three different work sectors:
1. Agriculture: forestry, hunting and fishing.
2. Industry: manufacturing, mining and construction.
3. Services: transportation, communication, public utilities, trade, finance, public administration, private household
services and miscellaneous other services.
The number of people working in the service sector is growing fast. Worldwide the agricultural sector is still the second
largest source of employment after services.
One of the major drawbacks of contemporary work psychology is its narrow scope. Work psychological research is
predominantly conducted in Western-oriented economies. Even within the countries where work psychology is
flourishing, there is an inclination to focus on white-collar, professional and middle to highly educated employees working
in large organizations. These groups are easier to gain access to, response rates are higher, and researchers are spared
the difficulties of translating instruments and establishing their cultural equivalence. As a result, with some exceptions,
there is comparatively little research on the lower segment of the labour market and on ethnic/racial minorities.
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,1.3. The meaning of working
Research on what working means to people has found that people do not just work for money, but that work serves many
other functions as well. Compare the effects of having a job to those of not having a job to examine the functions of
working. Research comparing the quality of life of unemployed and employed people shows that the latter are usually
considerably happier than the former. For example, levels of suicide, mortality, long term illness, etc. tend to be higher
among unemployed than employed people, whereas for the first group lower levels of life satisfactions and general health
have been found. The relation between unemployment and health runs both ways: whereas lack of health increases the
chances of becoming unemployed, unemployment also contributes to the emergence of health problems.
The Relative Deprivation Model from Marie Jahoda’s (1982) explains why being unemployed yields negative
consequences. Jahoda concluded that apart from providing an income, having employment also provides five classes of
social benefits: time structure, opportunities for social contact, sharing of a common purpose, social identity or status, and
regular activity. Without work, people are deprived of all five benefits, accounting for many of the adverse consequences
of unemployment for health and well-being. Matt Groening’s (1987) famous dictum: ‘work is hell – but it beats
unemployment’.
1.4. The roots of work psychology
Contemporary work psychology is concerned with promoting sustainable performance, that is, stimulating high work
performance as well as maintaining (and even enhancing) worker health and well-being. When researchers and
practitioners started to study work and organizations systematically in the middle of the 19th century, the emphasis was
on the best way of organizing work and the work organization, and on the socio-political implications of this.
Systematic thinking about the organization of work
Far before this era, scholars had already considered how particular tasks should be conducted. For example, the
Hippocratic collection provided Greek doctors with detailed guidelines on how particular types of complaints were to be
treated and is basically a collection of routines and guidelines prescribing how the tasks of a medical doctor should be
accomplished. Another early example of systematic thinking is seen in the Roman army, which was organized according
to simple and clear rules. The Roman army used several military manuals describing how the various parts of the army
could operate in specific situations. A more scientific (i.e., systematic, evidence-based) approach to examining work and
its effects and antecedents only emerged much later, after the Middle Ages had ended.
The birth of occupational medicine
The scientific study of work, worker health and well-being, and work performance can be traced back to the 1500s, when
Georg Bauer (Agricola) published De Re Metallica (On metal matters), an influential book on the art and science of mining.
Being the town physician in Chemnitz, Saxony and Agricola not only discussed the technical details of mine operation, but
also paid attention to miners and their typical diseases. He recommended wearing personal protective clothing.
Work psychology, 1850-1930
The industrial revolution of the 1750-1850s marked a transition towards new manufacturing processes, in that production
processes were increasingly mechanized and industrialized. The working conditions in the mills and factories were harsh,
working days were long and pay was low. From a work-psychological perspective, the nature of the tasks conducted in
this new era was different from the pre-industrial (or agrarian) time preceding it. The emergence of the industrial economy
meant that young workers entering the labour market could seek out, occupy and identify with jobs that were completely
different from the jobs that their fathers and mothers could choose from. However, this also implied that many young
people struggled to find a career that suited their interests, talents and accomplishments. Moreover, the tasks in the
factories were characterized by a high level of division of labour and were usually simple, repetitive and boring, requiring
few skills. The important issues in this era therefore became how can workers be motivated to work hard and how can
they be made more productive? The psychotechnics or applied psychology promised to provide answers to these issues.
Its founders attempted to apply psychological insights, obtained through empirical research and rigid measurement, to
the work environment. Münsterberg and Stern worked in the field of vocational psychology – the branch of personnel
psychology that focuses on the link between workers’ characteristics and job requirements, assuming that worker well-
being and productivity are optimal when there is a good match between the job and the worker.
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,Scientific management
Productivity could also be optimized by not focusing on the match between the worker and the task, but by concentrating
on the task itself, especially by simplifying it to such a degree that any worker would be able to do it. This idea was worked
out by Frederick Taylor (1856-1915), the founder of the scientific management approach (Taylorism). He sought to
maximize industrial efficiency and his ideas were highly influential until at least the 1950s. His ideas were also controversial
because they rested on two assumptions; workers are lazy and stupid. Taylor proposed to counter the stupidity issue by:
1. Simplifying tasks using scientific methods: complicated tasks were broken down into smaller and simpler subtasks.
2. Examining the best way to conduct these tasks: for each task there is one best way to accomplish this task and
that any other approach is suboptimal and should therefore be discouraged.
3. Training workers in the ‘one best way’ to conduct their simplified task so that even relatively unskilled (or dumb)
workers could be trained to perform the task fast and efficiently, resulting in higher productivity.
4. Separating the planning of tasks from their execution: during the execution of their tasks workers should not think
about how they should conduct the tasks, but instead this should be decided for them by their supervisors.
5. Selecting workers for particular tasks: some tasks would involve great strength, other tasks require high levels of
precision, and so forth, meaning that not all workers were equally well-suited for all tasks.
The laziness issue was addressed by introducing high levels of control and supervision, as well as by introducing pay-for-
performance systems (you work harder, you get paid more, you work slower, you get fired). Taylorism may be construed
as being the start of contemporary work science, with standardization and efficiency as its core concepts.
Work psychology, 1930 – present
The heyday of Taylorism was over by the middle of the 1930s. Scientific management was superseded by the human
relations movement
Human relations movement
Rather than fitting the worker to the job, 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 company Western Electric had adopted the principles of
scientific management in the 1900s, and in the 1920s the company had become aware of its drawbacks for employee
well-being and motivation. Western Electric introduced pensions, sick pay and stock purchase plans, and there was a range
of educational and recreational programmes for its employees. They executed different studies (Hawthorne), the most
important finding of all was in the general area of teamwork and cooperation.
Contemporary work psychology
Work psychology as it is today, aims to improve productivity by optimizing the organization of work, work methods, and
job characteristics, but at the same time strives towards maximization of worker health and well-being. it is assuming that
sustainable work performance can only be achieved if task requirements, worker characteristics and worker health and
well-being are all taken into account.
1.5. The times, they are A-changin’
Most job design theories have been developed in the mid-twentieth century when workers were still predominantly
working in large-scale manufacturing plants. After that time, things kept on changing.
The changing nature of work
Since the mid-1970s the developed economies have witnessed a vast increase in service sector working and a
simultaneous decline in the number of employees working in manufacturing. Another rapidly growing segment of the
workforce is that of the ‘knowledge worker’ a highly educated employee who applies theoretical and analytical knowledge
to developing new products and services. Knowledge work is typically characterized by a high degree of cognitive load, a
term which is used in cognitive psychology to illustrate the load or effort related to the executive control of the working
memory. In knowledge work the level of information processing is high in order to produce intellectual performances.
The changing workforce
About 50 years ago the demographic features of most work organizations were homogeneous. Many employees shared
a similar ethnic background, were male and worked for the same employer throughout their working lives. Nowadays
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, managers are confronted with a workforce that is more diverse in terms of gender, age, ethnicity, organizational tenure,
educational background and so on.
The changing flexibility of working
Many organizations have started to redesign their approach to work. Central is the fact that employees have high work
flexibility. Such a flexible work design, also referred to as ‘new ways of working’ (NWW), is characterized by:
1. Flexibility in the timing of work: employees have more autonomy in deciding when they work.
2. Flexibility in the place of work: employees can work from home, at the office or on the train etc.
3. Facilitation of new media technologies, such as smartphones and videoconferencing.
NWW can be beneficial for employees and their families if boundaries to separate work and family life are created.
The changing organization
Organizations themselves have also undergone dramatic changes. Two major trends are mainly responsible for the
ongoing changes in organizations:
1. Globalization, or commerce without borders, which, along with the interdependence of business operations in
different locations, changes the markets and environments in which organizations have to operate, thereby
creating a global economy with both opportunities and threats.
2. ICT, which is redefining how, where and when work is performed.
The changing psychological contract
Whereas once it was considered normal for employees to spend their entire working career with one or two companies,
changed notions of careers prescribe now that employees are expected to move between organizations much more often.
Education and training throughout a career have become more common, which improves the employability of an
employee. The psychological contract – what employees and employers want and expect from each other – has changed
dramatically in recent years. Characteristics such as stability, permanent employment, predictability and mutual respect
are out. Instead, the new features of self-regulation, flexibility and employability are required. The old psychological
contract is paving the way for idiosyncratic deals (‘i-deals’), where individual employees negotiate with an employer to
adapt work arrangements to better meet their personal needs.
Altogether these changes have led to what may be called in developed countries the intensification of work. Intensification
refers to increasing work hours and work pressure, the need for lifelong learning and the ability and willingness to
continuously change the type of work one does.
1.6. The crucial role of task analysis in contemporary work psychology
Task analysis is the common name given to any process that identifies and examines the (demanding) tasks that must be
performed by employees. Task analysis is a fundamental approach which assists in achieving higher performance and
safety standards.
Task analysis within work psychology
Task analysis is used in different disciplines, such as ergonomics, design studies, engineering, operations and psychology,
to describe, analyse and evaluate human-human and human-machine interactions in systems. It can be defined as the
study of what an employee (or team) is required to do, in terms of actions and/or processes, to achieve a system goal. The
idea is that task analysis provides the user with a ‘blueprint’ of human involvement in a system. This makes it easier to
describe how activities fit together and to evaluate the design implications. The resulting information can be used for
personnel selection, training, task design etc. Within the context of work psychology, task analysis can be considered as a
methodology in which data will be collected, ranked and evaluated to say something about the nature of the task, that is,
its psychologically relevant characteristics. The aim of work-psychological task analysis is to lead to a more efficient and
effective integration of the human factor into system designs and operations via task (re)design in order to optimize
human performance and safety.
Task-analysis methods and techniques
A task-analysis method is based on theoretical model that indicates which task characteristics will be analysed. In the
literature, all methods can be categorized using four different approaches:
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