Appendix A Review
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REVIEW | Psychology at Work |
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
RETRIEVAL PRACTICE Take a moment to answer each of these Learning Objective Questions (repeated here from within this section). Then click the 'show answer' button to check your answers. Research suggests that trying to answer these questions on your own will improve your long-term retention (McDaniel et al., 2009).
A.1 What is flow, and what are the three subfields of industrial-organizational psychology?
Flow is a completely involved, focused state of consciousness with diminished awareness of self and time. It results from fully engaging one’s skills. Industrial-organizational (I/O) psychology’s three subfields are personnel, organizational, and human factors psychology.
A.2 How do personnel psychologists help organizations with employee selection, work placement, and performance appraisal?
Personnel psychologists work with organizations to devise selection methods for new employees; recruit and evaluate applicants; design and evaluate training programs; identify people’s strengths; analyze job content; and appraise individual and organizational performance. Unstructured, subjective interviews foster the interviewer illusion; structured interviews pinpoint job-relevant strengths and are better predictors of performance. Checklists, graphic rating scales, and behavior rating scales are useful performance appraisal methods.
A.3 What is the role of organizational psychologists?
Organizational psychologists examine influences on worker satisfaction and productivity and facilitate organizational change. Employee satisfaction and engagement tend to correlate with organizational success.
A.4 What are some effective leadership techniques?
Effective leaders harness job-relevant strengths; set specific challenging goals; and choose an appropriate leadership style. Leadership style may be goal-oriented (task leadership), group-oriented (social leadership), or some combination of the two.
A.5 How do human factors psychologists work to create user-friendly machines and work settings?
Human factors psychologists contribute to human safety and improved design by encouraging developers and designers to consider human perceptual abilities, to avoid the curse of knowledge, and to test users to reveal perception-based problems.
TERMS AND CONCEPTS TO REMEMBER
RETRIEVAL PRACTICE Match each of the terms on the left with its definition on the right. Click on the term first and then click on the matching definition. As you match them correctly they will move to the bottom of the activity.
Question
flow industrial-organizational (I/O) psychology personnel psychology organizational psychology human factors psychology structured interviews task leadership social leadership | group-oriented leadership that builds teamwork, mediates conflict, and offers support. an I/O psychology subfield that explores how people and machines interact and how machines and physical environments can be made safe and easy to use. applies psychology’s methods and principles to selecting and evaluating workers. Personnel psychologists match people with jobs, by identifying and placing well-suited candidates. goal-oriented leadership that sets standards, organizes work, and focuses attention on goals. interview process that asks the same job-relevant questions of all applicants, each of whom is rated on established scales. a completely involved, focused state of consciousness, with diminished awareness of self and time, resulting from optimal engagement of one’s skills. an I/O psychology subfield that examines organizational influences on worker satisfaction and productivity and facilitates organizational change. the application of psychological concepts and methods to optimizing human behavior in workplaces. |
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TEST
YOUR-
SELF PSYCHOLOGY AT WORK
Test yourself repeatedly throughout your studies. This will not only help you figure out what you know and don’t know; the testing itself will help you learn and remember the information more effectively thanks to the testing effect.
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A.1 People who view their work as a calling often experience ________, a focused state of consciousness, with diminished awareness of themselves and of time.
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A.2 psychologists study the recruitment, selection, placement, training, appraisal, and development of employees; psychologists focus on how people and machines interact, and on optimizing devices and work environments.
Personnel Psychology
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A.3 A personnel psychologist scripted a set of questions to ask all applicants for a job opening. She then trained the firm’s interviewers to ask only these questions, to take notes, and to rate applicants’ responses. This technique is known as a(n)
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A.4 In your job, you rate your own performance, your manager’s, and your peers’. Your manager, your peers, and your customers also rate your performance. Your organization is using a form of performance appraisal called
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Organizational Psychology
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A.5 What type of goals will best help you stay focused and motivated to do your best work in this class?
Focusing on specific, short-
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A.6 Research indicates that women are more likely than men to have a leadership style.
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A.7 Effective managers often exhibit
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The Human Factor
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A.8 To reduce users’ frustration and to avoid accidents, human factors psychologists help organizations avoid the curse of knowledge, which is the tendency for
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