Thema 1: Work & work behaviour (2 questions)
Work
set of coordinated and goal-directed activities that are conducted in exchange for something else
Work in three sectors:
1. Agricultures → including forestry, hunting and fishing
2. Industry → manufacturing, mining and construction
3. Services → including transportation, communication, public utilities, trade, fiance and public
administration
Work is an essential part of our lives
- work is super prevalent: > 3.5 billion people are employed
- work is super invasive:
- full-timers spend half of their time on work
- private time is partly spent on work (overtime, commuting, thinking about work)
- impact on health, happiness and personality
- work is here to stay → working life well be prolonged (67+)
- technology paradox: instead of work becoming less because of advanced technology coming in, work
is still growing because that technology also needs to be operated
Benefits from work
- Income (indepence, availability of new resources)
- Social benefits:
- time structure, regular activity
- opportunities for social contact
- social identity (source of status and self-esteem)
- sharing of common purpose and feeling meaningful
- opportunities for learning and development
→ leading to higher levels of general health and life satisfaction
Many changes in society that impact organisations: changes in work
- intensification (work load, time pressure...)
- flexibilization (time, place, contracts… → work / life balance)
- mentalisation (service work and knowledge has become more important; increasing mental load)
- digitalisation (requires more digital skills)
- prolonged working life
What about healthy life expectancy?
- not rising to similar extent, if at all
- strongly related to educational level (no gender differences)
- lower education more likely to have unhealthy lifestyle + more unhealthy jobs (e.g. more physical)
Organisational change
- flexible vs. control (vertical axis)
- internal orientation vs. external orientation (horizontal axis)
Control + External orientation rational goal = focus on results, productivity, competition, profit
Control + Internal orientation internal process = focus on order, procedures, structure, quality
Flexible + External orientation open system = focus on innovation, change, growth, entrepreneurship
Flexible + Internal orientation human relations = focus on people, teamwork, cooperation
,How can Work & Organisational psychology help people to work in a motivated, productive and healthy way
during their entire working life?
→ Sustainable performance
Three overlapping subdisplinices:
1. Work (and Health) psychology
2. Organisational psychology
3. Personnel psychology (HRM)
Work (and Health) psychology
How should work, work conditions and work and resting times be structured in order to guarantee work quality
and good health and to optimise performance?
- compatibility work conditions and worker
- job design, fatigue, stress, motivation, sickness absence
Organisational psychology
How should organisations and business processes be structured to make people collaborate as efficiently and
effectively as possible?
- working efficient and effective as a team
- organisational structure & culture, leadership, organisational change, dealing with resistance
Personnel psychology (HRM)
How can we ensure an optimal person-job fit and flow of people through an organisation, in which individual
capacities and desires (continue to) match work demands and opportunities within the organisation?
- inflow, flow through and outflow of people in an organisation
- recruitment & selection, development of competences, performance appraisal, (financial) reward
systems
Scientific Management assumptions
- ‘one best way’
- workers are stupid and lazy by nature
- money is the only motivator
- managerial control is necessary to gain more profit
Taylor’s four principles of Scientific Management:
1. Scientific approach: time & motion studies
- broke each job down into its individual motions, analysed these to determine which were
essential + timed workers with a stopwatch
- unnecessary motion eliminated → worker, following machinelike routine, became far more
productive
2. Selection of right worker for job
- determine best way for worker to do job
3. Training and development of worker
- provide proper tools and training
- provide incentives for good performance
4. Separation of head and handwork: managers think, workers do
Results of Scientific Management
- rise of productivity and profit
- workers felt exploited
- protests form labour unions
- US Congress investigation lead to ban on stopwatch in work environment
- but: Taylorism is still alive and successful
, Ford Motor Company
- first assembly line
- man is extension of machine
- standard products + mass production
- no rights to labour unions
- but: not appreciated by workforce
Timeline
1920s Large companies look to psychology for selection → collaboration between engineers and
psychologists; psychological test development and ergonomics
1930 - 1940 Human Relations movement:
- social aspect
- two-way communication
- good leadership
WWII Army Aviation Psychology programme
After WWII - growth of selection psychology
- also broadening: ‘Organisational psychology’
- learning & training
- leadership
- fatigue, stress
- safety, ergonomics
1960s - wave of democratisation
- criticism of selection psychology
- ‘servants of power’
- opposition of labour unions
1970s < Differentiation, broadening and scientist deepening of W&O psychology
Current challenges for W&O psychology
Self-determination theory = people are motivated to grow and change by 3 innate and universal
psychological needs → able to become self-determined when their 3 needs are fulfilled:
1. Autonomy
- challenge: how about responsibility when algorithms are making decisions?
2. Competence
- challenge: how about competence and deskilling of workers (e.g. in call centres)?
3. Relatedness
- challenge: how about relatedness in a business like Uber?
Thema 2: Organisations, groups & leadership (1 question)
Organisation
collection of people who work together and coordinate their actions to achieve individual and organisational
goals
Organisations as open systems
- inputs → transformation process (system) → outputs (stakeholders) → feedback → input …
- closed system would lead to …
- isolation form the environment
- excessive emphasis on internal functioning, coordination and control as an end in itself
- perception of external events as unimportant, ‘noise’ or ‘mistakes’
- lack of interest in feedback
Work
set of coordinated and goal-directed activities that are conducted in exchange for something else
Work in three sectors:
1. Agricultures → including forestry, hunting and fishing
2. Industry → manufacturing, mining and construction
3. Services → including transportation, communication, public utilities, trade, fiance and public
administration
Work is an essential part of our lives
- work is super prevalent: > 3.5 billion people are employed
- work is super invasive:
- full-timers spend half of their time on work
- private time is partly spent on work (overtime, commuting, thinking about work)
- impact on health, happiness and personality
- work is here to stay → working life well be prolonged (67+)
- technology paradox: instead of work becoming less because of advanced technology coming in, work
is still growing because that technology also needs to be operated
Benefits from work
- Income (indepence, availability of new resources)
- Social benefits:
- time structure, regular activity
- opportunities for social contact
- social identity (source of status and self-esteem)
- sharing of common purpose and feeling meaningful
- opportunities for learning and development
→ leading to higher levels of general health and life satisfaction
Many changes in society that impact organisations: changes in work
- intensification (work load, time pressure...)
- flexibilization (time, place, contracts… → work / life balance)
- mentalisation (service work and knowledge has become more important; increasing mental load)
- digitalisation (requires more digital skills)
- prolonged working life
What about healthy life expectancy?
- not rising to similar extent, if at all
- strongly related to educational level (no gender differences)
- lower education more likely to have unhealthy lifestyle + more unhealthy jobs (e.g. more physical)
Organisational change
- flexible vs. control (vertical axis)
- internal orientation vs. external orientation (horizontal axis)
Control + External orientation rational goal = focus on results, productivity, competition, profit
Control + Internal orientation internal process = focus on order, procedures, structure, quality
Flexible + External orientation open system = focus on innovation, change, growth, entrepreneurship
Flexible + Internal orientation human relations = focus on people, teamwork, cooperation
,How can Work & Organisational psychology help people to work in a motivated, productive and healthy way
during their entire working life?
→ Sustainable performance
Three overlapping subdisplinices:
1. Work (and Health) psychology
2. Organisational psychology
3. Personnel psychology (HRM)
Work (and Health) psychology
How should work, work conditions and work and resting times be structured in order to guarantee work quality
and good health and to optimise performance?
- compatibility work conditions and worker
- job design, fatigue, stress, motivation, sickness absence
Organisational psychology
How should organisations and business processes be structured to make people collaborate as efficiently and
effectively as possible?
- working efficient and effective as a team
- organisational structure & culture, leadership, organisational change, dealing with resistance
Personnel psychology (HRM)
How can we ensure an optimal person-job fit and flow of people through an organisation, in which individual
capacities and desires (continue to) match work demands and opportunities within the organisation?
- inflow, flow through and outflow of people in an organisation
- recruitment & selection, development of competences, performance appraisal, (financial) reward
systems
Scientific Management assumptions
- ‘one best way’
- workers are stupid and lazy by nature
- money is the only motivator
- managerial control is necessary to gain more profit
Taylor’s four principles of Scientific Management:
1. Scientific approach: time & motion studies
- broke each job down into its individual motions, analysed these to determine which were
essential + timed workers with a stopwatch
- unnecessary motion eliminated → worker, following machinelike routine, became far more
productive
2. Selection of right worker for job
- determine best way for worker to do job
3. Training and development of worker
- provide proper tools and training
- provide incentives for good performance
4. Separation of head and handwork: managers think, workers do
Results of Scientific Management
- rise of productivity and profit
- workers felt exploited
- protests form labour unions
- US Congress investigation lead to ban on stopwatch in work environment
- but: Taylorism is still alive and successful
, Ford Motor Company
- first assembly line
- man is extension of machine
- standard products + mass production
- no rights to labour unions
- but: not appreciated by workforce
Timeline
1920s Large companies look to psychology for selection → collaboration between engineers and
psychologists; psychological test development and ergonomics
1930 - 1940 Human Relations movement:
- social aspect
- two-way communication
- good leadership
WWII Army Aviation Psychology programme
After WWII - growth of selection psychology
- also broadening: ‘Organisational psychology’
- learning & training
- leadership
- fatigue, stress
- safety, ergonomics
1960s - wave of democratisation
- criticism of selection psychology
- ‘servants of power’
- opposition of labour unions
1970s < Differentiation, broadening and scientist deepening of W&O psychology
Current challenges for W&O psychology
Self-determination theory = people are motivated to grow and change by 3 innate and universal
psychological needs → able to become self-determined when their 3 needs are fulfilled:
1. Autonomy
- challenge: how about responsibility when algorithms are making decisions?
2. Competence
- challenge: how about competence and deskilling of workers (e.g. in call centres)?
3. Relatedness
- challenge: how about relatedness in a business like Uber?
Thema 2: Organisations, groups & leadership (1 question)
Organisation
collection of people who work together and coordinate their actions to achieve individual and organisational
goals
Organisations as open systems
- inputs → transformation process (system) → outputs (stakeholders) → feedback → input …
- closed system would lead to …
- isolation form the environment
- excessive emphasis on internal functioning, coordination and control as an end in itself
- perception of external events as unimportant, ‘noise’ or ‘mistakes’
- lack of interest in feedback
