Chapter 1 – people at work
1.1 – what we talk about when we talk about work psychology
• Work refers to an “activity in which one exerts strengths or faculties to do or perform
something; sustained physical or mental effort to overcome obstacles and achieve an
objective or result; the labour, task or duty that is one’s accustomed means of livelihood; a
specific task, duty, function, or assignment often being part or phase of some larger activity.”
More formally work can be define as a set of coordinated and goal-directed activities that are
conducted in exchange for something else.
- Goal-directed activities, these are previously specified results
- Coordinated activities, workers do not act randomly
- In exchange for something else, physical, emotional and mental effort is compensated in
some way.
• Psychology refers to people’s behavior, motivations, thoughts and emotions related to a
particular topic.
• Worker psychologists aim to simultaneously maximize work performance and worker health
and well-being. In that sense they aim to promote sustainable performance
• Organizational psychology is about the context in which specific activities are conducted
• Personnel psychology is about the characteristics of the person conducting a particular work
task or selecting or hiring new staff.
• Work psychology is about the way workers’ behaviours, motivations, thoughts, emotions,
health and well-being relate to each other, and about ways to influence these concepts
1.4 – the roots of work psychology
• Taylorism (1911): searching for maximal efficiency of the working process (“the one best
way”)
- Simplifying tasks
- Examining the best way to conduct these tasks
- Training
- Separating the planning of tasks from their execution
- Selecting workers
• Human relations: Hawthorne experiment; Maslow motivation theory; Herzberg 2-factor
theory.
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 tasks
that must be performed by employees. In general, 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 aim of work-psychological task analysis is to lead to a more effective integration of the
human factor into system designs and operations via task (re)design in order to optimize
human performance and safety
• Different methods and techniques are used by work psychologists
- Behaviour description approach: focus is on actual behaviours employees display in
executing the task.
- Behaviour requirements approach: focuses on the actual behaviours should display to
perform the task in a successful way.
- Ability requirements approach: tasks are analysed in terms of employees’ abilities,
knowledge skills and personal characteristics
- Task characteristics approach: focus is to analyse the objective characteristics of a task,
independent from the behavior that is actually displayed or that should be displayed or
the abilities needed.
• Task-analysis techniques can be divided in at least three broad categories: data-collection
techniques, task-representation techniques and task-simulation techniques.
,Topic 1
Chapter 3 – The Models that Made Job Design
3.1 Background of Job Design
• Job design is concerned with the activities of workers, and relates to the duties and tasks
required to perform their work, and how those tasks and duties are structured and scheduled.
• Scientific management was based on a simple view of human motivation: workers were
rewarded on the basis of how many times they completed simplified tasks.
• Modern classics are linked by a concern with making jobs somehow more involving, satisfying
and/or health promoting (i.e. making good jobs) and enhancing job performance through
improving the quality of working life.
3.2 The Job Characteristics Model
• The JCM is concerned with developing jobs that are motivating, satisfying and performed well.
This model concentrates on five key features or characteristics of work:
- Skill variety (SV): jobs with more skill variety require workers to use a range of skills.
- Task identity (TI): jobs with task identity allow the worker to produce or deliver an
identifiable, complete outcome.
- Task significance (TS): more significant jobs have an impact on other people, both inside
and outside the organisation.
- Autonomy (AU): jobs with more autonomy allow the worker to make decisions concerning
how to perform tasks, when and where to perform tasks, and even how success in
performing work tasks is evaluated.
- Feedback from the job (FB): jobs that provide feedback given an indication of how well the
worker is performing.
• Hackman and Oldham consider that these five job characteristics produce three critical
psychological states: experienced meaningfulness of work, experienced responsibility for the
outcomes of work and knowledge of the results of work activities.
• The motivating potential of a job can be given by the following equation:
• Individual difference is known as growth need strength and is the extent to which people have
a need to develop and grow psychologically.
3.3 The Demand-Control-Support Model
• The DCSM is primarily concerned with health, but it does have something to say about work
performance. Originally the model had just two components, job demands and decision
latitude.
, - Jobs that are low on job demands and low on
decision latitude are called passive jobs.
- Jobs that are high on job demands but low on
decision latitude are called high-strain jobs.
- Jobs that are low on job demands but high on
decision latitude are called low-strain jobs.
- Jobst that are high on job demands and high
on decision latitude are called active jobs.
• Jobs can also be labelled iso-strain jobs, which are
low on support and job control but high on job
demands. Iso-strain jobs are considered to be particularly harmful to health.
• In the DSCM, the three key job characteristics of job demands, job control and workplace
social support work in combination to create healthy (and productive work). The DCSM has
two key hypotheses: the strain hypothesis and the active learning hypothesis.
- The strain hypothesis indicates that job control and social support can offset the
detrimental effects of job demands on health. Job control and social support buffer the
adverse impact of job demands on psychological and physical health.
- In the active learning hypothesis, solving problems leads to workers learning how to solve
problems faster and more effectively, to build skills levels and so to become more
productive.
3.4 The Vitamin Model
• The Vitamin Model (VM) indicates that some job
characteristics can be harmful if present at levels that
are too high or too low. The VM focuses on job-
related mental health and psychological well-being.
• In the VM, mental health is conceptualised in terms of
job-related affective well-being along three
dimensions. Affective well-being refers to whether we
tend to experience more pleasant emotional states or
more negative emotional states. The three dimensions are displeasure-to-pleasure, anxiety-
to-comfort and depression-to-enthusiasm.
• Warr (who defined the job characteristics) refers to job demands as externally generated goals
– goals that others in an organisation or customers assign to workers to attain.
• Physical security, availability of money, valued social position, supportive supervision, career
outlook and equity are supposed to follow a monotonic pattern: the higher the availability of
such job characteristic, the higher the level of mental health will tend to be.
• Three categories of individual characteristics are viewed as possible moderators of the effects
of job characteristics on mental health: values, abilities, and baseline mental health.
, 3.5 The Effort-Reward Imbalance Model
• The Effort-Reward Imbalance (ERI) Model has a more sociological focus, yet has still been
influential in how psychologists think of the relation between work and the experience of
work. The model attempts to tie together sociological factors concerned with labour markets
and employment, psychological factors
concerned with differences between individuals
and biological factors concerned with health.
• Rewards are distributed to employees in three
different ways: money, esteem and
security/career opportunities.
• Effort is evaluated as two components: extrinsic
effort or job demands and intrinsic effort or
overcommitment. Overcommitment reflects
ambition in combination with a need for
approval and esteem.
3.6 Contemporary Socio-Technical Systems Thinking
• STST can be described as a way of thinking about the design of work and provides an
organising framework to approach problems, rather than a hard and fast theory or model.
STST suggests that systems work at their best when social and technical aspects are jointly
optimised. Principles used to guide the design of modern work groups:
- Control of variance at source: this design principle recommends that workers be given the
control, opportunity and training to respond to problems as they occur.
- End-user engagement: this principle has increased in prominence and extends the notion
of employee autonomy.
- Minimal specification: this principle recommends that job roles and tasks, and the
allocation of tasks to individuals do not have to be overly specified and prescribed.
- Support congruence: this suggests that the social structures within an organisation need to
reflect and reinforce the behaviours that job design is seeking to promote.
- Multi-skilled or multi-functional: this principle recommends that work roles and teams
provide enlarged roles, with multiple tasks, allowing skills to be passed along organically.
- Self-management: this principle is implicit in STST, with the recommendation that in
return for workers being given the skills, experience and equipment to perform tasks, they
should also be made responsible for the work they perform.
• The most successful application of STST in job deign has been the introduction of semi-
autonomous work groups (SAWGs). SAWGs typically involve the creation of self-managing
work groups that are able to set and organise their own work.
Chapter 4 – Current Theoretical Perspectives in Work Psychology
4.1 Meta-theoretical Issues regarding Theoretical Model Development and Evaluation
• The foundation of professional knowledge in any scientific area is theory. Theory provides a
more systematic and complete picture for real practice than day-to-day knowledge.
• To understand theory development in work
psychology we should discuss the philosophical
origin of theories, so-called meta-theory.
- The highest level of meta-theory is the meta-
paradigm. Its focus is on broad a paradigmatic
issue related to theory in general.
- The second level of theory development is that
of grand theories. Grand theories are highly
abstract and are proposed to give a broad perspective on research area like psychology.
