General Psychology Chapter 13 - Lecture Notes

Learning Objectives By the end of this section, you will be able to: • Describe the field of human factors psychology • Explain the role of human factors psychology in safety, productivity, and job satisfaction Human factors psychology (or ergonomics, a term that is favored in Europe) is the third subject area within industrial and organizational psychology. This field is concerned with the integration of the humanmachine interface in the workplace, through design, and specifically with researching and designing machines that fit human requirements. The integration may be physical or cognitive, or a combination of both. Anyone who needs to be convinced that the field is necessary need only try to operate an unfamiliar television remote control or use a new piece of software for the first time. Whereas the two other areas of IO psychology focus on the interface between the worker and team, group, or organization, human factors psychology focuses on the individual worker’s interaction with a machine, work station, information displays, and the local environment, such as lighting. In the United States, human factors psychology has origins in both psychology and engineering; this is reflected in the early contributions of Lillian Gilbreth (psychologist and engineer) and her husband Frank Gilbreth (engineer). Human factor professionals are involved in design from the beginning of a project, as is more common in software design projects, or toward the end in testing and evaluation, as is more common in traditional industries (Howell, 2003). Another important role of human factor professionals is in the development of regulations and principles of best design. These regulations and principles are often related to work safety. For example, the Three Mile Island nuclear accident lead to Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) requirements for additional instrumentation in nuclear facilities to provide operators with more critical information and increased operator training (United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 2013). The Chapter 13 | Industrial-Organizational Psychology 479 American National Standards Institute (ANSI, 2000), an independent developer of industrial standards, develops many standards related to ergonomic design, such as the design of control-center workstations that are used for transportation control or industrial process control. Many of the concerns of human factors psychology are related to workplace safety. These concerns can be studied to help prevent work-related injuries of individual workers or those around them. Safety protocols may also be related to activities, such as commercial driving or flying, medical procedures, and law enforcement, that have the potential to impact the public. One of the methods used to reduce accidents in the workplace is a checklist. The airline industry is one industry that uses checklists. Pilots are required to go through a detailed checklist of the different parts of the aircraft before takeoff to ensure that all essential equipment is working correctly. Astronauts also go through checklists before takeoff. The surgical safety checklist shown in Figure 13.14 was developed by the World Health Organization (WHO) and serves as the basis for many checklists at medical facilities. Figure 13.14 Checklists, such as the WHO surgical checklist shown here, help reduce workplace accidents. 480 Chapter 13 | Industrial-Organizational Psychology This OpenStax book is available for free at https://cnx.org/content/col11629/1.5 Safety concerns also lead to limits to how long an operator, such as a pilot or truck driver, is allowed to operate the equipment. Recently the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) introduced limits for how long a pilot is allowed to fly without an overnight break. Howell (2003) outlines some important areas of research and practice in the field of human factors. These are summarized in Table 13.3 As an example of research in human factors psychology Bruno & Abrahão (2012) examined the impact of the volume of operator decisions on the accuracy of decisions made within an information security center at a banking institution in Brazil. The study examined a total of about 45,000 decisions made by 35 operators and 4 managers over a period of 60 days. Their study found that as the number of decisions made per day by the operators climbed, that is, as their cognitive effort increased, the operators made more mistakes in falsely identifying incidents as real security breaches (when, in reality, they were not). Interestingly, the opposite mistake of identifying real intrusions as false alarms did not increase with increased cognitive demand. This appears to be good news for the bank, since false alarms are not as costly as incorrectly rejecting a genuine threat. These kinds of studies combine research on attention, perception, teamwork, and human–computer interactions in a field of considerable societal and business significance. This is exactly the context of the events that led to the massive data breach for Target in the fall of 2013. Indications are that security personnel received signals of a security breach but did not interpret them correctly, thus allowing the breach to continue for two weeks until an outside agency, the FBI, informed the company (Riley, Elgin, Lawrence, & Matlack, 2014). Chapter 13 | Industrial-Organizational Psychology 481 Americans with Disabilities Act bona fide occupational qualification (BFOQ) checklist diversity training downsizing Hawthorne effect human factors psychology immutable characteristic industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology industrial psychology job analysis job satisfaction organizational culture organizational psychology performance appraisal procedural justice scientific management sexual harassment telecommuting Theory X Key Terms employers cannot discriminate against any individual based on a disability requirement of certain occupations for which denying an individual employment would otherwise violate the law, such as requirements concerning religion or sex method used to reduce workplace accidents training employees about cultural differences with the goal of improving teamwork process in which an organization tries to achieve greater overall efficiency by reducing the number of employees increase in performance of individuals who are noticed, watched, and paid attention to by researchers or supervisors branch of psychology that studies how workers interact with the tools of work and how to design those tools to optimize workers’ productivity, safety, and health traits that employers cannot use to discriminate in hiring, benefits, promotions, or termination; these traits are fundamental to one’s personal identity (e.g. skin color and hair texture) field in psychology that applies scientific principles to the study of work and the workplace branch of psychology that studies job characteristics, applicant characteristics, and how to match them; also studies employee training and performance appraisal determining and listing tasks associated with a particular job degree of pleasure that employees derive from their job values, visions, hierarchies, norms and interactions between its employees; how an organization is run, how it operates, and how it makes decisions branch of psychology that studies the interactions between people working in organizations and the effects of those interactions on productivity evaluation of an employee’s success or lack of success at performing the duties of the job fairness by which means are used to achieve results in an organization theory of management that analyzed and synthesized workflows with the main objective of improving economic efficiency, especially labor productivity sexually-based behavior that is knowingly unwanted and has an adverse effect of a person’s employment status, interferes with a person’s job performance, or creates a hostile or intimidating work environment employees’ ability to set their own hours allowing them to work from home at different parts of the day assumes workers are inherently lazy and unproductive; managers must have control and use punishments 482 Chapter 13 | Industrial-Organizational Psychology This OpenStax book is available for free at https://cnx.org/content/col11629/1.5 Theory Y transactional leadership style transformational leadership style U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) work team workplace violence work–family balance assumes workers are people who seek to work hard and productively; managers and workers can find creative solutions to problems; workers do not need to be controlled and punished characteristic of leaders who focus on supervision and organizational goals achieved through a system of rewards and punishments; maintenance of the organizational status quo characteristic of leaders who are charismatic role models, inspirational, intellectually stimulating, and individually considerate and who seek to change the organization responsible for enforcing federal laws that make it illegal to discriminate against a job applicant or an employee because of the person’s race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability, or genetic information group of people within an organization or company given a specific task to achieve together violence or the threat of violence against workers; can occur inside or outside the workplace occurs when people juggle the demands of work life with the demands of family life Summary 13.1 What Is Industrial and Organizational Psychology? The field of I-O psychology had its birth in industrial psychology and the use of psychological concepts to aid in personnel selection. However, with research such as the Hawthorne study, it was found that productivity was affected more by human interaction and not physical factors; the field of industrial psychology expanded to include organizational psychology. Both WWI and WWII had a strong influence on the development of an expansion of industrial psychology in the United States and elsewhere: The tasks the psychologists were assigned led to development of tests and research in how the psychological concepts could assist industry and other areas. This movement aided in expanding industrial psychology to include organizational psychology. 13.2 Industrial Psychology: Selecting and Evaluating Employees Industrial psychology studies the attributes of jobs, applicants of those jobs, and methods for assessing fit to a job. These procedures include job analysis, applicant testing, and interviews. It also studies and puts into place procedures for the orientation of new employees and ongoing training of employees. The process of hiring employees can be vulnerable to bias, which is illegal, and industrial psychologists must develop methods for adhering to the law in hiring. Performance appraisal systems are an active area of research and practice in industrial psychology. 13.3 Organizational Psychology: The Social Dimension of Work Organizational psychology is concerned with the effects of interactions among people in the workplace on the employees themselves and on organizational productivity. Job satisfaction and its determinants and outcomes are a major focus of organizational psychology research and practice. Organizational psychologists have also studied the effects of management styles and leadership styles on productivity. In addition to the employees and management, organizational psychology also looks at the organizational culture and how that might affect productivity. One aspect of organization culture is the prevention and addressing of sexual and other forms of harassment in the workplace. Sexual harassment includes language, behavior, or displays that create a hostile environment; it also includes sexual favors requested in exchange for workplace rewards (i.e., quid pro quo). Industrial-organizational psychology has Chapter 13 | Industrial-Organizational Psychology 483 conducted extensive research on the triggers and causes of workplace violence and safety. This enables the organization to establish procedures that can identify these triggers before they become a problem. 13.4 Human Factors Psychology and Workplace Design Human factors psychology, or ergonomics, studies the interface between workers and their machines and physical environments. Human factors psychologists specifically seek to design machines to better support the workers using them. Psychologists may be involved in design of work tools such as software, displays, or machines from the beginning of the design process or during the testing an already developed product. Human factor psychologists are also involved in the development of best design recommendations and regulations. One important aspect of human factors psychology is enhancing worker safety. Human factors research involves efforts to understand and improve interactions between technology systems and their human operators. Human–software interactions are a large sector of this research.