Stella Barenholz 2017-2018
ORGANIZATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY LECTURES
1. Introduction and attitudes at work .......................................................................................................................2
2. Attitudes and emotions at work ..............................................................................................................................4
3. Psychology of teams .................................................................................................................................................. 11
4. Leadership..................................................................................................................................................................... 15
5. Decision making in organizations ....................................................................................................................... 21
6. Fairness and justice ................................................................................................................................................... 26
7. Ethics in organizations ............................................................................................................................................. 32
8. Creativity and innovation in organizations ..................................................................................................... 38
9. Conflict management ................................................................................................................................................ 43
10. Negotiations ............................................................................................................................................................... 46
11. Organizational culture and psychology .......................................................................................................... 50
12. Communication ........................................................................................................................................................ 52
Exam Questions ............................................................................................................................................................... 54
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,Stella Barenholz 2017-2018
1. INTRODUCTION AND ATTITUDES AT WORK
What is Organizational Psychology?
An organization is a group of people who are regularly working together to achieve some
common goal. For example, Mac Donalds, Tilburg University, or the Dutch football team.
Psychology is the study of human mind and behavior.
So, Organization Psychology is the study of human mind and behavior in an organizational
context. It applies psychological principles, theories and research to the work setting. But, it also
studies factors that influence work (personality, cultural differences) or the influence of work on
non-work behaviors (bad day at work can influence conflicts with family or friends).
There are three levels which you can study:
- If you study on an individual level, you can study motivation, personality, values,
attitudes, emotions, decision making, cognitive processes, etc.
- If you study on a group level, you can study teamwork, negotiation and conflict
management, leadership, etc.
- If you study on an organization level, you can study the culture of the organization,
diversity, change management, etc.
Why is it important to study psychology at work?
We spend a lot of time working in our lives. So, therefore it is important to understand our
working behavior. But, we are working less than we did in the past (see graph).
Working is also important, because we earn money with it.
However, if you ask people “If you have enough money to live
comfortably for the rest of your life, would you stop working?”, 70%
answers “No”. Work also defines who we are, it is a defining
characteristic of how people gauge their value to society, their
family, and themselves. Unemployed individuals are also less
satisfied with their lives.
In the organizational psychology we are looking for causes for performed behavior. This means
we want to find out why people do what they do.
For example: on average, women are less likely to reach top management positions than men. A
solution to this problem could be to use quotas, like 30% quota on female board members in the
Netherlands. But can we know if quotas will be effective without knowing the reason why
women are passed over for promotion?
- Discrimination
- Lack of qualified women on the market
- Women’s own preferences (work-life balance)
- Structural barriers to combine work and family life
Quota’s success thus depends on the reason behind gender inequality.
Management and managers
Organizational Psychology is often about managements and managers. Managers get things done
through other people. The goal of OP is to increase the effectiveness of organizations through the
knowledge about people’s psyche. Increasing organizational performance is also a major role of
management. There have been some studies done on management roles. The first is Henry
Mintzberg’s study (1960). Qualitative interviews were held of 5 executives, and three
management roles were identified:
- Interpersonal roles: Have the leadership roles, being the figurehead, handing out
diploma’s
- Informational roles: Search for information, communicating new policies, being the
spokesperson of the company, present the company to the world
- Decisional roles: Handle disturbances, allocate resources, negotiate with others
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,Stella Barenholz 2017-2018
Later classifications define four other roles:
1. Traditional management: Decision making, planning, and controlling.
2. Communication: Exchanging routine information and processing paperwork.
3. Human resource management: Motivating, disciplining, managing conflict, staffing, and
training.
4. Networking: Socializing, politicking, and interacting with outsiders.
But, what makes managers successful and effective?
What managers do, is almost equally divided in
these four classifications (graph 1). Successful
managers get promoted more quickly and mostly
do networking (graph 2). Effective managers have a
really good performance, their employees are more
satisfied and more committed. They mostly do
communication (graph 3).
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, Stella Barenholz 2017-2018
2. ATTITUDES AND EMOTIONS AT WORK
ATTITUDES AT WORK
Attitudes are evaluative statements about objects, people, or events. These can favorable or
unfavorable. An attitude has three components: cognitive (thinking. evaluation), affective
(emotions, feelings) and behavioral (action).
Before the 1930s there was only a little interest in workers’ satisfaction. If they tried to measure
it, they looked at the payment (more loan = higher satisfaction) or asked the managers instead of
the workers.
The Hawthorne studies first suggested a link between job satisfaction and performance. They
were performed at the Western Electric Company in Ciciero, Illinois in 1927. Researchers
wanted to examine the associations between physical aspects of work (lighting, breaks, length of
the workday) and productivity. They did research and found that productivity always increases
in the experimental group, even if the physical conditions were worse than the control condition.
This is explained by an increased attention to the workers by the researchers, which generated
better attitudes and satisfaction, and thus also performance. So, the Hawthorne effect is the
change in behavior or attitudes due to increased attention from researchers. This study has
contributed a lot of information on the concept of employee attitudes in OP research.
There are some major attitudes in OP research: job satisfaction, work engagement,
organizational commitment, perceived fit, organization cynicism, and so on. The first subjects
are the most important and will be discussed more broadly.
Job satisfaction
Job satisfaction is the evaluation of someone’s job. This is a cognitive attitude, the perception of
the work environment. There are different ways to measure job satisfaction. The first is the
overall satisfaction, a single overall evaluative rating of the job, and it can be measured with only
one item, namely: “Overall, how satisfied are you with your current job?”. A concept that can be
used here is the Faces-Scale. This single item shows a good reliability and validity.
The facet satisfaction can be measured by asking specific/different elements of job satisfaction.
For example, about co-workers, supervisors, payment, tasks, and so on. This measurement is
useful if you want to know more about specific elements (also used in the JDI, Job Descriptive
Index).
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