Organizational Psychology

A Scientist-Practitioner Approach

Steve M. Jex, Thomas W. Britt

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118724453
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Industrial & Organizational Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The foundation of organizational psychology, updated to reflect the changing workplace

Organizational Psychology: A Scientist-Practitioner Approach, Third Edition provides students with a thorough overview of both the science and practice of organizational psychology. Reflecting changes in the global workplace, the third edition expands coverage of the effects of technology on processes and personnel, the generalizability of theories across cultures, including organizational climate, and employee health and well-being. The new edition retains the hallmark features of the text and

• Expanded coverage of the pervasive effects of technology on the social environment of work, including virtual work and the impact of social media.
• More graphics, including tables and charts, to help students understand and remember various related concepts and theories.
• Includes a unique full chapter on research methods and the use of statistics in understanding organizations.
• New chapter on the work/non-work interface, including consideration of both employees' life stages and changes over their careers.
• Provides Instructors with comprehensive presentation and testing materials.
• More on ethics, in light of relatively recent scandals in corporations and in politics.
• Expanded coverage throughout on cross-cultural issues and diversity in organizations.
• Additional readings facilitate in-depth learning.

Industrial and organizational psychologists contribute to the success of an organization by improving the performance, satisfaction, and well-being of employees. By identifying how behaviors and attitudes can be improved through hiring practices, training programs, and feedback and management systems, I/O psychologists also help organizations transition during periods of change and development. Organizational Psychology: A Scientist-Practitioner Approach, Third Edition is a comprehensive guide to the theory and application of behavioral science in the workplace.

Chapter 1
Introduction to Organizational Psychology

The behavior of individuals acting as members of formal organizations has a tremendous impact on many aspects of our lives. Most things we need—the food we eat, the cars we drive, the houses we live in—depend on the coordinated effort of individuals in organizations. This impact, in fact, is so pervasive that we typically take it for granted. In most cases, we only take notice when the results are at the extremes. For example, we marvel at the coordinated effort of a surgical team that successfully performs a difficult procedure, and express disdain when corruption occurs in a government agency. In most instances, however, the impact of behavior in formal organizations goes relatively unnoticed.

Organizational psychology is a field that utilizes scientific methodology to better understand the behavior of individuals working in organizational settings. This knowledge is also used, in a variety of ways, to help make organizations more effective. Effective organizations are typically more productive, often provide higher-quality services to their constituents, and are usually more financially successful than less effective organizations. For private organizations, financial success often translates into higher wages and greater job security for employees, and increased shareholder wealth for investors. For public organizations such as police departments, municipal governments, and public universities, success means higher-quality services and cost savings to taxpayers.

Enhanced organizational effectiveness, and the success that often comes with it, often provides many indirect benefits as well. Successful organizations provide employment opportunities, which helps to foster the economic well-being of society as a whole. Also, in many instances, employees in successful organizations are more satisfied and fulfilled in their work than employees in less successful organizations. These positive attitudes may carry over to non-work roles such as parent and community member. Consumers also benefit from enhanced organizational effectiveness because well-managed, efficient organizations are often able to produce products and provide services at a much lower cost than their less successful competitors. Such cost savings are often passed on to consumers in the form of lower prices. In sum, everyone is a potential winner when organizations function effectively. Organizational psychology seeks to enhance the effectiveness of organizations through scientific research and the application of research findings.

What Is Organizational Psychology?

This book provides students with a comprehensive treatment of the science and practice of organizational psychology. Organizational psychology is the scientific study of individual and group behavior in formal organizational settings. Katz and Kahn, in their classic work, The Social Psychology of Organizations (1978), stated that the primary defining characteristic of an organization is “patterned” human behavior. When behavior is patterned, this means that some structure is imposed on it. In organizations this structure typically comes from formal job descriptions and organizational policies. Most organizations also have a set of values that they want employees to abide by. Thus, an organization cannot exist when people just “do their own thing” without any consideration of the behavior of others.

Given Katz and Kahn's (1978) defining characteristic of organizations (e.g., patterned behavior), it is easy to see that there are many organizations in this world. A group of 12 people who regularly play softball together on Friday nights would fit this definition, as would a major multinational corporation. Therefore, to further define the field of organizational psychology, it is important to distinguish between formal and informal organizations. A formal organization is one that exists to fulfill some explicitly stated purpose, and that purpose is often stated in writing. Formal organizations also typically exhibit some degree of continuity over time; that is, they often survive far longer than the founding members do. Business organizations obviously exhibit these defining characteristics of a formal organization, as do many other nonprofit organizations and government agencies.

An informal organization is one in which the purpose is typically less explicit than for a formal organization. Going back to our previous example of the softball team, these individuals are obviously spending time together because they enjoy playing softball and, in all likelihood, each other's company. It is doubtful, though, that these reasons for playing softball are formally stated in writing, or even explicitly stated. It is also doubtful (though obviously not impossible) whether this group would continue to exist if half of the team members moved to another city or simply lost interest in playing softball.

The field of organizational psychology is concerned with the study of formal organizations. That is not to say that the formal organizations of interest to organizational psychologists are always business or profit-making organizations (a common misconception that we have noticed among many of our colleagues trained in other areas of psychology). Throughout the chapters in this book, many studies are described that have been conducted not only in businesses but also in government agencies, universities, and nonprofit social service agencies. In some cases, organizational psychologists even study “virtual” organizations where people never even interact face-to face (Shin, 2004), yet these are still considered formal organizations according to the definition provided above (see Comment 1.1).

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Comment 1.1

Virtual Organizations: Advantages and Disadvantages

Imagine if you needed to buy food, or needed to complete some banking transaction. What's the first thing you would do? Most likely you would look for a grocery store or a bank—or would you? With increasing advances in information and telecommunications technology, however, organizations can be (and often are) created by linking people in different physical locations. The term for this organizational configuration is a virtual organization and it has been defined as “a collection of geographically distributed and culturally diverse people who are linked by electronic forms of communication (De Sanctis & Monge, 1999, p. 693). Really any organization that does not need to meet face-to-face with its people could use this type of organizational arrangement.

So what are the advantages of creating a virtual organization? The primary one is cost. For most “nonvirtual” organizations a major cost is physical space. Leasing office space is costly, and this is particularly true in large cities (try leasing any space in Manhattan!). Having a virtual organization also saves employees from long commutes to work, and having to uproot their families due to transfers.

Despite these advantages, which are certainly considerable, there may also be disadvantages to this type of organization. Employees in this type of organization must obviously be comfortable with computer and telecommunications technology—this is something we often take for granted now, but may not necessarily be the case for everyone. Another potential disadvantage is that employees may miss the face-to-face social interaction that comes with working in a traditional organization—as much as a pain other people can be at times, they do also provide comfort. Finally, all customers are not necessarily comfortable dealing with virtual environments. When some people invest they feel more comfortable meeting face-to-face with their investment broker as opposed to talking with them on the phone or communicating via e-mail.

Despite these potential disadvantages, virtual organizations are here to stay and will likely increase in number in the future. As with any form of organization, the key is to make sure that people are comfortable working in it and that it is appropriate given the nature of the business.

Sources: DeSanctis, G., & Monge, P. (1999). Introduction to the special issue: Communication processes for virtual organizations. Organizational Science, 10, 693–703; Shin, Y. (2004). A person-environment fit model for virtual organizations. Journal of Management, 30, 725–743.

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Another point worth noting is that the focus on formal organizations does not preclude the study of informal organizational processes, or even occasionally informal groups and organizations themselves. It has been shown, for example, that informal friendship ties exist in formal organizations, and they have important implications for employees (Nielson, Jex, & Adams, 2000). In this same vein, processes that occur in informal groups and organizations may provide researchers with valuable insights into processes that occur in formal organizations. For example, the manner in which a status hierarchy develops in an informal group such as on an intramural basketball team may help researchers better understand the emergence of leadership in formal organizations. Put differently, the laws of human behavior apply regardless of the context in which they occur.

Another point of clarification in the definition of organizational psychology has to do with the term psychology itself, since organizational psychology is part of this larger field. Psychology is the scientific study of individual human behavior and mental processes (Comer & Gould, 2013) Two things are important to note about this definition. First, like any other psychologist, organizational psychologists use methods of scientific inquiry. This simply means that organizational psychologists use a systematic, data-based approach to studying organizational processes and solving organizational problems. The “data” used by organizational psychologists may come in a variety of forms, including survey responses, interviews, observations, and, in some cases, organizational records.

The other important part of this definition is that psychology focuses on individual behavior. This may seem a bit odd, given that significant portions of this text are devoted to group and organizational-level processes. What it means is that regardless of the level at which some process may occur, psychologists view individual behavior as central to that process (Porras & Robertson, 1992). Thus, to understand the impact of group and organizational-level variables, we must focus on how they influence, and are influenced by, individual behavior. Groups and organizations don't behave; people do. This strong focus on individual behavior also serves to distinguish organizational psychology from other social science disciplines (e.g., sociology, economics, and political science) that attempt to explain organizational processes but are less focused on individual behavior. It is also one, though certainly not the only, way that organizational psychology differs from the closely related field of organizational behavior (see Comment 1.2).

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Comment 1.2

Organizational Psychology Versus Organizational Behavior: What's the Difference?

Many readers, particularly those who have received at least a portion of their training in a university business school, have heard of the field of organizational behavior. What is the difference between organizational psychology and organizational behavior? In all honesty, these two fields are quite similar—so much so, in fact, that many faculty who teach organizational behavior in business schools received their training in departments of psychology. Though less common, there have been some instances where faculty who teach organizational psychology received their training in business schools. Despite the outward similarities, there are actually subtle differences between organizational psychology and organizational behavior. Moorhead and Griffin (1995) define organizational behavior as “the study of human behavior in organizational settings, the interface between human behavior and the organization, and the organization itself” (p. 4). If we focus only on the first part of this definition, there is no appreciable difference between organizational psychology and organizational behavior. However, the differences lie in the portion of the definition stating that organizational behavior is concerned with “the organization itself.” Specifically, the field of organizational behavior is concerned not only with individual behavior in organizations, but macro-level processes and variables such as organizational structure and strategy are viewed as interesting and worthy of study in their own right.

The field of organizational psychology is also concerned with the impact of macro-level variables and processes, but only to the extent that such variables and processes have an impact on individual behavior. Much of the reason for this difference is that organizational behavior draws from a greater variety of disciplines than does organizational psychology. While organizational psychology draws primarily from various subfields within psychology, organizational behavior draws from a variety of disciplines including psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, and labor relations, to name a few. This gre...