A Handbook of Work and Organizational Psychology

Volume 2: Work Psychology

Charles J. De Wolff, P J D Drenth, Thierry Henk, Charles,De,Wolff, P J D Drenth, THIERRY HENK

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134837694
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Work Psychology, the second volume of the Handbook of Work and Organizational Psychology, concentrates on issues related to the direct relationship between the worker and the organization and on his or her task or function. This could be termed the classical tradition of work psychology, including human factors, psychology and ergonomics. This volume provides a comprehensive update on new issues and studies in this core area. Subjects like safety, occupational stress, workload and absenteeism due to sickness are tackled. Chapters discuss particular types of workers on whom psychologists have focused attention more recently: the older worker, the unemployed, and the foreign worker. Moving away somewhat from the 'micro-world' of the individual worker, models of human economic behaviour and the development of social indicator systems are also explored.

1
Introduction

Pieter J.D. Drenth

As was indicated in the general introduction given in Volume 1 each of the following three volumes has its own accent. The emphasis of this first volume is on the micro-world of the worker and his or her task. It comprises the many chapters from the classical tradition of work psychology, including human factors psychology or, as it is sometimes called, ergonomics. The history of “work psychology” goes back about a hundred years. In fact, it was the main area of research of the first pioneers in applied industrial psychology, such as Miinsterberg, Viteles, Weimar, Lahy and others. Numerous studies have been carried out since the early beginning, and each year hundreds of articles and books have contributed to a substantial body of knowledge and a well established tradition in this particular area.

This is not to say that no new issues have emerged and that no new studies are or can be undertaken. As an example the more recent interest in welfare, health and safety in work organizations can be mentioned. New and stricter laws and regulations on health and safety conditions at the workplace have stimulated work and organization psychologists in many countries to (re)study their causes and conditions, to provide training and to develop measurement devices in the field of occupational health and welfare. Subjects like safety, occupational stress, workload and sickness absence, therefore, are given a predominant place in this volume. Likewise, specific attention will be given to problems in work organizations and the labour market which have received a lot of attention of the work psychologists lately and which will continue to do so in the near future. One can think of issues related to work and aging, the problems of ethnic diversity and the consequences of the loss of work and unemployment.

Meijman and Mulder open this volume with a chapter on psychological aspects of workload. In their contribution they develop a conceptual outline of the psychological study of workload in which two traditions are combined; the study of mental load and the study of physical load. In the former the emphasis is on the effects of the nature and level of information load on task performance, and the latter focuses on the effects of energetical and biomechanical processes on task performance and health.

In the third chapter Sanders illustrates how ergonomics distinguishes itself from work and organizational psychology in general, in having different roots (psychonomics, work physiology and engineering as opposed to psychometrics, personality and social psychology) on the one hand, but that it is an indispensable chapter in work and organizational psychology on the other. Too often human factors are disregarded in the design of machines, tools and work systems, which causes (sometimes serious) errors and accidents. Further integration of the ergonomic tradition in work psychology will certainly lead to an enrichment of this domain of psychology.

In a chapter on industrial safety Wagenaar shows that this is not simply determined by the use of safe equipment, and is not merely the corollary of low accident statistics. Whilst accidents usually occur on the shop floor, this is not the only level at which they must be prevented. Safety is the consequence of a good safety policy, and practicably effective measures to this end should be initiated at the management level. Information about the effectiveness of such measures is only gained on the shop floor, however, where indications of latent faults become discernible. Safety is therefore the responsibility of every employee in the organization.

During recent decades an increasing desire, or even need, for far-reaching changes in the arrangement of working hours has arisen. This concerns not so much shorter hours—the source of much social conflict in the past—but rather different timetabling and greater flexibility. The question concerns not so much the employee’s health (the traditional argument), but rather his or her need for free time and a changing work ethos. Thierry and Jansen provide an overview of the various different working arrangements, such as flexible hours, intensive working weeks, part-time work and temporary contracts, as well as different types of shift work. Both actual arrangements and the results of research into their effects are considered.

Allegro and Veerman provide an approach to sickness absence and long-term inability to work from a social-scientific perspective. In this respect, avoidable absenteeism—in which there is no direct and unambiguous question of unfitness for work—is of especial interest.

Although abseentecism itself is easy to measure, it is a complex phenomenon which encompasses many factors at different levels: the narrow (personal circumstances), the intermediate (workplace circumstances and social factors) and the broad (legislation and social protection). Authors offer an explanatory framework of thinking, which also has practical relevance in terms of a possible preventive, threshold-raising and curative policy.

Buunk, De Jonge, Ybema and De Wolff highlight a long-recognized problem: the negative effects of the work situation upon health. Only during the past few decades has the term “health” been expanded to encompass mental health, and the influence of the psychosocial aspects of the working environment begun to be considered. The principal idea in this respect is stress. Given how central work is in many people’s lives, the circumstances of and events at their work have the potential to create strongly negative emotions. The perspective offered in this chapter is socio-psychological, emphasizing the social factors involved in the development and processing of negative emotions which may arise from stress at work.

In the next three chapters three specific groups of employees are described who have deserved greater attention from psychologists recently. The first of these is the older worker, which is given attention in a contribution by Boerlijst, Munnichs and Van der Heijden. Older employees are a vulnerable group where prejudice associates with falling productivity, inflexibility and health problems. Using the literature and their own research, the authors discuss whether these and other widely held opinions about older workers are justified, whether any other—positive—qualities counteract them, and in what ways the mobility and employment of older employees can be encouraged. In this respect, the importance of social support from leaders and colleagues is pointed out. The need for more longitudinal career research is also underlined.

In the next chapter Fryer provides an analysis of the psychological consequences of a phenomenon which has unfortunately become much more common in recent years: unemployment. The literature on this subject specifies a large number of physical and psychological complaints, including anxiety, depression, passivity, isolation, and a loss of self-esteem and hope, as well as various health problems. The author considers the extent to which empirical findings support these supposed consequences. His critical analysis shows that unemployment is indeed the cause of many of the psychological changes cited, although there are great differences between individuals as regards their experiences of and the consequences of unemployment.

Evers and Van der Flier discuss the position of a third specific group in work organizations: foreign workers, often including large numbers of refugees, immigrants and ethnic minorities. The position of this category on the labour market in most Western countries is quite unfavourable: high unemployment, low level of education and training, high turnover, and specific cultural and attitudinal traditions that hinder an easy and smooth integration in the local work culture. Authors give a comprehensive overview of the various problems related to the proper assessment of the capacities and skills of these “allochthonous” workers, and try to indicate ways to achieve an optimal balance between economic efficacy and a fair treatment of this vulnerable category of personnel.

The last two chapters in this volume deal with two domains that are somewhat distinct from, but at the same time conceptually closely linked to work psychology. The first deals with human economic behaviour. Poiesz convincingly shows that economic psychology is to be distinguished from economics. Both focus upon economic phenomena; however, the psychologist does so considering individual behaviour as their determinant, whereas the economist considers an “aggregated” level: economic phenomena and processes on a large scale. In this contribution, it is shown that—with their different perspectives—organizational and economic psychologists are clearly complementary.

In Chapter 12 Zanders pays attention to a movement that is strongly based on work psychological insights, namely the attempt to describe and to evaluate large and complex systems, such as modern companies, in terms of social and human indicators. Traditionally these descriptions and evaluations were made using economic models. During the 1960s and 1970s, however, a demand arose for more than simple economic information. This was the beginning of the development of social indicator systems. A variety of models and parameters, built upon insights from social work psychology, were developed. Zanders provides an overview of the nature and evaluative possibilities of such systems, and the way they have been applied in social policy making.

Together the 12 chapters in this volume try to present a comprehensive overview of the relevant issues and achievements in the domain of work psychology; a domain with a long and established tradition, but in which also novel and new-sprung issues are raised and are being studied.

2
Psychological Aspects of Workload

Theo F. Meijman and Gijsbertus Mulder

1 Introduction

Working activities are always productive in more than one respect. Concrete or imaginary objects are converted into a product as a result of working activities and in performing the activities people are altered. The outcome may be positive, i.e. the task has been completed successfully and people have developed their skills or have found satisfaction through working activities. However, the outcome of work may also fail to meet the standards specified in the work assignment or a person’s state may take a turn for the worse in performing the task. Positive outcomes are not likely to be associated with the term “load”, although meeting task demands is always taxing and requires effort, for demands are made on the abilities and on the willingness to dedicate these abilities to the task. Thus, exposure to task demands does not necessarily have to be conceived of as a predominantly negative process, although it usually is. The term workload tends to be associated with decrements in performance or willingness to perform, or with the risk of impairment of the well-being and health of the task operator. We will adhere to this convention.

The study of mental load focuses traditionally on decrements in performance due to changes in the nature and level of the information load of a specific task (Gopher & Donchin, 1986). In the study of physical load the emphasis is much more on the energetical and biomechanical processes in task performance, and their effects on health and well-being (Rohmert, 1983). In this chapter we shall present an outline of a conceptual framework of the work psychological study of workload that includes both aspects. Thereto a scheme is being developed which will be called the “effort-recovery” model. It is rooted in the classical frame of thought of exercise physiology and elaborates its prevailing concepts on the basis of insights from work psychology and occupational medicine.

2 The Classical Model

2.1 Load and capacity

The classical frame of thought for the study of workload stems from exercise physiology. In The Netherlands it is referred to as the “load-capacity” model (Burger, 1959; Bonjer, 1965; Ettema, 1973). In this model, load refers to a threatening disruption of the balance of certain physiological systems due to task performance or environmental influences. According to Ettema (1967) this threat will induce physiological responses which can be viewed as compensation mechanisms. He gives the example of a raised energy output needed to shift a heavy object. To be able to meet this demand, a raised energy uptake and transport are needed to keep the energy in the body at the required level. One of the physiological responses that does just that is an accelerated heart rate, as it enables the organism through compensation to maintain the threatened energy balance.

The load-capacity model distinguishes several concepts that in a modified or unmodified form are of interest to the work psychological study of workload. It concerns the concepts’ external load or objective task demands, functional load and effort, capacity, and maximum capacity. External load comprises all external factors that stem from the task contents, task organization and work conditions, and give rise to responses of the organism. The effort expended by the organism to maintain the balance disturbed by a concrete external factor can be inferred from the responses of the physiological systems that are affected by that factor and play a role in the compensation mechanisms. These responses are referred to as functional load. They provide information on the exercise or effort that is needed to perform the task. Their nature and intensity depend on the person’s capacity, which can be expressed as the percentage of maximum capacity. The latter is understood to mean (Zielhuis, 1967; Ettema, 1973) the maximum external load which, with a given work form, an individual is able to cope with or can endure during a certain period of time, which is still followed by full recovery. As both entities, i.e. external load and maximum capacity, are expressed in the same units, the percentage of maximum capacity can be represented by a ratio. As long as the percentage is more than zero the person is expending effort, which will show in changes in the relevant functional load parameters. With a percentage below one, the person remains within the limits of his own competence and no negative effects need to occur. For then the external load does not exceed the maximum capacity. However, if the percentage exceeds the value one, a situation of overload will arise with the risk of negative effects. A similar situation may arise, if a certain exercise or level of effort has to be maintained for longer than an acceptable period of time. Thus, negative effects depend on the relationship between the external load and maximum capacity, and on the time during which the effort is exerted. Less well-trained people are, also depending on their age, unable or unwilling to cycle at 70% of their maximum capacity on a bicycle ergometer for much more than 15 minutes (Astrand & Rodahl, 1986). Van der Sluis and Dirken (1970) calculated that, in the energetical model, a percentage of maximum capacity of about 33% during an 8.5 hour working day is acceptable to industrial workers.

In the sixties Kalsbeek (1967) and Ettema (1967) applied this conceptual framework, which was originally constructed for energetical load, to the study of mental load. The latter focuses primarily on the demands made on the human information processing system. External load should be expressed in units relevant to this specific form of load, such as the number of signals per time unit that has to be reacted to, or the number of decisions needed to arrive at the proper solution for a certain task in relation to the available time. Functional load could be inferred from the changes in the functional systems that in one way or another are related to the mental processes of interest. On the basis of such indicators statements could be made about the mental effort needed to perform a particular information processing task. In their study Kalsbeek and Ettema used a classical indicator, i.e. the variability of the heart rhythm. Since the end of the last century this entity has played a role in the psychophysiological study of mental processes (Meijman et al., 1989). In the eighties Mulder (G. Mulder, 1980) and Mulder (L. Mulder, 1988) refined this measure and developed it into a standard indicator in the study of mental effort.

2.2 Elaborations of the classical model

The classical “load-capacity” conceptual framework has been criticized and supplemented at various points from the perspective of occupational medicine as well as work psychology. Meijman and O’Hanlon (1983), Kuiper (1985), Kompier (1988) and Van Dijk et al. (1990) commented on the classical conceptual framework and proposed changes for various parts. The objections mainly pertain to the static character of the model and its too little relevance to the practice of occupational medicine. We will discuss a number of these objections, because they are relevant to the work psychological conceptual framework for the study of workload that will be developed below.

2.2.1 The controversial concept of maximum capacity

The strength of the classical model is its quantitative character. However, in practice this is also its weakness. This can best be illustrated by a discussion of the concept of maximum capacity. Maximum capacity i...