Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [409]
Many of the functions of I/O psychologists, it is apparent, are primarily managerial; accordingly, we pass these by. But other functions, though serving management’s ends, are primarily psychological. A look at two of them will give some notion of how I/O psychologists apply their science to improving the fit between human beings and their jobs.
Fitting the job to the person: This consists in part of human engineering, but includes much more.
The human engineering aspects include a number of physical features of the workplace and job that I/O psychologists pay attention to. Among them:31
—the “work-space envelope,” including such factors as privacy and crowding, lighting, the spatial relationships of desks and chairs in relation to shelves, files, and doors, the best height for work surfaces, and many similar matters;
—noise in the workplace, which can generate stress and interfere with cognitive processes;
—specialization of the job, which makes for efficiency and high output, but workers who do the same thing all day (welding one corner of a car door, skinning chicken breasts, entering deposits and withdrawals on a computer) find their work monotonous, fatiguing, and lacking in meaning.
Psychologists can make useful suggestions about these workplace characteristics, but all of them cost money, although the argument has been made that more comfortable and less bored workers actually do more and better work and that employee turnover is reduced.
But human engineering is only one facet of the much larger subject of job satisfaction, a major concern of I/O psychologists. This is a broad and complex subject; we will content ourselves here with merely noting, first, the major organizational causes of job satisfaction, as summarized by psychologist Robert Baron of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and two co-authors.32
—a comfortable, pleasant work setting (the result of good solutions to the three engineering problems just mentioned),
—a fair reward system,
—high respect for the boss,
—participation in decision making, and
—appropriate workload.
In addition, there are four personal causes of job satisfaction:
—the individual’s status,
—seniority,
—a good match between the employee’s interests and work, and
—genetic factors. Genetic factors? Yes. Studies of identical twins separated at birth and raised apart have found that despite their different life upbringing and life experience, they have very similar levels of job satisfaction, which strongly suggests that innate personality traits play a considerable part in it.33
Fitting the person to the job: In large part this consists of assessing the ability of potential employees to perform a particular job. But in the case of managers, it also calls for appraising them after some years on the job in order to determine who has been moving up and looks like high-level material, and who seems stuck and unlikely ever to contribute much. Companies have good reason to want to know which prospective employees to bet on. One insurance company reckoned in 1974 that it cost $31,600 to replace a salesperson and $185,000 to replace a sales manager; the figures would be roughly four times as large today.34
Employee testing began, as we saw, before World War I. It has grown steadily ever since; nowadays a majority of large organizations and some smaller ones use tests in personnel selection. The evidence is that it pays off. A typical study, made for an artificial ice plant, found that of applicants for maintenance positions whose test scores ranged from 103 to 120, 94 percent were later rated as superior on the job; of those whose scores ranged from 60 to 86, only 25 percent were rated that highly.35
Tests for blue-collar jobs range from paper-and-pencil quizzes measuring knowledge of the job to “work sample tests