Introduction
In the Human Factors session, we discussed human/machine interfaces along with some of the issues caused by having humans in the system.
All these studies form part of the much larger field of Industrial (or Organisational) Psychology. In this section, we will look at organisational psychology in a larger way, examining some of the fields that affect the work of a licensed engineer, which may not at first seem to be part of an engineer’s job; for example looking at recruitment.
Industrial psychology is a field and career in itself, recognised by both the American Psychological Association and the European Federation of Psychologist’s Associations, but it is useful for licensed engineers to have an understanding of it, as part of their additional role as team leaders and man managers.
In this section, we will discuss industrial psychology at large, before looking more specifically at certain sections, namely job analysis and recruitment, occupational health, motivation, and workplace culture. This knowledge can assist with dealing with personnel in future careers.
By the end of this section you will be able to:
- Analyse and evaluate the definition and purpose of Industrial Psychology
- Evaluate the purpose and types of job appraisal and recruitment
- Evaluate occupational health
- Evaluate theories of motivation
- Evaluate theories of organisational culture
What is Industrial Psychology?
Industrial or organisational psychology (I/O psychology) is an applied specialisation of psychology and seeks to apply psychological theories, both to how people behave at work and also the wider way in which work affects our lives – known as work/life balance. Although a field that few know much about, and frankly have often not even heard of, in 2014 it was estimated to be the fastest growing career in America, with a mean salary, in 2018, of over £100,000. These figures suggest that the field must be considered of value, and indeed it is a recognised fact that correctly applied I/O principles will improve both productivity and profitability in businesses.
Despite its relative obscurity, I/O psychology has been around since the very beginnings of psychology, when one of the very first psychological laboratories was founded in Leipzig in 1879. This lab trained two psychologists, namely Hugo Munsterberg and James Cattell, who went on to have a significant influence on I/O psychology’s development (Landy 1997).
The significant development, originally made by Cattell, was the recognition that human error as recognised in the traditional sense, is in fact a misunderstanding. The traditional concept of human error fails to recognise that there are significant psychological and physical differences between individuals, and that these differences lead to significant differences in performance and behaviour in the workplace.
Originally, the focus was on looking at individual differences and using this research to predict workplace performance. Initial work was slow but promising, and the advent of the First World War lead to the solidification of ideas as a response for the need to assign new troops rapidly to the appropriate roles for combat. Over 1 million recruits were tested, using a modification of the Stanford – Binet test which made it suitable for group rather than individual testing. The Stanford – Binet test is designed to gauge intelligence through examining 5 cognitive factors.
The First World War also drove massive industrial growth in the United States, which continued after the war. This new industry had largely had some experience of I/O during the war, and the leaders were generally impressed by what they had seen. This led to a demand for the duplication of the army testing in an industrial environment, and what was then known as mental ability testing became commonplace to the point of almost being ubiquitous.
Various discoveries were made around this time which seem so obvious now that it is almost difficult to believe they ever needed to be discovered at all! One such example of this is Mayo’s discovery (1924) that rest periods improved morale. This discovery led him to join the Hawthorne studies, which were discussed in the section on Human Factors, where he studied how emotion and relationships affected people’s productivity at work, which in turn led to the development of human relations.
The Second World War again brought about the need for testing, but this time it was taken beyond simply the troops and was also applied to the morale and fatigue of those working in industry to support the war effort.
The name change away from simply industrial psychology to industrial and organisational psychology or I/O psychology was deliberate and was intended to show the shift away from the original work which tended to focus on the individual and their performance and attitudes. Now the work became broader, with groups becoming the object of study from small teams to entire companies.
The Organisational was added because it became accepted that when a worker joins an organisation, they will become exposed to that company’s goals and procedures – the concept of “that’s how we do it here”.
This increasing interest in the psychology of organisations as a whole, however, in the 60s and 70s, did not remove study of the more traditional industrial psychology, as the individual within the organisation remained important, with this study remaining vital to the development of employment law - particularly around the concept of fairness in selection efforts. It was around this time that some criticism of I/O psychology began to be heard, with the belief that, as a discipline, it reacted only to the interests of management and not workers as individuals.
These criticisms lead to further changes, with I/O developing a multi-level approach attempting to understand phenomena on both an individual and organisational level. In addition, the needs of employees as individuals, not just as little more than machines, began to be considered. As an example, this led to the idea of organisational justice becoming embedded in addition to the more traditional concerns of selection (Griffin et al, 2002: 356-375).
Job Analysis, Recruitment and Appraisal
Whilst it may initially appear that recruitment does not directly relate to the safety case process, a key part of writing safety cases is assigning tasks to personnel, and in this respect recruitment is an integral part of the process – that is recruitment in terms of deciding who to bring on board for the project, which would usually mean internal personnel, but may include external recruitment if no suitable candidate was available internally.
Job Analysis
Job analysis is a series of methods intended to define the content of a job and what attributes a worker will need to undertake the job successfully. It can be used as part of the selection process but is also used within organisations to decide which employee is most suitable for a task. In an informal manner, job analysis is undertaken by team leaders every time they assign work. Through carrying out proper job analysis, the analyst (likely a team leader) will understand not just the important tasks of the job, but how they are carried out and what qualities are needed to be able to carry it out successfully.
The process is, in theory, straightforward, beginning with looking at the duties of the incumbent if possible, then considering exactly what the nature and conditions of the work entail, and any basic qualifications that are required. This allows the creation of a job psychograph, which gives a list of the attributes and mental requirements. For a job analysis to be sound, the most important requirement is a detailed, correct and validated task list that looks at the role holistically, not just the tasks that are needed but also basic training needed, where and when the job takes place, and many other areas. For this reason, it is likely that consultation will be required when writing the safety case to ensure that expert opinion informs the job analysis.
The concept of job analysis was introduced by Winslow and Gilbreth in the early 20th century, and surprisingly the core purpose has barely changed, if it all, since then, despite attempts to introduce different systems. It is true that it has become increasingly detailed and therefore more refined, but the core purpose remains the same (Sackett and Laczo 2003).
Job analyst is a role, or career, of its own, however in the UK it is more common for this task to be undertaken by human resources personnel who have had some level of training in industrial psychology.
One of the main outcomes of job analysis are job descriptions and job specifications. These documents have multiple purposes, ranging from ensuring that the correct workforce is initially hired by an organisation, to providing a basis for ongoing assessment and appraisal. This second part is vital when undertaking appraisal, as it is not just a moral but also legal requirement that, when assessing a team member in terms of their performance, it must be carried out against a defined specification to which the worker also has access. It also forms the basis for development of later improvement plans, such as looking at areas where additional training would benefit the worker and help them to meet the requirements of the specification. Finally, the job specification is also used to define the pay and benefits of a role, as, without a clear understanding of what the job entails, it is impossible to decide what is a correct level of remuneration.
Job analysis can be defined as an attempt to answer a series of questions, including:
- Why does the job exist?
- Where is the job performed?
- When is the job performed (both in terms of season and time of day)?
- What are the physical and mental attributes that the worker will require?
- What conditions (physical and mental) are likely to be encountered?
As already discussed, job analysis seeks to combine the demands of the task with knowledge of human attributes and use this information to produce a theory of behaviour for the job in question. This means that there are two main but differing approaches to job analysis, worker oriented and task oriented.
Task oriented procedures focus on the activities involved in performing the work, taking into consideration duties, responsibilities and functions. From here, task statements are developed which describe the tasks performed in detail. After this, the tasks are scaled and rated in terms of difficulty, frequency, and responsibility. Functional Job Analysis (FJA) is an example technique, developed in 1944 by Fine and Cronshaw. Here, elements of work are scored in terms of data people and things. Data and things are rated 0-6 whereas people are rated 0-8, with lower score indicating higher complexity.
Here, the worker is taken as the starting point rather than the role. This is done by looking at the attributes needed to carry out the job successfully, commonly divided using KSAO – that is Knowledge, Skills, Attributes and Other. Knowledge is the information needed to carry out the job, skills are the proficiencies needed for each individual task, attributes are stable over time, and other covers everything else – usually personality factors.
The Fleishman Job Analysis System (F-JAS) is a methodology that follows the worker – oriented approach. This uses big data to create minimum sets of the KSAOs needed across a range of different jobs using a system of 73 specific scales in three broad areas: cognitive, psychomotor, and physical.
Recruitment
Industrial psychology is heavily involved with the recruitment process, and industrial psychologists work with Human Resource (HR) professionals, along with subject matter experts, to develop processes and systems for the recruitment and selection of personnel. Recruitment is the process of identifying suitable personnel, and just as importantly getting them to apply to the organisation. Advertising jobs, defining qualifications, and screening out unqualified applicants all form part of recruitment.
Selection on the other hand is the actual process of hiring and promoting personnel. Here we use evidence-based systems to select the most qualified candidates. A variety of methods and tools are used to carry out selection, such as personality and ability testing, interviews, knowledge tests and work samples. Before they can be used, selection procedures must be validated and shown to be relevant to the role. It is both unfair and illegal to use a procedure that is not relevant.
Occupational Health
Occupational health is a specialist branch of medicine that seeks to keep people healthy and safe at work – both physically and mentally. Occupational health grew out of the ongoing drive to make workplaces safe and is seen by some employers as merely a necessary evil carried out purely because it is legal requirement. It may also appear to be unrelated to the safety case process, but, as discussed in the section on human factors, a good safety case is built around the human and will inform the design process. For this reason, a good safety case will not only consider occupational health but can actually be considered part of the occupational health documentation of a facility.
All research into the field shows that a healthy and safe workforce is good for business, with those business that have better workplaces, in terms of health, also having better financial results. Over 170 million days each year are lost to sickness in the UK, at a cost of over £100bn to the economy. In addition, the longer people are off sick the less likely they are to make a successful return. If someone is off sick for less than a week, the chance of a successful return is approaching 100%; after 6 months this drops to just 50%. Occupational health teams seek not only to help keep employees healthy, they also help support them back into work and help employers manage risks that may give rise to work-related ill health, be it mental or physical.
The ultimate aim of occupational health is to reduce and remove work-related illness and injury through a variety of methods, such as:
- Health monitoring, for example pre employment and annual health checks
- Using ergonomics to design healthy workplaces and work practices
- Encouraging safe working practices
- Supporting staff to return to work
- Supporting sickness absence management
- Offering advice on reasonable adjustments to help return people to work
How is it Provided?
The simple answer is it depends on the size of the organisation. Larger organisations may employ an individual or team, often a nurse or part-time doctor, but many organisations choose to buy in services from an external specialist provider, especially smaller companies. Often the services are provided at the usual place of work, however this is not always possible or appropriate, so it may be necessary to travel to appointments or to be visited at home. The latter may be considered particularly appropriate in cases of workplace stress.
Methodologies in the Workplace
When we think of seeking to reduce workplace injury, we naturally tend to think of seeking to reduce physical injury. However, workplace stress is now becoming recognised as the major issue facing many employers. It is the 3rd highest reason for workplace absence, but due to the nature of stress it is felt that this is probably under reported, plus stress leads to an increased likelihood of other illness such as colds. It also tends to lead to longer periods of absence from work than other causes, and those who are off sick with stress are less likely to return to work than those who have been off sick for other reasons.
Workplace stress is a major issue in engineering environments particularly in the high-hazard industries, with many factors combining to create an environment in which the risk of stress is much higher than in some other professions. There are many reasons for this, but the major ones are usually considered to be the high-pressure environment, shift work putting pressure on the personal life, extreme responsibility of the job and the traditional unwillingness of engineers to discuss their feelings. There are an increasing number of methods used to help combat workplace stress, from the mundane to the more exotic. These include:
- Workload management
- Ensuring adequate breaks and rest periods
- Comfortable break areas
- Plants in the workplace
- Therapy dogs and other animals
Motivation
Motivation is a concept that we are all familiar with, but which can be difficult to define. Pinder offers the following as a suggestion (2008):
“…a set of energetic forces that originate both within as well as beyond an individual's being, to initiate work-related behaviour, and to determine its form, direction, intensity, and duration”
This definition covers all that we need it too, but we probably know it more simply as a drive to carry out a task, and that it can take many different forms. It is more broadly considered to be the desire to seek out positive incentives and avoid negative ones, with incentives being defined as either rewards or punishments, depending on if they are considered positive or negative.
Motivation is a useful tool to predict behaviour, but it varies enormously between individuals, with what is considered a reward by one person being a punishment to another. On its own, study of motivation is not effective, but must be combined with study of ability and environmental factors, to be able to produce a plan that has the capacity to influence behaviour and performance. Interestingly, motivation tends to change with age, with older workers being less motivated by extrinsic features such as pay and more influenced by intrinsic features such job interest. This information can be key when selecting personnel for a given task within the safety case.
Theories of Motivation
There have been several theories developed that seek to describe employee motivation. These can generally be divided into four broad categories, namely needs – based, cognitive process, behavioural and work – based. We will only look at the needs-based theory in detail here, as it is generally considered to be the most flexible and the most useful methodology for those who do not need a strong understanding of the topic. For those with an interest in the theories of job motivation, there are several works available on the topic.
Needs – Based theories seek to explain motivation as the drive of an employee to meet certain needs, from the basic physiological needs such as food, through to higher level needs such as a feeling of belonging or self-actualisation. There are two major theories within the needs-based category, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, and Atkinson & McLelland’s Need for Achievement.
Maslow’s theory suggested that workers seek to satisfy their needs in a purely hierarchical manner, and would not seek to satisfy a higher need until a lower one had been met – for example, an employee would not seek to satisfy the desire for safety until they had meet the need for food. However, while it can be shown that the order of needs is correct, it does not effectively predict workplace motivation or behaviour, with workers seeking to satisfy needs in a non-hierarchical manner.
Atkinson and McLelland’s theory instead suggests that the desire to achieve varies between individuals, with those that have a high need for achievement being more likely to immerse themselves in work, with a tendency to seek feedback. The actual motivation is broken down into types:
- Achievement – seeks position advancement, feedback, and sense of accomplishment
- Authority – need to lead, make an impact, and be heard by others
- Affiliation – need for friendly social interactions and to be liked.
All individuals have these three motivations, but the proportion will change from individual to individual and within the individual over time. It is generally considered, that to be satisfied with a job, a worker will need to be satisfied with at least two of these, and the traditional idea that simply increasing the amount of pay will increase job satisfaction, does not hold water.
Organisational Culture
Organisational culture is an extremely broad subject and encompasses the values and behaviours that contribute to the social and psychological environment of a business. It influences the way interactions between people occur, the context in which knowledge is created, how resistant employees are to change and ultimately the level and way in which knowledge is shared. It can be influenced by many things, such as the history and type of organisation, the types of employees, national culture, and the management style. It guides the way in which people work, and the manner in which an organisation behaves to achieves its goals. Whilst it is not the intention of the safety case to influence organisational behaviour this will, in fact, be one of the outcomes of a well written and applied safety case, whereas a poor safety case will instead be unduly influenced by the organisational culture.
Interestingly, a variety of researches have propounded the idea that whilst an organisation may have its own unique culture – whether real or perceived – within the organisation subcultures can exist that not only differ, but can be in conflict with each other, and the culture of the organisation as a whole. This happens because each of these subcultures has its own management team, and the behaviour of that management team is the single biggest driver of organisational culture. This is particularly the case in large organisations, where individuals will often feel removed from the organisation as a whole and look to their immediate peers and managers for guidance.
There are as many types of organisational culture as there are organisation, but there are some recognised typological groups which will be briefly examined now.
Strong and Weak Culture
A strong culture is one that can be easily understood and articulated. A weak culture on the other hand is one that is difficult to define, understand or explain. In a strong organisation staff are engaged with the values and respond to stimulus – such as instruction from managers – quickly and effectively.
Procedures tend to be loosely defined, with the clearly defined culture directing the actions of individuals without the need for extensive bureaucracy.
In a company or organisation with a weak culture on the other hand, there is little alignment and control drives a need for extensive (and complex) procedures and bureaucracy.
Healthy Culture
All organisations should strive for a health culture, as it drives increases in productivity, growth, and efficiency, whilst also reducing employee turnover and counterproductive behaviour. There are several characteristics that tend to indicate a healthy culture, including but not limited to:
- Acceptance and appreciation of diversity
- Regard for fair treatment of each employee and respect for each their contribution
- Pride and enthusiasm for the organisation and the work
- Equal opportunity for each employee to realise their potential
- Strong communication with all employees
- Strong company leaders with a strong sense of direction and purpose
- Ability to compete in industry innovation and customer service, as well as price
- Lower than average turnover rates (perpetuated by a healthy culture)
- Investment in learning, training, and employee knowledge
Bullying Culture Type
Bullying is, unfortunately, still quite widespread within organisations. It is generally prevalent where employees feel they have the support of their seniors to carry on with their behaviour. If managers see this behaviour being tolerated or rewarded in others, they will quickly come to accept it themselves.
Generally, the higher the level of the employee carrying out the bullying, the more far reaching its effects. As bullying of an individual can occur irrespective of their rank, there is a danger that if a manager is the target of bullying, they may then cascade this bullying downward as a method of offloading aggression.
Bullying cultures can exist in large and profitable organisations, but it is generally found that in organisations with a bullying culture, productivity is low. Changing a deep-rooted bullying culture is extremely difficult, and often requires extensive redeployment of staff.
Tribal Culture
Logan et al have proposed five basic stages of organisational cultures. Namely:
- Life sucks (a subsystem severed from other functional systems like tribes, gangs, and prison—2 percent of population).
- My life sucks (I am stuck in the Dumb Motor Vehicle line and can't believe I have to spend my time in this lost triangle of ineffectiveness—25 percent of population).
- I'm great (and you're not, I am detached from you and will dominate you regardless of your intent—48 percent of population).
- We are great, but other groups suck (an attitude of unification around more than individual competence—22 percent of population)
- Life is great (based around Desmond Tutu's hearing on truth and values as the basis of reconciliation—3 percent of population).
Clearly the desire here is to move the organisation toward stage 5, which is difficult almost to the point of impossibility.
Summary
As we have seen, the interaction between an individual and an organisation or the other individuals within the organisation can have an enormous effect on the effectiveness both of the individual and of the organisation, with it being incumbent upon us all to work toward ensuring we have the person best placed to do a job doing that job, and also to strive toward developing a strong organisational culture.
The motivation of the individual is key to success in this, with various theories having been propounded to explain human behaviour in this regard. It must always be remembered that humans are both the most socialised and most individualistic creatures on the planet – which sounds like a contradiction. This means that humans seek to belong but also to retain their own sense of self, and hence the drive should be to create an inclusive culture in which differences are not just tolerated but celebrated. It is this lack of homogeneity that leads to creative solutions to problems and tends to lead to less problems occurring in the first place.
References
Griffin, M. A., Landy, F. J., Mayocchi, L., (2002). ‘Australian influences on Elton Mayo: The construct of revery in industrial society’. History of Psychology, 5 (4), 356-375.
Mayo, E. (1924) Recovery and industrial fatigue. Journal of Personnel Research, 3, pp 273–281.
Pinder, C. C. (2008) Work Motivation in Organizational Behaviour (2nd Edition). New York: Psychology Press
Sackett, P. R. and Laczo, R. M. (2003) ‘Job and Work Analysis: Industrial and Organisational Psychology’, in Borman, W.C., Ilgen, D. R., and Klimoski R. J. (ed). Comprehensive Handbook of Psychology, Volume 12. New York: Wiley.
Schmitt, N., and Fine, S. A. (1983) ‘Inter-Rater Reliability of Judgements of Functional Levels and Skill Requirements of Jobs Based on Written Task Statements’, Journal of Occupational Psychology. 56 (2), pp 121-127