Work and Organizational Psychology

An Introduction with Attitude

Christine Doyle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134618552
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Psychology

In this unique text, Christine Doyle provides the student with a cutting-edge introduction to the field of work and organizational psychology. The main focus is on recent changes that have occurred in the world of work, incorporating their causes, consequences, proposed solutions to the associated problems, and above all, the challenges they pose for work and organizational psychology. Among the topics covered are motivation at work, the concept of stress, and the causes of individual accidents and organizational disasters. Solutions to such problems might include lifelong learning and training, performance management, career development, and employee assistance programmes. This lively, provocative, and highly readable book will be an essential resource for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of work and organizational psychology, as well as business management students, managers and anyone with an interest in human resources management.

1 What’s it all about…? (Introduction to work and organizational psychology)

May you live in interesting times.

Chinese curse

Defining work

Benjamin Franklin once wrote memorably that there are only two certainties in life—death and taxes. It is arguable whether he ought to have added work to this duo. The fact that he didn’t probably has something to do with the difficulty of characterizing what work is. One thing is clear; our attitudes to work have always been ambivalent. The Christian Bible gave work as one of the punishments visited on humanity following expulsion from Paradise. For centuries the less pleasant forms of work were delegated to slaves and peasants. Part of the attraction of being rich and powerful has been that you don’t necessarily have to work and that you can get others to do it for you. Perhaps because work was such an unpleasant necessity, it was elevated to a virtue. Medieval monks made work part of their discipline, either as a form of “mortifying the flesh” or for the “glory of God”. This may be the source of the “Protestant Work Ethic” (Furnham, 1990; Weber, 1958), which perhaps reached its peak when prosperity through hard work was regarded as evidence that the person was predestined to be “saved” from damnation. And there lies the paradox. Work may be a necessary evil, but for most of us, work is a powerful source of our personal and social identities irrespective of whether we enjoy it, whether we are paid for it, or whether those identities are thereby enhanced or undermined.

Have a look at Exercise 1.1 opposite. If you spent any time at all thinking about the questions in Exercise 1.1, you will have realized that work and our attitudes towards it are not as straightforward as you might have first thought. According to Porteous (1997, pp. 4–5), “work is normally conceived as involving some element of giving away control of the way one can distribute one’s time and effort to someone else in exchange for money or its equivalent”. However, he acknowledges that this definition is too narrow. I once did a study in which 100 people were asked what were the most important features of work as opposed to play or leisure. The top features on which there was over 90% agreement were as follows:

EXERCISE 1.1
Reflecting on the nature of work

Before reading on, take a little time to think about this. What is one of the first questions that you typically ask a stranger after you’ve said hello? Why, until quite recently, did many a woman describe herself as “only a housewife”? How many forms can work take (e.g., from a school child to a homemaker to a political or business leader)? If you love your work is it still work? When do leisure pursuits such as sport and hobbies become work? (For instance, is the amateur squash player who competes in national competitions working?) Why does losing one’s job often have devastating effects over and above the loss of income? If you won millions, what would you do after the initial euphoria wore off and how many of your activities would be classed as work? What kinds of work do you do and what do they mean to you? What do you think are the defining features of work?

1. Work activities are necessary for survival and usually involve some form of compulsion. True, one can choose whether or not to work but leaving the tasks undone or stopping when you get bored has costs. A filthy home is a health hazard, a lazy worker risks being sacked and losing income, the would-be writer who never gets down to it loses the satisfaction of having written, the uncommitted student risks failure, the “idle rich” may feel bored and that life lacks direction. Work also imposes structure. You can play in any way you choose but work has to be done methodically, and there is often a best way to do it.
2. Work activities are almost always undertaken in the service of some higher aim. The voluntary worker wants to make life better for someone, the “breadwinner” wants to provide for his or her family, the business executive wants the success of the company, the teacher wants students to fulfil their potential, entertainers want to give pleasure, artists want to create something of lasting value. It is for this reason that work is such a powerful source of identity and why it can be a source of satisfaction. It is also why being deprived of work can be so painful.

Both these features may explain why many people enjoy having worked even if they did not enjoy the work itself. A job well done promotes a sense of mastery and achievement—it enhances one’s self-esteem.

Having come to these conclusions, I then discovered reversal theory (Apter, 1982, 1989, 2001), which develops the distinction between work and nonwork activities within a general theoretical framework. One of the core ideas in reversal theory is that how people feel and what people want are determined by distinct psychological states that are essentially transient. These psychological states have also been referred to as “ways of being” or “selves within the person”, which capture the idea that at any given moment we can experience the world in very different ways. Apter calls these psychological states metamotivational states because they determine what people want at any given time. Frey (1997, p. 3) gives a succinct summary: “Reversal theory is a general psychological theory that posits the existence of eight meta-motivational states that combine in various ways to determine one’s motives and experiences at a given moment in time…Switches between opposite states are called reversals…”. Two particular meta-motivational states seem germain to the work/play divide. When we are in the telic state we are primarily goal oriented. The goal involves something that is significant to us and the means to achieve that goal is largely immaterial. If, for instance, we could magically push a button to get the house clean, the pile of marking done, the business deal signed, etc. then most of us would. In a paratelic state, it is the doing of the activity itself which is important, not the goal. Thus, a person may play tennis for pleasure and just enjoy…playing tennis. The idea that one might get someone (or something) else to play the tennis or listen to the music, or drink the glass of wine and so on to achieve the enjoyment is nonsensical. This seems to get at the kernel of work and play. When we work, we are primarily in a telic state, when we play we are primarily in a paratelic state. Once the goal of winning becomes more important than playing the game, it becomes work, or at least something very like it. Conversely, we can expend a great deal of “worklike” effort on some activity and still regard it as leisure or play. Thus, the true gardener enjoys the gardening; the person who cuts the lawn to avoid the neighbours’ censure is working.

The great strength of reversal theory is that it proposes that people can suddenly switch between these states with consequent profound changes in emotional experience. Thus meeting a liked colleague at work and exchanging pleasantries can switch us into the paratelic state and leaven an unpleasant or boring task. The extreme anxiety one can feel before having to give a presentation can turn to enjoyment or elation if the audience responds enthusiastically. Thus, many people would say that the social rewards of paid employment are among the most important to them. One of the consequences of the drive for ever-increasing efficiency and productivity is that people are often too pressured to switch into paratelic states and so the work is frequently perceived as stressful. Conversely, people who love their work and would do it for enjoyment of the activity alone, will spend much of their time in a paratelic state, whatever the pressures. So here we have the germ of an explanation as to why some people thrive on long hours and constant pressure while others suffer stress-related illness. We will return to reversal theory again in this book because it seems to be a very promising framework which is attracting increased research attention (see, e.g., Apter, 2001; Svebak & Apter, 1997).

Defining work and organizational psychology

Useful though this wider definition of work is for understanding the meaning of work for individuals, work and organizational psychology is primarily concerned with paid employment and often with people who work for large or medium organizations. It attempts to understand and explain the behaviour and experience of people at work by applying theory and research methods from psychology.

However, this simple description hides a great deal of complexity. Even the name of the discipline cannot be agreed on. In the UK it is called occupational psychology, in the USA it is called industrial/organizational psychology, and in Europe it is work and organizational psychology. There has been much recent debate within the British Psychological Society’s (BPS) Division of Occupational Psychology as to whether the name should be changed to come into line with the rest of Europe but as I write no consensus has yet been reached. So what is an author to do? If I use “occupational psychology” in the title, the term may be obsolete before the book is published and in any case, I want the title to reflect the mainly European focus. On the other hand, the name of the Division has not yet changed and, in the UK, practitioners are still known as chartered occupational psychologists. In the end there has to be an unhappy compromise. The title reflects the European focus but some parts of the text conform to current UK practice. From now on readers should regard the terms “work and organizational psychology” and “occupational psychology” as synonymous.

To make matters worse, work and organizational psychology is by no means the only discipline to concern itself with people at work. To name but a few, there are management science, human resource management, personnel management, and a hybrid discipline known as organizational behaviour which, according to Cherrington (1989), developed from psychology, sociology, and anthropology with minor influences from economics, political science, and history. There is not space here for an extended discussion of the similarities, differences, and definitions of all these disciplines, which in any case have been explored elsewhere (see, e.g., Brotherton, 1999; Furnham, 1997). Suffice it to say that theory and research in work and organizational psychology contribute to all these related disciplines though not always at a very sophisticated level. For instance, Porteous (1997) describes the role of a personnel manager as being largely concerned with administrative duties such as benefits, pensions, holiday rosters, and so on. He continues, “Many companies are totally unaware of the value of good occupational psychologists. Being qualified in occupational psychology is not the same as being qualified in personnel” (p. 17). Not everyone agrees with this view. Some have argued that human resource professionals can have at least as much, if not more competence in their specialist areas than occupational psychologists (Ridgeway, 2000; Shaw, 1992). St Ather (1999) makes the point that management consultants, trainers, personnel specialists, recruitment consultants, etc. are practitioners’ main competitors, not other occupational psychologists. The debate continues (Crawshaw, 2000b; Duncan, 2001).

Work and organizational psychology tends to focus on individuals and groups and to explore what goes on in organizations in terms of underlying psychological processes. So for instance, leadership is coming to be understood in terms of the social constructions of followers. In other words, followers interpret what is going on around them and come to a consensus about what that “reality” is. Leaders are the people who influence these socially constructed interpretations through their exceptional social and communication skills. (Alimo-Metcalfe, 1998a; Smith & Peterson, 1988). Having said that, occupational psychologists are not afraid to borrow from other disciplines, if that helps understanding. For instance, analysing the causes of disasters such as Chernobyl and the Piper Alpha North Sea oil platform requires understanding of the social, historical, and political contexts as well as engineering design—both of which issues go far beyond the psychology of the human operators (see, e.g., Reason, 1987, 1990, 1997).

Work and organizational psychology also brings a degree of scientific rigour to the study of people in the workplace. For instance, procedures for selecting new employees are carefully designed to be as fair and accurate as possible and the effectiveness of the methods are evaluated later by measuring the work performance of successful candidates. The one great strength of work and organizational psychology is that its practice is based on systematic research evidence and, in theory at least, all its interventions should be properly evaluated. Thus, a programme to help employees to manage stress would be followed up with research to establish whether or not stress levels actually were reduced. This emphasis on systematic methods and research does not always endear itself to top management, who want instant solutions to pressing problems and do not want to hear about costly failures. However, it does make it less likely that 6 months after the consultant has left, the “miracle cure” is discovered to be worse than the original disease!

But what is work and organizational psychology FOR…?

The question of the basic purposes and aims of work and organizational psychology is something which needs to be tackled at the start even if the reader cannot make up his or her own mind on the matter until the book has been read and digested. There is a very real problem here. We might start by asking what is psychology in general for? An informed answer will probably involve something to do with understanding the human condition in order to improve it. As psychology graduates will be aware, this debate is hedged around with horror stories of past mistakes, post-modernist critiques, and so on, but I believe that a concern for human welfare has always been close to the purposes of both psychology and psychologists. This is seen clearly in the work of professional colleagues in, e.g., clinical, educational, and health psychology. Work and organizational psychology is different. Work can be a mixed blessing for individuals and most organizations have priorities and agendas which leave little space for human weakness and well-being.

The private (commercial) sector is first and foremost concerned with making a healthy profit for shareholders and directors. This means producing the best quality goods and services at the lowest possible cost. Pursuing this efficiency could mean paying subsistence wages and demanding up to 16 hours of work on 6 days a week. These practices are not confined to the 19th century—they exist today in the developed West and in many other parts of the world and companies are not averse to relocating production to take advantage of them. However, another option is to increase automation, drastically reduce the size of the workforce, and leave every two survivors doing the work previously done by three or more people (Herriot & Pemberton, 1995). In the public sector too, successive UK Governments have demanded ever higher quality services whilst simultaneously driving down funding. Thus, public sector workers tend to be low paid and overworked. Expecting all organizations in either sector to behave automatically like charitable institutions with human well-being at their core is not only naive but stupid. It isn’t going to happen.

So the question is: Who are the clients of occupational psychologists—the organization, which pays their fees and wants greater productivity, or the employees and their well-being? Given the realities of the current system, it is inevitable that work and organizational psychology is in the service of business priorities. Luckily for those of us who feel that there should be some ethical dimension to our work—a need to make a positive difference to the quality of people’s lives and not simply via the creation of wealth—the choice is not so stark.

In the UK in the 19th century, reformers of the worst abuses of the Industrial Revolution were not simply naive idealists. The various Factory Acts became law partly because employers realized that it was in their own best interests to have a healthy, well-fed workforce. The Government of the day was itself appalled at the poor physical state of men from the slums and factories who presented themselves as recruits for the armies of World War I. (A terrible irony yes, but the defence of the realm was a serious matter.) So despite many false starts and halting progress, things did gradually improve, not least because the social evils of a vast underclass were unacceptable in a Liberal Democracy. The process continues today in the current UK Labour Government’s campaign against “social exclusion”. Thus just because a system appears all-powerful and all-pervasive does not mean that there should be no attempt to change it or that such attempts are doomed to failure. A key way to achieve change for the better is still to demonstrate that the goals of productivity, profit, and excellence of service are best served by ensuring the well-being of the workforce.

EXERCISE 1.2
Evidence-based practice

To illustrate the caution needed, let us take one example from the Times newspaper on Saturday 13 May 2000. “Ailing teachers take 2.5m days off” shouted the headline and the story went on to report that more than half the teachers in UK state schools took an average of 9 days sick leave in 1999. Representatives of the teachers’ Trades Unions immediately attributed this to stress created by high workloads and relatively low pay and status relative to other professions, compounded by rigorous (and some would say punitive) Government inspections. If this were true, then the consequences for children’s education and the nation’s health-care bill would be serious indeed and the causes of teacher stress would need urgent attention.

What questions would you want to ask and have answered before accepting the Trades Union interpretation of these statistics? (Remember that it often appears to be in the best interests of employers to be sceptical too, so “forewarned is forearmed”.)

However, in contrast to the stark realities of the 19th century, the issues are not quite so clear-cut as the link, say, between unguarded machinery and a mangled arm. For a start, there has been an awful lot of history—not least the general failure of Communist economies. It also has to be admitted that work systems that made people part of the machinery have been very successful in creating affluent societies. One should pause, therefore, before taking to the soapbox. Perhaps you would like to pause here to consider Exercise 1.2.

Thinking about Exercise 1.2, here are a few of the questions that occur to me:

• How accurate are these figures anyway?
• How does this sick leave rate compare with other workers in the public and private sectors?
• What proportion of days actually worked by UK teachers does 2.5 million lost represent?
• Is this rate of sick leave worse than in the past?
• What is the evidence that teachers are under more stress than other workers?
• Could other factors be implicated? For example, children tend to suffer a lot of infectious diseases so perhaps teachers are more exposed to infection. What were the most common illnesses anyway?
• Could poor training and low expectations of the professionalism required by teaching in the past mean that there are more people in post who are “not up to the job” than in other professions?
• Could teachers’ low morale, born o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 0: Read me…(It’s all in the subtitle, or I’d like to disagree with Aristotle’s principle of moderation in all things)
• 1: What’s it all about…? (Introduction to work and organizational psychology)
• 2: All change…the past and future of work: Organizational change and development
• 3: Why work? (Or life, the universe, and everything!): Employee relations and motivation
• 4: A study of stress: Design of environments and of work
• 5: The ironies of automation and other disasters: Human-machine interaction
• 6: Lifelong learning: Training and development
• 7: Getting the right people (and keeping them): Selection and assessment
• 8: Getting the best from the best: Appraisal and career development
• 9: How to stop worrying and learn to love work: Counselling and individual development
• 10: Where do we go now?(Well, I wouldn’t start from here…)
• References