Using Psychology in Management Training

The Psychological Foundations of Management Skills

David A. Statt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415178631, 9780415178631
• eBook ISBN: 9781134683444
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Many of the fundamental principles of psychology form the basis for management training. Using Psychology in Management Training aims to give trainers and student trainers a grounding in the ideas and research findings which are most relevant to their work.
Three major areas are explored from a management training perspective and illustrated with examples
* the individual psychological processes of learning, personality and motivation which are at the heart of most management training courses
* the social psychological processes of group dynamics, leadership and stress which all arise from the interaction of people at work
* the psychology of the actual training experience including the crucial training skill of communication and what is needed to meet organisational training needs
Using Psychology in Management Training has a clear and accessible format with a comprehensive glossary of unfamiliar terms and suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter.

1 Training, trainers and trainees at work

WHAT IS TRAINING?

Let’s start with a definition. Training, most people in the field would agree, can be described as:

a planned process to modify attitude, knowledge or skill behaviour through learning experience to achieve effective performance in an activity or range of activities. Its purpose, in the work situation, is to develop the abilities of the individual and to satisfy the current and future needs of the organisation.

(Reid and Barrington, 1997, p. 7; italics added)

This is, of course, a definition of an ideal situation. I have italicized two of the words in it to point up the difference between the ideal and the actual situation that trainers have to deal with. We will note at various points in this book how little planning goes into much of the training that is offered in the workplace, and how developing individual abilities usually comes a very poor second to satisfying organizational needs. However, the implications of both of these goals are very much at the heart of this book and both are firmly grounded in the concepts and research findings of psychology. Part I is concerned with individual psychological processes and Part II with social psychological processes.

It may be as well at this stage to point out that the use of psychology by trainers also represents an ideal situation. I think the actual situation here is nicely captured by an experienced and perceptive trainer:

Applying psychology to training is not like applying the principles of aerodynamics to aeroplane design. It is more like using a schoolboy knowledge of Latin to begin a relationship with an Italian lover; much better than nothing, but of necessity basic, tentative, experimental, and open to constant modification and learning.

(Hardingham, 1998, p. 5)

The study of psychology is the best we have in aiding our understanding of training, trainers and trainees. It is not sufficient but it is necessary, both as a stock of knowledge and understanding and as a perspective on the human condition.

TRAINING AND EDUCATION

Sometimes the terms ‘education’ and ‘training’ are used interchangeably to refer to the same activity. At other times a distinction is made. In the latter case education (from the Latin word ‘educae’ meaning ‘to draw out’) is regarded as dealing with more fundamental concepts while training is more narrowly focussed and concrete in its concerns, like the difference between mathematics and applied statistics perhaps, or logic and computer programming. One emphasizes understanding in other words, and the other emphasizes techniques.

Even where this distinction is made it can never be regarded as water-tight. Both education and training are firmly rooted in the psychology of learning and there will be times, for example, when education requires a narrow and concrete application (such as memorizing lines of poetry or a historical sequence of events). Similarly, management training may deal with abstract and general principles of psychology or economics.

In the world of work it is probably reasonable to expect that most of the learning people will be required to do is thought of as being concrete, specific, narrowly focussed and, indeed, often task-based. In point of fact though, if we are dealing with human resource management (HRM) training, the most popular courses (like leadership, motivation, stress, etc.) draw on a great deal of rather complex behavioural science. But for the sake of brevity we shall refer to all the workplace learning that appears in this book as training.

One important implication of this is that, unlike education which ideally aims to maximize the potential of each individual and therefore the differences between individuals, we shall be dealing with a process whose objective is to minimize individual differences to the (ideal) point where anyone who has done the training can perform the task in question equally well, regardless of their particular background or abilities. Of course the more complex the subject of training and, crucially, the more it is related to the way people ‘use’ their personalities in the job, the less will this principle hold. This latter aspect of working life is known as emotional labour and with the rapid expansion of the service sector it is becoming increasingly prevalent (Hochschild, 1983).

Finally, in this section, it is worth pointing out that we are not dealing with those occupations which have standard training programmes leading to formal qualifications, like doctors, lawyers, or printers. The social anthropologist Erving Goffman has pointed out how the period of training for these occupations is often grossly inflated beyond what is needed to perform them successfully. This is done to show how important the occupation is and/or to maintain a monopoly of practice (see, for example, Cockburn, 1991). Goffman called this the rhetoric of training (Goffman, 1971). However it is also important to note that most of these occupations are now including within their qualification period some training specifically on management, and that would be of interest to us.

THE ROLE OF THE TRAINER

Trainers play many roles in their work, of course. One leading practitioner lists nearly thirty—and more could be added—ranging from administrator to technician (Pont, 1996). This trainer groups these roles into three major subgroups, Subject expert, Method expert and Group manager, that is knowing the subject, knowing how to impart it, and knowing how to keep people involved in learning about it. The essence of all these roles, but especially the last, is that of being a facilitator, using all the resources at our disposal (including one’s own emotional labour) to help trainees learn as much as they can.

Clearly facilitation requires a high level of sensitivity and interpersonal skill in communicating with others, and we would hope that professional trainers self-select themselves on that basis. Communication is a topic that we will explore in some detail in Chapter 8 but, directly or indirectly, all the material covered in the rest of this book has something to contribute to an increase in facilitation.

THE WORKPLACE MODEL

Of course the role of the trainer as it is viewed by practitioners may not be quite the same as viewed from the top of the organization that is paying for the training. All trainers, whether internal or external, have to work within organizational constraints. Some of these constraints, like time and money, are quite obvious and need no rehearsal here. It is the less obvious, often unconscious constraints, formed by widely accepted and unquestioned assumptions, that I would like to highlight in this section. These assumptions have influenced the management of the Western workplace since management first emerged in the late nineteenth century. Taken together they have formed what I consider to be a dominant ethos, which I call The Workplace Model.

The earliest strategy for managing work goes right back to the classical eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith, right at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. It would now be called ‘job simplification’. Smith argued that if a complex production process can be divided into very simple steps, each of which requires little if any skill or training, then costs (of wages, materials and so on) are minimized. Charles Babbage, the nineteenth-century computer pioneer, took the division of labour idea a stage further by relating human labour to the most effective use of machines, and this way of organizing the industrial workplace was to remain virtually unchallenged until the mid-twentieth century. But it was Frederick W.Taylor who had the most profound influence on the practical applications of the division of labour.

Frederick W.Taylor

Taylor was born in Philadelphia in 1856 and started work as a labourer in the Midvale Steel Company. By the age of 31 he was the company’s chief engineer, and his astonishing rise was due in large part to the powers of observation he brought to the job. He later moved to Pittsburgh to work as a consultant for the huge Bethlehem Steel Company. Taylor carried out the first systematic studies of industrial work ever undertaken (Taylor, 1911).

In 1885 Taylor began to examine the way men carried out one of the very simplest of all the tasks in the steel mill, the shovelling of sand. What he discovered was quite astonishing. He found they were doing it all wrong! Indeed he found that every step of the process was marked by inefficiency and waste. For example, the shovels were the wrong size, shape and length, the amount of sand carried was often too little or too much for the worker’s stamina and the receptacles they were supplying were in the wrong place.

After Taylor had analysed each step of the process thoroughly (stop-watch in hand) he re-designed it, shovel and all, and found that productivity went through the roof. People had been using shovels inefficiently ever since the things had been invented and no one had realized it. As Peter Drucker, the granddaddy of all business gurus, puts it Frederick Taylor was ‘the first man in history who did not take work for granted, but looked at it and studied it’ (Drucker, 1988, p. 29).

If you can demonstrate a technique for improvement as simple and dramatic as this you can be sure the world will beat a path to your door. Taylor’s findings had a speedy and far-reaching impact on the world of work. Taylor called his approach to work ‘scientific management’ and with it he figured out a detailed set of principles to be applied to the workplace. He was concerned not only with the division of work into the smallest and most efficient units possible but with the management of all these units.

Taylor was the first person to suggest that the management (including supervision) of the work process should be separated from the operations themselves. Control of, and responsibility for, the work process should not, he felt, be in the hands of the operator. Once the individual worker had been (‘scientifically’) recruited, selected and trained it was the manager’s role to organize the labour force and supervise the workers’ performance.

Taylor was most concerned about the relations between workers and management. He had been deeply influenced by his own experiences on the factory floor where he saw not only gross inefficiency in the use of men and machines but men deliberately working as slowly as possible. He attributed these industrial ills to bad management and the practice of letting workers do their jobs as they wanted. Management, he felt, was not doing enough proper managing—an echo of a much more recent debate. Taylor was also, however, very concerned about the quality of each worker’s job. He thought that everyone was entitled to as much money and advancement as he was capable of earning.

In a sense he wanted to re-introduce individuality into the workplace, and he stressed that managers should always deal with individual workers rather than groups. But Taylor also felt strongly that workers and management were dependent on each other and that unless they recognized and respected this mutual dependency they could not achieve their common goal of maximum prosperity for both employer and employee. This goal could only be achieved by getting the maximum productivity out of each worker and each machine.

Taylorism’, or ‘time-and-motion study’, became very popular with many employers, though not always in the way that Taylor had intended. They often tended to see it mainly as a technique for getting more work out of their workforce for the same wages. Conversely, it was never accepted by the labour force or their trade union representatives, who regarded the man with the stopwatch as an enemy to be outwitted.

When factories were still run by their owners the basic conflict was seen as an ideological one between capitalists and workers. In the course of the twentieth century owners have given way to managers in the running of most enterprises. The conflict now seems to have taken on a more psychological aspect, as between managers and managed, or ‘doers’ and ‘done to’ as I would prefer. That is why this basic and intrinsic conflict of interests, which Taylor never recognized, has been as true of many other countries, including the former Soviet Union, as it was of the late nineteenth-century United States. And the conflict persists to this day, with management attempts (both conscious and unconscious) to use Taylorism in practice whatever modern theoretical flag happens to be flying over the workplace.

J.B.Watson

By the early years of the twentieth century Taylorism was the dominant ideology of the American workplace (and probably of the Western workplace). It was soon to be complemented by the first American school of psychology, Behaviourism. The leading exponent of this school was John B.Watson and he announced its birth in the following uncompromizing tones: ‘Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior’ (Watson, 1913, p. 158).

Watson’s forthright views were a reaction to the German pioneers in experimental psychology who had adopted the technique of introspection (where people reported on their subjective experience) as the best way to study the mind. Not only did Watson not care for introspection as a method, he didn’t believe in the existence of a mind to be studied. There was nothing to be studied, he argued, but someone else’s observable physical behaviour. Watson, in other words, was firmly of the opinion that in psychology what you see is what you get, and what you can’t see and don’t get doesn’t exist. The experimenter provided the stimulus, noted the response to it which the subject made, and didn’t worry about what happened in between.

While Watson was arguing the case for Behaviourism in the West, the physiologist Ivan Pavlov was performing the experiments in Russia that would introduce the concept of conditioning to the world. We will examine this work in some detail in Chapter 2 but for the moment we should simply note that Watson was very taken with Pavlov’s work and incorporated it into his theory of Behaviourism. Here was a clear and objective way of understanding why a given stimulus produced a given response without recourse to talk of introspection or the conscious mind. Moreover it should be possible, Watson felt, by using the method of conditioning to change someone’s behaviour in a desired direction, a very exciting prospect indeed.

This view of what psychology should be about had an immediate and powerful impact on psychologists, particularly in the United States. Indeed the effect of Behaviourism on American life was to go far beyond psychology or the academic sphere. In its clearly stated, no-nonsense style concentrating on an objective and apparently common-sense view of the human condition, it seems to me reminiscent of the recently introduced principles of Taylorism in the world of work.

Both ‘isms’ seemed to have a similar appeal for many people in early twentieth-century American society, with its roaring economy and the sense of endless opportunity that attracted millions of immigrants from all over the world. Behaviourism was part of a simple ‘can-do’ philosophy for a time and place that was growing impatient with its European heritage. It was a vigorous antidote to Social Darwinism and its denial of environmental influences. It was an affirmation of the fundamental American belief that people could better themselves by their own efforts.

Henry Ford

The year 1913 also saw the emergence of a third ‘ism’ that complemented the other two in its effects on the world of work. In that year Henry Ford introduced the first moving assembly line to his small automobile factory, and with it began the era of mass production.

‘Fordism’ was essentially an application of Taylorism to the process of production. The pace of the assembly line determined the rate of productivity and the workers had to adjust to that pace. Each worker performed a simple operation, lasting a few seconds, as the line passed him. Henry Ford was very much in favour of Taylor’s ideas of job fragmentation and the most intensive use of labour and machines. He was perhaps most strongly influenced by Taylor’s suggestion of high wage incentives and paid his operatives the unheard of sum of $5 a day—more than twice as much as the going rate. He had to pay such high wages. The conditions of the job were so awful that he had a staggering 400 per cent turnover of staff in his first year of operation (Littler and Salaman, 1985).

Paying people more money for the job rather than trying to improve their working conditions was typical of Fordism. Henry Ford’s approach to the psychology of his workers was similar to J.B.Watson’s approach to his subjects: here is the stimulus ($5), there is the response (a pair of hands at the assembly line for a day). If it works why worry about anything else? And Ford’s invention did indeed seem to work, with brilliant success. Like Fre...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Using psychology in management training
• Acknowledgements
• List of illustrations
• Introduction
• 1: Training, trainers and trainees at work
• Part I: Individual differences
• Part II: The workplace setting
• Part III: The training experience
• Glossary
• References