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WORK & ORGANIZATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY BOOK VU SUMMARY
Vrije Universiteit van Amsterdam
Work and Organizational Psychology, year 2 [VU]
Summary of the book: Landy, F. J., & Conte, J. M. (2019). Work in the 21st century: An
introduction to Industrial and Organizational Psychology.
! Misses only chapter 4: Job analysis and performance, which is relevant to the exam of W&O
2020/2021 on VU
The summary is completely in English, just like the book.
Arbeids- en Organizatiepsychologie, tweede jaar [VU]
Samenvatting van het boek: Landy, F. J., & Conte, J. M. (2019). Work in the 21st century: An
introduction to Industrial and Organizational Psychology.
! Mist alleen chapter 4: Job analysis and performance, die relevant is voor het tentamen van A&O
2020/2021 op VU
De samenvatting is volledig Engels, zoals het boek.
Contents/Inhoud
CHAPTER 1………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………2
CHAPTER 3………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………7
CHAPTER 5………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………15
CHAPTER 6………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………24
CHAPTER 7………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………30
CHAPTER 8………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………38
CHAPTER 10…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….44
CHAPTER 11…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….53
CHAPTER 12…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….55
CHAPTER 13…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….63
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WORK & ORGANIZATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY BOOK VU SUMMARY
CHAPTER 1: INTRO
I-O psychology: personnel psych, organizational psych and human engineering.
Personnel psychology: addresses issues such as recruitment, selection, training,
performance. Assumes that people are consistently different in their attributes and work
behaviors and that info about these differences can be used to predict, maintain, increase
work performance and satisfaction. Goal is to find or fit the best person to the job.
HRM, human resources management: practices such as recruitment, retention, training,
and development of people in order to achieve individual and organizational goals.
Organizational psychology: combines research and ideas from social psych and
organizational behavior. Addresses emotional and motivational side of work. Topics as
attitudes, fairness, motivation, stress, leadership, teams and broader aspects of
organizational and work design.
Issue is the extent to which characteristics of people match the demands of the work.
implications for performance (but indirectly)
Human engineering (or human factors psychology): study of capacities/limitations of
humans with respect to a particular environment. Opposite of personal approach. Human
eng. Is developing an environment that is compatible with characteristics of the worker.
Scientist-practitioner model: model that uses scientific tools and research in the practice of
IO psychology. You actually are active in practicing the science.
(CSR) corporate social responsibility: organizational actions and policies that take into
account stakeholders expectations as well as economic, social and environmental
performance. Things like volunteering, donations, etc.
Welfare-to-work programs: programs that requires individuals to work in return for govt
subsidies.
Telecommute: working from home
Virtual teams: team that has widely dispersed members working together toward a
common goal and linked through computers and other technology.
The workforce has changed:
- Directly or indirectly providing a service rather than just manufacturing goods.
- More teams as opposed to individuals
- More telecommuting and virtual teams
- More diversity
- More support from organization with maintaining family-friendly workplaces.
For younger adults:
- Jobs providing opportunities to use current skills or develop them are most satisfying
- If they don’t have this opportunity there will be a lack of interest in the work
- Usually higher education than their parents, see the world more globally.
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WORK & ORGANIZATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY BOOK VU SUMMARY
When the nature of the student work was related to the student’s major, both school
satisfaction and school performance increased.
Mindless jobs with long hours can do more harm than good for the student.
Two reasons for the difference between what was important in 1917 and what is important
today.
1) Change in the world of work
2) Accumulation of knowledge about work-related behavior in nearly a century since
then.
1876-1930
Wilhelm Wundt: founded one of the first psychological laboratories in 1876
Within 10 years, he had established a thriving graduate training and research enterprise.
He trained Munsterberg and Cattell.
Munsterberg became the director of the psychological laboratories at Harvard University.
He didn’t devote any value to the application of psychology to the workplace.
Soon, he saw the potential to address many practical problems. He was the first to measure
abilities in workers and tie those abilities to performance. He applied rudimentary statistics
to analyze the results of his studies. He also wrote the first I-O psychology textbook.
Cattell was one of the first to realize the importance of differences among individuals as a
way of predicting their behavior. Wundt was more interested in general laws than
differences among participants.
Walter Scott and Walter Bingham developed methods for selecting and training sales
personnel. They helped with the testing and placement of more than a million army recruits.
They adapted a well-known intelligence test; Stanford-Binet test. It is designed for testing
one individual at a time but was adapted to make it suitable for mass group testing.
This form of test was called the Army Alpha.
After the war the private industry set out to emulate the successful testing of army
personnel and mental ability testing became commonplace in the work setting.
Lillian Gilbreth received the first PhD in industrial psychology.
Scientific management: a movement based on principles developed by Frederick Taylor,
who suggested there was one best and most efficient way to perform various jobs.
It was based on the principles of time and motion study: studies that broke every action
down into its constituent parts, timed those movements with a stopwatch and developed
new and more efficient movements that would reduce fatigue and increase productivity.
Lillian became a well-known human engineering practitioner and manager consultant.
1930-1964
Elton Mayo: began studying the emotions of workers, not their efficiency. Interested in the
possibility that work caused workers to act in pathological ways.
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WORK & ORGANIZATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY BOOK VU SUMMARY
Revery obsession: mental state that resulted from the mind-numbing, repetitive and
difficult work that characterized factories. Because workers’ mind could wander during
physical labor, various paranoid thoughts might arise.
Hawthorne studies: research done at the Hawthorne, Illinois, plant that began as an
attempt to increase productivity by manipulating lighting, rest breaks, and work hours. This
research showed the important tole that workers’ attitudes played in productivity.
Hawthorne effect: the change in behavior that results from research paying attention to the
workers.
Until the Hawthorne studies, it was accepted that the only significant motivator of effort
was money and that the environment, rather than the person, was of primary importance.
Results of these studies was the Human Relations Movement, which focused on work
attitudes and the newly discovered emotional world of the worker. Studies of job
satisfaction more common.
The war settled human engineering (less accidents) as a subarea of industrial psychology.
The war also brought renewed interest in ability testing as well as the introduction of the
assessment center.
Post-war times were a boom for industry, with much testing. But there was also a boom in
labor unrest (workers were less willing to passively accept the decisions of organizations or
their leaders).
Civil Rights Act of 1964: federal legislation that prohibits employment discrimination on the
basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin, which define ‘protected groups’.
Prohibits not only intentional discrimination but also practices that have the unintentional
effect of discriminating against individuals because of their race, color, national origin,
religion or sex.
Title VII: requires employers to justify the use of tests for selection.
If test can’t be shown to be related to job performance and a protected group tends to
score lower on it, resulting in fewer offers of employment, it might be considered illegal.
The present
American Psychological Association: major professional organization for psychologists of all
kinds in the United States.
Major shift in APA members between 1985 to 2003, primarily in gender. From 15 to 30
percent women.
The challenges to IO Psychology in the 21st Century
- Relevancy: needing to study the problems of today
- Useful: need to add value
- Thinking bigger
- Needs to be grounded in the scientific method.
Research of IO psychologists fall into one of four categories
1. Junk science: fascinating topic bad research
2. Pragmatic science: important topic and well-designed
