The Psychology of Work

Theoretically Based Empirical Research

Jeanne M. Brett, Fritz Drasgow

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781135649333
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

This edited volume is derived from a conference held in honor of Charles Hulin's contribution to the psychology of work. His research has carefully developed and tested theory related to job satisfaction, withdrawal from work, and sexual harassment. Edited by Hulin's students, The Psychology of Work discusses research in job satisfaction. This research shows that job satisfaction plays an essential role in theories of organizational behavior. Formal models are used, such as item response theory, structural equation modeling, and computational models. Three general and consistent themes in Hulin's research are represented in this book's chapters. The first theme is a focus on broad, general constructs, such as job satisfaction. The virtue of this approach is that a wide range of behavior can be explained by a small number of variables. The second theme involves the examination of the antecedents and consequences of job satisfaction. This theme is increasingly important because it ties research on job attitudes and job behaviors where links are consistently found to social attitudes and behaviors where links are rarely found. The third theme consists of Hulin's interest in the use of formal models to characterize and understand behavior. This volume will be of interest to scholars and students in industrial/organizational psychology, human resources, organizational behavior, and management.

Part I

THE HULIN LEGACY

Chapter 1

Lessons From Industrial and Organizational Psychology

Charles L. Hulin

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

CENTRALITY OF WORK IN LIVES IN MODERN SOCIETY

Industrial and Organizational (I-O) Psychology, to a greater extent than any other field of behavioral science, is concerned with one of the few fundamental elements of the life of an individual in our world. In the United States and other nations in the industrialized world, our work defines us. You are what you do. To do nothing is to be nothing. Just as doing nothing negates our humanity, we are defined privately and socially by our work.

Work, whether pleasant or painful, helps define individual identity. Strangers ask, “What do you do?” We reply to casual or ideological queries by naming skills or places of employment. We relate occupation to race, ethnicity, gender, region, and religion in struggling to comprehend the essential reality of self or community. Our daily tasks give lives coherence; by contrast, the lack of work denies our basic humanity. Workers uncomfortable with abstract discourse assert, “I am a workaholic” or “Hard work’s my middle name.” Philosophers may translate such vernacular lines into “I work, therefore I am.” (Green, 1993)

There are changes (but fewer than we think) from the days when we wore our occupation as our name. Our Anglo-Saxon ancestors named Archer Baker, Bowman, Butcher, Brewer, Carpenter, Cartwright, Clark, Cooper, Cook, Farrier, Fletcher, Hunter, Judge, Miller, Miner, Porter, Sawyer, Sheppard, Scribner, Shoemaker, Smith, Squire, Tailor, Tanner, Teacher, Tinker, Wagner, Weaver, and Wright, among others, were identified by their occupation. Other examples from other languages and cultures are easily found. We did not have to guess about others’ jobs nor did they have to announce their job in the first few sentences of a conversation for their place in the world to be known. We truly were what we did. We still are in less obvious but equally defining ways.

What Work Provides

Work is a source of identity. We no longer wear our occupation as our name so “What do you do?” is among the first questions we ask of a new acquaintance (perhaps the most generally exchanged bit of information about ourselves).

Work is a source of relationships outside the family. Our relationships with our work colleagues and supervisors define us and shape our views of the world as surely as do social roles.

Work is a source of obligatory activity. The obligatory activities and time constraints of work provide a structure to our everyday lives. Absent these structuring forces, quotidian activities may resemble all too much time fillers without purpose.

Work is a source of autonomy. In individualist cultures, autonomy is among the most strongly held values. Our autonomy, valued so highly in U.S. culture, rests on the foundation of a job, the money it provides, the goods that can be purchased with that money, and the intangible values of “standing on one’s own two feet.”

Work provides opportunities to develop skills and creativity. Aside from genetically influenced general cognitive abilities, the important skills and abilities we have are either developed or honed in the performance of a succession of jobs. We establish the base for these skills in the classroom but we develop them on the job.

Work is a source of purpose in life. The importance of family notwithstanding, work provides most of us with a sense of purpose. Among women, changes in the relative priority of marriage and family on one hand and work and a career on the other in industrialized societies suggest the overall importance of work may be increasing, at least among this segment of the population.

Work is a source of feelings of self-worth and self-esteem. Just as work provides a sense of purpose in life, accomplishments related to this purpose provide us with a sense of our self-worth and self-esteem. We gain self-esteem when we accomplish something worthwhile—and work is worthwhile.

Work is a source of income and security. Money is the universal fungible. Work, whatever the nature of the job, provides income that can be spent to acquire goods and services needed or desired. No other value received for work can be exchanged for the range of things that money can. Other values received from work may be more valued but none is as fungible. Money is a nearly universal metric used to measure accomplishments.

Work gives other activities, for example, leisure time, meaning. Absent work and work routines, our other activities would have no defining base. Not everything we do is measured against our work; work is, however, the source of activities that provides the ambient structure against which other activities are compared and defined.

Job Loss

Just as a job still defines today, the loss of a job has fundamental consequences for our lives. For example, when Gary Romans was fired by Caterpillar in Peoria, what troubled him more than the silence of the union was losing the company badge he had carried from the age of 18, as his father did before him for 31 years. Getting fired from the largest employer in a company town like Peoria is “… like an industrial death sentence. When you are fired, you have lost your identity, your sanctuary, and security” (Franklin, 1996).

Clifford Mills, executive vice president of Tazwood, a mental health center based in Pekin and serving the Peoria area, said after a prolonged Caterpillar strike that resulted in many employees being fired, “Trying to get these guys to respect themselves again is going to be the hard part for us clinically” (Franklin, 1996).

Clifford McCree returned to his former workplace 14 months after being fired from his maintenance job with the city of Miami. He killed five former coworkers, wounded one, and then killed himself. His suicide note read, “The economic lynching without regard or recourse was—is—something very evil. Since I couldn’t continue to support my family, life became nothing.… I also wanted to punish some … that helped bring this about” (“In Suicide Note,” 1996).

“Going postal” is now a part of our everyday language. It almost always refers to somebody killing former co-workers or supervisors because of real or imagined problems at work or the removal of work or a job from one’s life. But, just as suicide is the final culmination in a long series of self-destructive behaviors, “going postal” is but the tip of the iceberg of interpersonal aggressiveness and abuse individuals experience and dispense in organizations (Glomb, 1998, in press). The consequences for individuals and organizations of anger and aggression in the workplace are significant and long-term. Patterns of such incidents, both aggressing and being aggressed against, are predictable by a combination of individual differences and organizational characteristics (Glomb, 1998). These relations highlight the need for research into an aspect of work in organizations that may erupt into violence when individuals are denied a job and the dignity that goes with it.

In the United States, when the size of the population is controlled, the number of employed persons and the number of suicides are correlated −.59 (p < .01) across years (Cook, Dintzer, & Mark, 1980). The direction of this correlation no surprise; the size of the relationship, describing an effect size of ~.6 in the relationship between suicide and lack of work across years, may be somewhat surprising. The results of a lack of a job are not phenomena restricted to the United States or Western societies. In Japan, they are experiencing the highest unemployment levels in post-war history and the highest number and largest percentage of people committing suicide, nearly 33,000 in 1998 (Strom, 1999). These trends in suicide began in 1990 when the bubble of Japan’s economy burst. There was a 44.6% increase in suicide in 1998 over 1997 among men ages 40 to 59. Forty percent more men in their 20s committed suicide in 1998. These trends have not changed in the past 2 years. These are noteworthy figures because this is the period of time when young men traditionally counted on becoming shaiin, members of society by means of entering the work force. This portal to society is opened only a crack today compared to previous years. The shame of not having ajob is almost unbearable among Japanese men. Men without a job—even employed men fearful of losing their job—are killing themselves. The effects of job loss or a lack of ajob may be magnified in Japan because the threshold for suicide is reduced; suicide has little of the stigma it has in the United States or other Western societies.

But in other nations, functionally related responses that reflect indirect self-destruction (Baumeister & Scher, 1988; Faberow, 1980) will be enacted as surely as people are deprived of a job and their pride is eroded. Few modern societies or cultures have true “coming of age and independence” ceremonies. Jobs and work are the defining elements of adulthood. Acquiring full-time work is often the only obvious event marking the transition from childhood. The loss of a job, either through layoff, firing, or retirement is a major life event; it may mark a return to dependency on one’s family, spouse, or the government. In an individualist culture such as the United States (Triandis, 1994; chap. 5, this volume), dependency is functionally equivalent to being shunned in a collectivist culture; they are both threats to one’s identity.

When we deny a person’s work, we deny many things other than income—things that represent the difference between existence and a life seen as valuable. We gain self-esteem when we do something worthwhile, not when we mouth psychobabble slogans about our importance in the cosmos; our jobs provide the most frequent source of accomplishments. When a job is lost, low self-esteem and its consequences follow. We rarely have to retreat to our own private Walden Pond to learn if we have lived; we do that by examining our accomplishments.

Work, Population Demographics, and Public Policy

Work and jobs and expectations about jobs influence ages, and the changes in these ages, at which we marry (22.5 years for males and 20.6 years for females in 1970, and 26 years for males and 24 years for females in 1990) when we have our first children (21.8 years in 1960 to 24 years in 1990), and even if we get married (72% in the 1970s; 61% in 1990). These are very large changes in population demographics across approximately 20 years. The birth rate in the United States has dropped to near the replacement rate of ~2.1. Fertility rates are substantially below population replacement rates in many Western, industrialized nations, for example, Sweden, Ireland, and Italy in the European Union. Their birth rates are sufficiently below population replacement rates that they have significant (negative) implications for the nation.

The most frequent reason given for delayed beginnings of families, for limitations on family size, increasing ages of marriage, or even marriage at all, is interference with working careers of potential mothers. When work or a career are seen as limited by marriage and a family, the latter are frequently giving way to the former. Some countries, for example, Sweden, have instituted public policies to increase birth rates and family sizes by making parenthood compatible with working careers. A similar but weaker Family Friendly Leave Act addresses the same issues in the United States.

Changes in women’s priorities, balancing or even reversing the relative importance of marriage and family on one hand, and ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I: The Hulin Legacy
• Part II: Research on the Psychology of Work
• Section B Antecedents and Outcomes of Satisfaction
• Section C: Modeling Organizational Behavior
• Author Index
• Subject Index