1.1 The lmporl 2.How serious is the issue of stress in the workplace?How can workplace stress affect the rest of your life?Is stress a legitimate "disease"?Can it be considered as an occu- pational hazard?How can stress be reduced at work? 3. Are today's workplaces adequately safe?How can work be made safer?What are the respective responsibilities of workers and employers for creating and maintaining safety at the workplace? 4 How can the jobless be brought back into the workforce?How effective are welfare- to-work programs,which require work in return for government subsidies?What can be done to increase the probability of today's welfare recipient becoming tomor- row's full-time employee?If the government proposes to pay welfare recipients less than the minimum wage in return for their work requirement,will this help or hinder the passage from welfare to work? 5 To what extent should work and non-work lives be kept separate?Should working par- ents expect their employing organizations to provide family-friendly workplaces?In households with two wage earners,how can both partners lead productive and satisfy- ing work lives yet still maintain a productive and satisfying relationship with each other? 6 Do foreign-based companies actually have better methods of production,or are they more profitable simply because they pay their workers less?Is there any value to U.S. employers in adopting the work practices of other countries,or should we stick with what has made America great?Should everyone working for an American company. either in the United States or in another country,be expected to accept American culture as part of the work environment? These are just some of the debates that you will see in any newspaper or on any television news program over the course of several months.When you have finished this course,you will have a knowledge base to discuss these and similar issues responsibly.That does not mean that you can solve these problems,but it does mean that you will have something sensible and unique to add to the discussion. You may also have discussions with others who have taken a course like this;perhaps your parents,co-workers,or managers.If they have not taken this course in the past 5 to 10 years,they may be working from an outdated experience and knowledge base.Just consider how the world has changed since,say,the 1980s: Personal computers now dominate the workplace. Many workers do their work from home(telecommute),and many work groups and work teams are located in many different offices and work as virtual teams seldom if ever meeting physically as a group. Client meetings,organizational meetings,and training are conducted through videoconferencing Work performance can be monitored electronically. Three out of every five jobs are now directly or indirectly providing a service rather than manufacturing"goods." Increasingly more work is done by teams as opposed to individuals. There is little stability in many business sectors.Downsizing.rightsizing.mergers. and acquisitions have radically altered the psychological contract between an organ- ization and its employees so that few workers can expect to spend their careers with one organization. Workers are expecting greater recognition and support from their organizations with respect to creating and maintaining family-friendly workplaces. Workforces are becoming increasingly diverse,and not only in terms of age,gender, sexual orientation,race,and disability.Managing diversity today means embracing an increasingly broad spectrum of interests,values,attitudes,and cultures. Scanned by CamScanner
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hat Is Industrial and Organizational Psychology? The nature of work has become more fluid,where jobs may not be well defined, tasks may not be routine,and the groups assigned to tasks may vary in their type and number of people. Work is now international or global. The information you derive from this course will be substantially different from what your parents'generation learned in a similar course. The Importance of Understanding the Younger Worker A great deal of the published research in 1-O psychology deals with managerial,profes- sional,and other white-collar full-time employees who are older than a category that might be labeled"young adults."In the 21st century,we need to question the appropriateness of this research focus.As Loughlin and Barling (2001)report,in Austria.Denmark,and Sweden combined,approximately 70 percent of young people between the ages of 15 and 24 are employed in some capacity.In the United States and Canada,80 percent of high school students work for pay.By 12th grade,most of these students are employed for more than 20 hours per week. Loughlin and Barling(2001)argue that it is a mistake to ignore the population of young workers for several reasons:(1)They represent a large portion of a population of part-time workers,and as part-time work becomes more common,we need to know all we can about the experience of part-time work:(2)one's first job is likely to have a substantial influence on the filters through which subsequent work experiences are viewed.As Loughlin and Barling (2001)suggest,"teenagers seem to be more influenced by their work environments than adults and...these attitudes and aspirations are stable once established during teenage years"(p.548). Mainstream literature tends to characterize the"first job"as the first full-time job after a decision is made to forgo further education.But your first job might be more correctly seen as your first paying job outside of the home environment,regardless of whether it occurs at age 14,age 19,or age 25.Surveys the authors of this text have done with college students suggest that jobs such as cashier,customer service rep,camp counselor,lifeguard/swim instructor,waitserver,and retail salesperson are the most common paid positions for younger adults.Experiences in these jobs are often memorable if for no other reason than motivating the job holder to aspire to work that will never repeat these experiences! Nevertheless,they help form early impressions of management and supervision,'good" work,and work/life balance.As such,these experiences are understudied. The little I-O research that has been done on younger workers suggests the following: 1. For younger adults,jobs that provide an opportunity to use current skills or develop new skills are most satisfying (Green Montgomery.1998;Mortimer,Pimental, Ryu,Nash,Lee,1996). 2 For younger adults who do not have the opportunity to use current skills,or develop new skills,cynicism and lack of interest in the work can result(Stern,Stone,Hopkins, McMillion,1990). 3. Young workers represent a very valuable commodity or resource since their educa- tion levels tend to be higher than their parents,they are more sophisticated techno- logically,they tend to see the world globally rather than domestically,they have no problem being'connected"24 hours a day,and multicultural school environments have given them an open-mindedness that was rare in earlier generations(Loughlin Barling.2001). Scanned by CamScanner
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1.1 The lmportance of1-0Psychology The paradox of younger workers goes EUORCORN beyond issues ofresearch focus,too.Youn- ger adults represent a valuable resource in terms of skills and experiences they have independent of paid work.Yet at the entry level,paid work often consists of menial activities that neither tap current skills nor develop new ones.This,in turn,leads to demotivation.cynicism,and a negative view of work in general.Zemke,Raines, and Filipczak (2000)cite management and supervision as the real culprit in the negative experiences of younger part- time workers. Virtually everyone reading this text has had some experience as a paid worker,and we encourage you to consider this experi- By age 20,most young people have held some sort of a job. ence when reading the following chapters. Moreover,it will be useful for you to remember these experiences when you become a super- visor or leader,even in your part-time life.As a shift manager at Burger King,think twice on slow days before directing subordinates to wipe tables that are already clean.Instead,take the opportunity to ask them what they are good at that might contribute to the shift productivity or what they'd like to become good at that might contribute to future productivity. Butler(2007)has examined the issue of work-school conflict for college-age students. Many students work part-time (and some even full-time)to fund their education.Not surprisingly,Butler found that students struggled to keep a balance between work and school and that work often had a negative effect on schoolwork.This was particularly true when the work consisted of long hours and difficult schedules,provided little real control to the student-worker,and did not permit opportunities to complete schoolwork.The research showed that when the nature of the student work was related to the student's major. both school satisfaction and school performance increased.In contrast.long hours and work that allowed no control on the part of the student actually decreased academic perfor- mance.As we will see in Chapter 10,these results are similar to what has been found when studying work-life balance outside of the school years. Butler justifiably argues that school should come first and work should simply facilitate the educational experience.He suggests that universities and colleges become more proac- tive in creating or facilitating work programs that foster,rather than impede,education and in counseling students with respect to what jobs might create conflict versus those that will promote the educational experience.The lesson may be that mindless jobs with long hours can do more harm than good for the student. MODULE 1.1 SUMMARY Work is important because it occupies much ofour aspects of life that are touched by work.SIOP is time,provides us with a livelihood,and defines the primary professional membership organiza. how we feel about ourselves."Good work"enables tion for I-O psychologists. workers to develop and use skills to benefit others. In this course you will gain knowledge about the 1-0 psychology applies psychological principles. workplace.work-related issues.and the ways theory,and research to the workplace and to all that work has changed over recent decades. Scanned by CamScanner
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MODULE 1.2 The Past,Present,and Future of 1-0 Psychology The Past:A Brief History of I-0 Psychology We will present the historical context of various I-O topics when we cover them in subse- quent chapters:here we will sketch the evolution of I-O psychology in broad and simple terms.For the interested reader,Koppes(2007)has published a useful book tracing this development of I-O psychology in great detail.In particular,we will present a brief descrip- tion of the development of American I-O psychology as it is valuable for you to see how the science evolved in the United States.Having said that,we also point out that there were parallel developments in other countries,such as Britain(Chmiel,2000;Kwiatkowski, Duncan,Shimmin,2006),Australia,Germany,the Netherlands(van Drunen van Strien, 1999),and eastern European countries such as Romania(Pitariu,1992;Rosca Voicu, 1982).For many foreign countries,unfortunately,there is no published English-language account of their development ofI-O psychology.However,one of the first modern American I-O psychologists,Morris Viteles,did a wonderful job of describing the status of I-O psy- chology around the world during the period from 1922 to 1932(Viteles.1932).Arthur Kornhauser(1929)also provided a description of I-O psychology in England and Germany. One of the most comprehensive surveys of international applied psychology(particularly with respect to vocational counseling)as it was practiced in 1937 appears in a book by Keller and Viteles(1937).In addition,a more recent survey of early non-American I-O psychology. in particular the work of Otto Lipmann(German)and Charles Myers(British),has been provided by Vinchur(2005),and there is an entire chapter on the topic of non-American I-O by Warr (2006).As we present the various topics,note that we make use of a wide variety of contemporary research and theory produced by non-American scholars.Salgado(2001)has published a comprehensive review of the landmarks of scientific personnel selection inter. nationally covering the period 1900-2001.For further reading on the development of 1-O psychology as a science and a practice in America,we recommend several excellent and detailed reviews (Benjamin,1997;Katzell Austin,1992;Landy.1997). You may ask why we need any historical treatment.The answer is that to know where we are now and where we are going as a field,it helps to know how we got here.As an example, much of the current effort being devoted to research on emotional intelligence is wasted because the researchers ignored many years of earlier research on social intelligence-a similar concept-and wandered down the same dead ends as their earlier counterparts (Landy,2005b,2006).As the philosopher Santayana (1905)suggested,those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it(p.284). Scanned by CamScanner
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:Industrial and Organizational Psychology? When we look at history from a broad perspective,it is possible to make some good guesses about the future.And knowing the discipline's history helps us understand the context in which research and application were conducted,which in turn helps us appreci- ate the value of that research today.Consider Table 1.3.which lists the titles ofarticles in the first year of publication of one of the major 1-O journals,the Journal of Applied Psychology (JAP).Now look at Table 1.4.This is a list of articles that appeared in 2015 in the same journal.Quite a contrast!There are two reasons for the difference between what was impor- tant in 1917 and what is important today.The first reason is the change in the world of work.The second reason is the accumulation of knowledge about work-related behavior in nearly a century since then.Table 1.5 presents a broad time line in the evolution of I-O psychology.Important dates and developments in I-O psychology that have occurred over the past few decades are covered throughout the remainder of this book.In the sections that follow,we will highlight some early and important developments in the field of 1-0 psychology. 1876-1930 The roots of I-O psychology trace back nearly to the beginning of psychology as a science. Wilhelm Wundt founded one of the first psychological laboratories in 1876 in Leipzig. Germany.Within 10 years,he had established a thriving graduate training and research enterprise.He hoped to put scientific psychology on an even footing with the more estab- lished physical sciences of chemistry,physics,and biology.In the mid-1880s,he trained two psychologists who would have a major influence on the eventual emergence of 1-0 TABLE 1.3 Titles of Research Artides in the Journal of Applied Psychology,1917 Estimates of the military value of certain personal gualities The legibility of the telephonedrectory The psychology of a prodiqious child A test for memory of names and faces Practical relations between psychology and the war The moron as a war problem Mental tests of unemployed men A trial of mentaland pedagogical tests inacvil service examination for policemenand firemen The attitude and reaction of the businessman to psychology A note on the German recruiting system TABLE1.4 Titles of Research Artices in the Journal of Applied Psychology,2015 Ameta-analysis of the relationship between individual assessments and job performance A longitudinal study of an intervention to improve road safety climate:Climate as an organizational boundary spanner Fored distribution rating systems When doesrank and yanklead to adverse impact? Vocational fit and counterproductive work behaviors:A self-regulation perspective Well'mtired of trynanizatiodtizenship behavior and ctizship fatigue Absence of malice:A meta-analysisof nonresponse bias in counterproductive work behavior res Unethical for the sake of the group:Risk of sodalexdusion and proroupunethical behavior The slippery slope:How small ethicaltransgressions pave the way for larger future transgressions A meta-analysisof gender stereotypesand bias inexperimental simulations ofemploymentdedson making ToodrainedtohelpAresoe depletion perpectiveondaily interpersonal tizenship behaviors Revisiting the debate on the relationship between display rules and performance Considering the explicitness of display rules Scanned by CamScanner
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