An Introduction to Contemporary Work Psychology
Peeters, M. C. W., De Jonge, J., & Taris, T. W. (2014)
Book summary
Index:
Chapter 1 – Introduction: People at work p. 2-7
Chapter 3 – The models that made job design p. 7-13
Chapter 4 – Current theoretical perspectives in work psychology p. 13-18
Chapter 5 – Quantitative job demands p. 18-24
Chapter 6 – Qualitative demands at work p. 24-30
Chapter 7 – Job control and social aspects of work p. 30-36
Chapter 8 – Recovery from demanding work hours p. 36-40
Chapter 10 – Individual characteristics and work-related outcomes p. 41-45
Chapter 11 – Work-family interaction p. 45-51
Chapter 12 – Burnout, boredom and engagement in the workplace p. 51-59
Chapter 13 – Job satisfaction, motivation and performance p. 59-62
Chapter 14 – Safety at work p. 62-66
Chapter 15 – Sickness absence and sickness presence p. 66-71
Chapter 16 – Managing psychosocial risks in the workplace: p. 71-75
Prevention and intervention
Chapter 17 – Job crafting p. 75-78
Chapter 19 – Positive interventions: From prevention to amplification p. 78-83
1
,Chapter 1 Introduction
Learning goals for this chapter
Describe the key elements of work.
Explain what work psychology is about and what is meant by contemporary work
psychology.
Specify some main features of the world’s labour force.
Understand the selection bias in contemporary work psychology.
Understand what working means to workers.
Summarize the history of work psychology.
Explain five important changes in the world of work.
Explain the crucial role of task analysis in contemporary work psychology.
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 monetary rewards)’. Three key elements in this
definition:
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. Workers execute a series of interrelated activities following work
routines, procedures and guidelines and using tools and machinery especially devised
to bring about the intended goal.
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. That is, work is
conducted in exchange for something else.
Work psychologists are not only interested in pushing worker’s performance to their upper
limit. At present many work psychologists are primarily interested in maximizing worker
health and well-being (this used to be different in the early days of work psychology).
Contemporary work psychology aims to promote what might be called sustainable
performance, maximizing work performance as well as worker health and well-being.
This book is about work psychology = 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 about the tasks that are carried out at work, that is, the specific
activities that are conducted to achieve a particular goal. We focus on work psychology (=
psychological study of work activities), but other related fields are:
Organizational psychology is about the context in which the activities are conducted
by workers (organization, work team, leadership).
Personnel psychology is about the characteristics of the person conducting a particular
work task (gender, age, ethnicity, education, experience, personality), and also about
selecting or hiring new staff.
1.2 Who do we mean when we talk about workers?
The world’s workforce
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 for the production of goods and services during a specified period’. It includes
2
,both the employed and the unemployed. Homemakers and other unpaid caregivers and
workers in the informal sector are excluded. Out of a world population of 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:
− Agriculture: forestry, hunting and fishing.
− Industry: manufacturing, mining and construction.
− Services: transportation, communication, public utilities, trade, finance, public
administration, and private household services.
Selection bias in contemporary work psychology
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. There is comparatively little research on the lower segment of the labour
market and on ethnic/racial minorities.
The consequences of the choice to focus mainly on specific groups in specific parts of the
world:
It limits our ability to generalize findings and hampers the development of adequate
theory by ignoring important issues that may be especially pertinent for vulnerable
workers in less developed regions.
Because of the restricted ranges in our critical variables, we may not appreciate the
full impact that work has on the lives of workers around the world and their families.
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. One way of examining the functions of
working is to compare the quality of life of unemployed versus employed people, which
shows that the latter are usually considerably happier than the former. 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 reason why being unemployed yields negative consequences is explained by Marie
Jahoda’s (1982) Relative Deprivation Model. She 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.
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 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.
3
, Systematic thinking about the organization of work
A long time ago, scholars had already considered how particular tasks should be conducted.
For example, the Hippocratic collection (ancient Greek medical knowledge) provided Greek
doctors with detailed guidelines on how types of complaints were to be treated, and is
basically a collection of routines and guidelines. Another early example of systematic
thinking is seen in the Roman army, which was organized according to simple and clear rules.
As these examples illustrate, early work on how particular tasks should be conducted largely
rested on common sense, moral axioms, tradition, long-standing practices and laymen’s
psychological insights. A more scientific approach (i.e. systematic, evidence-based) to
examining work and its effects and antecedents only emerged much later, after the middle
ages has 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. He discussed technical details
of mine operation, but also paid attention to miners and their typical diseases.
Agricola’s work was followed up by Bernardino Ramazzini, who wrote a seminal book on the
typical diseases encountered by workers in 52 occupations. These works can be considered
the starting point for the discipline now known as occupational medicine.
Work psychology; 1850-1930
The industrial revolution of the 1750s - 1850s marked a transition towards new
manufacturing processes, in that production processes were increasingly mechanized and
industrialized (i.e. production changed from piece-by-piece to mass production). These
changes reformed the economic system into that of industrial capitalism. Working people
found increased opportunities for employment in the new mills and factories, leading to
increased urbanization. However, the working conditions in the mills and factories were
harsh, working days were long and pay was low.
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 parents did. 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 became; how can
workers be motivated to work hard and how can they be made more productive?
Psychotechnics or applied psychology promised answers to these issues. Münsterberg and
Stern are its founders and 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.
Productivity could also be optimized by not focusing on the match between the worker and
the task, but rather 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,
the founder of the scientific management approach (or Taylorism). He sought to maximize
4
