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Samenvatting: An Introduction to Contemporary Work Psychology, 2nd Edition()
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Samenvatting introduction to workpsychology 2nd edition deeltentamen 1Hoofdstuk1 - Setting the Scene: People at Work
1.2
That is, work is about performing activities that require sustained e ort to achieve a particular
objective, and these activities are conducted to obtain some form of income. more formally —>
Work can be de ned as a set of coordinated and goal-directed activities that require sustained
e ort, and are conducted in exchange for something else, usually (but not necessarily and often
not exclusively) some form of monetary reward.
three key elements:
1. Work consists of a set of goal-directed activities —> actions at work are intended to bring
about a particular previously speci ed result
2. Work consists of a set of coordinated activities —> successful task accomplishment often
requires that workers execute a series of interrelated activities following particular work
routines, procedures and guidelines, and often using tools and machinery especially
devised to bring about the intended goal
3. The activities involved in working require some degree of physical, emotional and/or mental
e ort, and this e ort is usually compensated in some way —> in exchange for
something else.
for many people working is a necessary evil: it is easy to think of more attractive, interesting and
enjoyable activities, but working is often simply essential for earning a living.
Work psychology refers to people’s behavior, motivations, thoughts, and emotions in the context
of work.
Work psychologists aim to simultaneously maximise work performance and worker health and
well-being. In that sense they aim to promote employee sustainable performance —> central aim
of work psychology is to facilitate obtaining that goal (produce something): how can we use the
knowledge and insights of psychology to help workers achieve their work goals in an optimal and
sustainable manner. —> his view, maximizing worker well-being is the same as maximizing work
performance —> Since many organizations frequently face di culties in nding suitably trained
personnel, it is important to them that their current sta remain healthy and motivated.
contemporary work psychology aims to promote what might be called employee sustainable
performance: a regulatory process in which an individual worker enduringly and e ciently
achieves particular desired work goals while maintaining a satisfactory level of well-being
Work psychology focuses on the speci c activities conducted to achieve work goals. It does not
(or at least not primarily) focus on the work context or on worker characteristics; these are the
domains of other sub elds of what is known as organizational psychology an personnel
psychology. Work psychology is about the tasks that are carried out at work; that is, the speci c
work activities that require sustained e ort and are conducted to achieve a particular goal.
1.3
There is probably no group in the world that is as heterogeneous and diverse as the world’s
workforce
world’s labor force comprises people aged 15 and older who supply labor for the production of
goods and services during a speci ed period. It includes people who are currently employed and
people who are unemployed but seeking work, as well as rst-time job-seekers. However, not
everyone who works is included. Unpaid workers, family workers, and students are often omitted,
and some countries do not include members of the armed forces. The size of the labor force
tends to vary during the year as seasonal workers enter and leave the labor force
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,Around the world 4.6 billion people are at work (out of a total population of nearly 8 billion).
The global unemployment rate is 5.8% in 2023; this gure di ers widely across countries.
The number of people working in the service sector is growing fast. (more than 50 %)
Worldwide, the agricultural sector is still the second largest source of employment after services.
Historically, work psychology has predominantly focused on WEIRD workers. Research on less-
studied groups of workers in remaining parts of the world is recommended. Focusing on speci c
groups in speci c parts of the world limits our ability to generalize ndings and ignores important
issues that may be especially pertinent for vulnerable workers in less developed regions of the
world. Only by recognizing this diversity we can begin to rewrite our textbooks in ways that
provide a more inclusive picture of the psychology and behavior of the world’s workforce.
1.4
Examining the artefacts of popular culture may provide some insights into what working “means”
to people; that is, what they think of it and what function it has in their lives. The idea behind
examining such artefacts is that they re ect real cultural and societal values and attitudes (such as
popular songs, movies, books and paintings)
This short and admittedly ad hoc inventory of some of the artefacts of popular culture shows that
work may have both positive and negative features: work provides boredom and challenge,
success and failure, and friends and foes.
Popular culture frequently depicts work and working life as something that is unpleasant, and may
have adverse consequences for employee health and well-being.
Contrary to this popular view, research strongly suggests that having a job contributes positively
to health and well-being, at least when compared to having no job (i.e., being unemployed).
In a sense, the history of mankind can be construed as a continuous and ongoing pursuit to make
working life easier; that is, to reduce the e ort needed to subsist. all made it easier to accomplish
the work tasks of the day—or even made these super uous, promising to free time and energy to
be invested in other, more pleasurable, activities.
From the perspective of the individual worker, an important driver of the acceptance of these
innovations was
(a) the desire to spend less time on work, and
(b) to make work initially easier and more comfortable.
The relation between unemployment and health runs both ways: whereas lack of health increases
the chances of becoming unemployed, unemployment also contributes to the emergence of
health problems
Jahoda and her colleagues showed that the often devastating psychological consequences of
unemployment went beyond the obvious hardships of nancial deprivation
According to Marie Jahoda’s Relative Deprivation Model, apart from providing an income, having
employment also provides ve classes of social bene ts. main drivers for the positive
consequences of having employment are the fact that working provides people with
(a) time structure, (b) opportunities for social contact, (c) sharing of a common purpose, (d) social
identity or status, and (e) regular activity.
Working is not fun but unemployment is worse
1.5
Scholars have long thought systematically about the best way of performing work tasks. (mid 19th
century). key emphasis was on the best way of organizing work and the work organization (with
an eye to maximizing productivity and pro t, leading to what has come to be known as industrial
capitalism), and on the socio-political implications of this (e.g., consider the criticism of industrial
capitalism by scholars such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels).
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, The Hippocratic Collection provided Greek doctors with detailed guidelines on how particular
types of complaints were to be treated. It is basically a collection of routines and guidelines
prescribing how the tasks of a medical doctor should be accomplished. , early work on how
particular tasks should be conducted largely rested on rules of thumb, long-standing practices,
and common sense. more scienti c (i.e., systematic, theoretical, evidence-based) approach to
examining work and its e ects and antecedents only emerged much later, after the middle ages
had ended
The rst truly scienti c texts on the association between work and health appeared In the early
1500s. The books by Agricola and Ramazzini constituted the starting point for the discipline now
known as occupational medicine.
Agricola) published De Re Metallica (On metal matters), an in uential book on the art and science
of mining
Agricola’s work was later followed up by Bernardino Ramazzini (1633–1714), an Italian physician
and university professor who wrote a seminal book on the typical diseases encountered by
workers in 52 occupations.
workpsychologie 1850–1930
The industrial revolution 1750–1850s marked a transition towards new manufacturing processes,
in that production processes were increasingly mechanized and industrialised. These processes
also a ected the shape of employment of the masses, changing it from artisanal piece-for-piece
production to mass production.
These changes reformed the economic system into that of industrial capitalism, transforming the
social and physical landscape in the process. ex increased urbinazation, more employment
opportunities, long days and little money
From a work-psychological perspective, the nature of the tasks conducted in this new era was
di erent from the pre-industrial (or agrarian) time preceding it.
Moreover, the tasks in the factories were characterized by a high level of division of labor and
were usually simple, repetitive, and boring—requiring few skills. The important issues in this era
therefore became how can workers be motivated to work hard and how can they be made more
productive?
A major issue in work concerned the productivity of the workers. Psychotechnics was introduced
in Germany at the end of the nineteenth century. It applied psychological insights to working life,
focusing on optimizing the match between worker and vocation. Both Münsterberg and Stern
worked in the eld of vocational psychology—the branch of personnel psychology that focuses
on the link between workers’ characteristics and job requirements, assuming that worker well-
being and productivity are optimal when there is a good match or t between the job and the
worker (see also Chapter 5).
Scienti c management was introduced and popularized by Frederick Taylor 1856–1915.
Productivity could also be optimized by not focusing on the match between the worker and the
task, but rather by concentrating on the task itself, especially by simplifying it to such a degree
that any worker would be able to do it
It focused on the simpli cation and optimization of tasks as well as increased work motivation by
introducing strict supervision and pay-for-performance systems.
His ideas were also controversial because they rested on two basic assumptions, namely that
workers are both lazy and stupid
Taylor proposed to counter the stupidity issue by:
- Simplifying tasks using scienti c methods —> di cult tasks were broken down to smaller and
simpler tasks
- Examining the best way to conduct these tasks —> assumed that for each task there was one
best way to do it, other approaches would be suboptimal
- Training workers in the “one best way —> to conduct their simpli ed task so that unskilled/
stupid people could perform task fast and e ciently
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, - Separating the planning of tasks from their execution —> during the execution of their tasks
workers should not think about how they should conduct the tasks, but instead this should be
decided for them by their supervisors
- Selecting workers for particular tasks —> t not all workers were equally well-suited for all tasks.
The laziness issue was addressed by introducing high levels of management control and
supervision, as well as by introducing pay-for-performance systems—you work harder, you get
paid more
Taylorism may be construed as being the start of contemporary work science, with
standardization and e ciency as its core concepts.
A basic assumption of scienti c management is that there is one best way for each task to be
conducted. However, how can this one best way be discovered? Taylor proposed to analyze tasks
thoroughly and systematically (select best employe looks how does it) —> new possibilities
explored by gillbreths
Gillbreths who conducted so-called time and motion studies in the 1910s and 1920s. The
Gilbreths developed a method based on the analysis of work motions that consisted of lming the
details of a worker’s activities while recording the time needed for these activities. in doing this,
the Gilbreths sought to make processes more e cient by optimizing the motions involved, rather
than by reducing process times, as Taylor had done.
The introduction of Tayloristic principles at work often resulted in repetitive, boring, and physically
demanding jobs, as the management of these organizations sought to maximize productivity and
pro t—irrespective of the cost to the workers involved. The heyday of Taylorism was over by the
middle of the 1930s. After 1930 these ideas were replaced by the insights of the human relations
movement. This school of thought focused particularly on the social context in which the work
tasks were conducted. Rather than tting the worker to the job (as scienti c management had
attempted), the adage of the human relations movement was to t the job to the worker, paying
special attention to the human side of working. —> It originated from the series of experiments
conducted from 1924 to 1933
THe most important nding of all was unquestionably in the general area of teamwork and
cooperation” . Although the evidence for this claim is weak at best, the Hawthorne studies helped
develop ground-breaking ideas on social relations at work, motivation, satisfaction, resistance to
change, group norms, worker participation and leadership that even today inspire much research
on the e ects of job characteristics on work performance
Contemporary work psychology merges ideas from many di erent disciplines in an attempt to
promote employee sustainable performance: a regulatory process in which an individual worker
enduringly and e ciently achieves particular desired work goals while maintaining a satisfactory
level of well-being.
1.6
The nature of work has changed from mainly manufacturing work to predominantly service and
knowledge work. —> larger proportion of workers is involved in less physically strenuous jobs
associated with less exposure to physical health risks.
—> Working in service jobs is also not without risks as it brings about new types of job demands.
Typically, service work requires some degree of emotion work, in which employees have to adhere
to rules regarding the expression of emotions. (serve with a smile becomes a task requirement)
growing segment of the workforce is that of the “knowledge worker”—a highly educated
employee who applies theoretical and analytical knowledge to developing new products and
services. Knowledge workers include those working in the areas of product development, data
management, consultancy and information systems —> not new
—> Knowledge work is typically characterized by a high degree of cognitive load, a term which is
used in cognitive psychology to illustrate the load or e ort related to the executive control of the
working memory. In knowledge work the level of information processing is relatively high in order
to achieve intellectual performances.
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