Work Psychology in Action

Anna Sutton

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781352011067
• eBook ISBN: 9781350305380
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

The new edition of this popular, accessible and skills-oriented textbook introduces key psychological concepts and demonstrates how they come into play in the real world of work, while building strong awareness of how business priorities inform and underpin applied psychology. It combines summaries of important research studies with an exploration of topics from different international perspectives to offer students a deeper appreciation of how psychology develops and is used in the world of business. The book takes a practical, problem-solving approach to understanding the role of psychology in the workplace and focuses on employability skills that will benefit students in their future careers. Written by a highly experienced lecturer, this book is ideal for undergraduate and postgraduate business and psychology students taking modules in work psychology. New to this Edition:
- Fully updated to include the latest research and theory in the field
- Reworked chapter on communication and culture
- New material on neuroscience
- New features such as 'Psychology and Technology'
- Updated 'International Perspectives'feature, including a wider range of countries and perspectives of Indigenous peoples
- New examples and case studies from a wider geographical range, including Asia, Australasia and the Middle East

1	INTRODUCING WORK PSYCHOLOGY

INTRODUCTION

In this first chapter we gain an initial introduction to the concept of work psychology. We start by considering the scientific approach to psychology that underpins the rest of this book, looking at what the scientific method is and why we need it to understand psychology at work. We then briefly review the different theoretical areas of psychology and discuss examples of how they are used to understand people at work. After this, we consider how applied psychology draws on theoretical psychology and the different areas of expertise for work psychologists.

We then turn to look at the ‘work’ side of work psychology, reviewing the main areas of business studies and seeing how they can inform our understanding of human behaviour. And finally, we have a look at how the subject of work psychology has developed, outlining some of the key people and theories that have made work psychology what it is today.

This chapter will help you answer the following questions:

• What does it mean to say psychology is a science?

• What are the different areas of work psychology?

• How does work psychology, as an applied discipline, draw on the different theoretical strands of psychology?

• How can business studies inform and contextualise our understanding of people’s behaviour at work?

• Why is it useful to know about the historical development of work psychology?

Case Study A day in the life of a work psychologist

Amirah had always been interested in people, so when it came time to decide what subject to study at university, choosing psychology was an easy decision. She wanted a career that would help people and, not knowing that much about psychology when she first started university, assumed she would become a clinical psychologist. She knew they worked with and tried to help people who had mental health problems, and it was important to her to know that she was doing something worthwhile in her work. But partway through her degree, Amirah found out about work psychology. As she learned more about it, she realised that it fitted her interests and skills really well: she wanted to use psychology to help people and organisations in their normal day-to-day work.

So after completing her undergraduate degree, she went on to specialise in work psychology in a postgraduate degree and then continued her training through supervised practice, until she eventually became accredited as a psychologist. Now, when she tells people she is a work psychologist, their first response is: ‘Oh, you should come and sort out my company, we’d keep you busy for years!’ But after this, they often ask her what she actually does. Isn’t work psychology just another name for management consultancy or human resource management?

She does frequently work closely with managers and HR professionals, but her role and approach are very different from theirs. Amirah explains the difference to people like this: ‘I think the key thing that sets me apart as a psychologist is that I am trained to apply the science of psychology to the workplace.’ She knows that many managers or HR professionals use benchmarking as a guide to best practice or try to copy what the market leaders are doing, choosing the approaches and ideas they think will work well for their organisations. ‘Work psychologists bring scientific rigour to their work: we make sure we have solid research evidence for our recommendations. We also have a very good understanding of how to carry out research that will be useful to our specific client organisation. For example, we know when surveys or focus groups would be the best approach, we can design questionnaires so that they are reliable and valid, or choose the appropriate measures from external publishers’, she comments. Overall, she sees work psychologists as providing a vital link between cutting-edge psychology research and the realities of the business world.

Amirah sometimes explains her work by telling people how her career has developed. When she started her career, she worked for a large psychometrics publishing company. She spent her time there conducting research to develop or validate tests that could be used to identify employee skills or work-related personality traits. She was also heavily involved in training people to use these tests appropriately, teaching them how to administer the tests and, especially, how the results could be used for selection or development decisions. After a few years in this role, Amirah decided she wanted to move into leadership development as a specialism. She became a freelance consultant with a small work psychology consultancy and so impressed its managers that when they were looking for a full-time consultant, they were more than happy to offer the job to her.

Now, Amirah struggles to describe a ‘typical day’ because her job is so full of variety. Some days she will meet with client organisations to discuss the basics of a new leadership development programme they want to offer to their managers. Sometimes she conducts coaching sessions with managers seeking to develop their own leadership capabilities, in which she might use development questionnaires and feed back the results as a basis for the individual to set development goals. She also runs group training sessions for small groups who are learning more about leadership together. Alongside all this, she makes sure she is up to date with leadership research so that she can make best use of this knowledge in developing her training programmes. The work is challenging but rewarding, and Amirah enjoys the contribution she makes to improving organisations’ effectiveness as well as being part of helping to improve people’s work lives.

THE SCIENCE OF WORK PSYCHOLOGY

Psychology as a science

Although psychology can be defined as the study of the mind (psyche), it can be difficult to say what we really mean by ‘mind’ and even more difficult to say how we can study it. ‘Mind’ is an abstract concept and yet, as a science, psychology has to take as its subject things we can observe. What can we observe about the mind? You might suggest that each of us can observe our own thoughts or feelings, which to a certain extent we can, but how can we observe the thoughts and feelings of other people? How can we make comparisons between them or find out if a particular thought process is common to a lot of people?

If we are going to adopt a scientific approach to understanding people, we need to have something more concrete to observe and on which to test our theories. So the science of psychology seeks to find explanations for a more observable phenomenon: human behaviour. Our definition of ‘behaviour’ can be quite broad and include anything that we can observe, including facial expressions, what people say, the emotions they show, their tone of voice, group dynamics and even organisational-level success metrics. If we can find a good explanation for a particular aspect of human behaviour, then we can say we have a good psychological theory; we have explained why people do the things they do.

An ‘armchair psychologist’ is a term sometimes used for someone who does not have any education or training in psychology but likes to come up with their own explanations for human behaviour. Many people still think that psychology is simply common sense – the Fad or Fact feature explores this debate in more detail. In contrast to this common misconception, psychology uses the scientific method to try to develop explanations that are evidence based.

The scientific method

The scientific method is a five-stage process that attempts to find a good, evidence-based explanation for why things are the way they are. It is a way of testing whether the ideas we have about how the world works are actually supported by observable facts. The five stages are:

1. Observe patterns or regularities in the world.

2. Develop a possible explanation (theory).

3. From that explanation, develop a specific prediction (hypothesis).

4. Test the prediction.

5. Evaluate the explanation and refine it if necessary.

To illustrate this scientific approach, here is an example based on one of the first studies linking personality and work behaviour with physical health outcomes: the Type A and B personality distinction. Two cardiologists, Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman, used the scientific method to show how personality patterns were related to important health outcomes (Friedman & Rosenman, 1959).

1. Friedman and Rosenman noticed that men with particular behaviour patterns (ambitious, impatient, proactive workaholics) seemed more likely to suffer from coronary heart disease.

Fad or Fact Psychology is just common sense

One of the most common criticisms aimed at psychology is that it is just common sense and so studying it will be easy. After all, we think we already know a lot of it. Many research studies in psychology do, in fact, confirm things that we already think we know about how people behave at work. For example, people who report they are intending to leave their jobs are more likely to quit (Tett & Meyer, 1993). This might seem so commonsensical and obvious that it is hard to imagine why anyone would do research on it, much less why so many people would research it that it needed a meta-analysis to bring the findings together.

And even when we take this a step further to consider the complexities of the relationship between someone’s intention to quit and actually leaving the job, we might also think the findings are common sense. A person’s intention to quit does not completely predict the behaviour of leaving the job. Other factors are important, such as the state of the job market and how easy it is to find another job, whether the job holder has dependants and so on.

It can come as something of a shock, then, when we come across counter-intuitive findings. For example, we might think that someone who is dealing with a lot of stressors at work will be more likely to want to quit than someone who is having an easy time. But research shows a different pattern: it depends on the type of stressor (Podsakoff et al., 2007). All stressors cause workers strain and tension, and those that are hindrances (for example organisational politics or role ambiguity) do make people want to leave their job. But stressors that are perceived as challenges rather than hindrances (for example pressure to complete tasks, tasks that require high levels of attention) reduct people’s intentions to leave the job. So a simple intuitive idea of the relationship between stressors and leaving a job is not supported by the evidence.

It is, of course, a perfectly natural thing for us to do as we try to understand the peo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Titlepage
• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Short Contents
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• About the Author
• Dedication
• About this Book
• Note to Instructors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introducing Work Psychology
• 2 Finding and Measuring Talent
• 3 Developing and Retaining Talent
• 4 Motivation and Attitudes
• 5 Building effective Teams
• 6 Leadership: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
• 7 Culture and Communication
• 8 Working in a Changing World
• 9 Stress and Well-Being at Work
• 10 Positive Psychology at Work
• 11 Cutting-Edge Work Psychology
• 12 The Realities of Research in Work Psychology
• Glossary
• Index