The California School of Organizational Studies Handbook of Organizational Consulting Psychology

A Comprehensive Guide to Theory, Skills, and Techniques

Rodney L. Lowman, Rodney L. Lowman

• Éditeur: Jossey-Bass
• Année: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781119177869
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Psychologie
• Sous-sujet: Industrie- & Organisationspsychologie

Discover a wealth of issues in the field of consulting psychologywith this landmark book. Explore key topics in assessment andevaluation, building teams, executive coaching, career counseling, interpersonal conflicts and relationships, benefit design, personality testing, and much more. Learn to delineate and betterunderstand the wide array of information you are faced with, andbecome more adept and knowledgeable in the field of consultingpsychology. This comprehensive volume has expert contributorsrecruited by the volume's editor--himself an eminent educator andpractitioner in the field. You will get:
* Special issues in consulting to specific types of organizationsincluding industry, schools, government, non-profit, andinternational
* Informative guidelines for professional practiceprocedures
* Organized sections on individual, group and organizationalissues
* And much more!

PART ONE
FOUNDATIONS OF ORGANIZATIONAL CONSULTING PSYCHOLOGY

CHAPTER ONE
Individual-Level Variables in Organizational Consultation

Andrew D. Carson

Riverside Publishing

Rodney L. Lowman

California School of Organization Studies, Alliant International University

Organizational consulting psychologists work at multiple levels: directly with individuals, as with executive coaching, with dysfunctional or functional groups, or with the organizational system as a whole. Fundamentally, however, organizations are composed of individuals. Consulting psychologists—whatever their level of expertise at the group and organizational levels—are wise to understand people at the individual level if they wish to be effective in their various roles.

THE CONCEPT OF INDIVIDUAL-LEVEL VARIABLES

This chapter therefore identifies individual-level variables that we feel organizational consulting psychologists should understand. These dimensions are relevant, for example, in conducting assessments or individual coaching. For example, individuals tend to congregate and interact in their work lives with other people who in important psychological respects are similar to themselves (see Holland, 1997; Lowman, 1991, 1993a, 1993b). To some extent, the nature of an organization or occupation is determined by the predominant types of individuals within it, because the types of people (for example, whether intellectual or mechanical, or exuberant and open versus rigid and conservative) will help create the tone and values of the organization. Perhaps of single greatest importance are the individual characteristics of those in leadership roles in the organization (Boudreau, Boswell, & Judge, 2001; Roberts & Hogan, 2001). In addition, individual-level variables retain importance as background or contextual information when working at the group or organizational level, as different change approaches will work either better or worse with different types of individuals or groups of individuals.

Specific aspects of consulting that focus primarily at the individual level, and for which an understanding of individual-level variables are particularly important, include:

• Individual assessment for purposes of selection
• Individual evaluation of fitness for duty
• Interventions to change problematic individual behavior
• Interventions designed to improve or optimize individual-level functioning
• Assessment for purposes of career assessment and counseling

Other chapters in this book (for example, Kilburg, 2002) address specific aspects of the applications of consulting psychology at the individual level. In this introductory chapter, we map the basic variables, or ingredients, demonstrated to have work and organizational relevance in the practice of consulting psychology. Not every individual-level variable will be equally important in each application, but a broad understanding of individual differences—how individuals differ on individual-level variables—will generally make for more effective applications.

This chapter therefore serves as a general introduction on the stable characteristics of people that affect both work adjustment and how individuals seek to fit into groups and organizations. We will discuss these variables in two sets: traits rooted in the structure of personality, and presumably with a relatively larger influence from biological or even genetic factors, and those that appear to have a relatively larger cultural component and are aspects of character. In practice, it is difficult to draw a firm dividing line between these sets of variables. Even so, it is useful for the consulting psychologist to conceptualize a distinction between these two groups of variables, because traits are more difficult to modify, while character may—with effective interventions or policies— change or be changed, at least in its behavioral expressions.

INDIVIDUAL TRAITS

Over a century of research on differential psychology (see Hough, 2001; Lowman, 1991) has focused on four domains of traits that are relevant for vocational and organizational selection: interests, abilities, personality, and features of psychopathology not already part of these domains. Ability traits have been shown to determine whether one can do something (see Carroll, 1993), personality traits the manner of how one does something, and interest traits the degree to which one is drawn or naturally motivated to do something. Abilities refer to performance, dimensions of personality to style, and interests to motivation. We shall address the first three areas; those interested in the nature of psychopathology and how it affects work adjustment can refer to Lowman (1989, 1993a).

Much of what we know about the dimensions of individual difference traits derives from factor analytic methods. Our reliance on factor analysis and related methods to identify traits is to some degree ironic and has some limitations. The irony is that the methods to identify psychological variables presumed to be important for specific individuals depend on identifying what is in common across individuals. This is not paradoxical, however, since individual uniqueness derives from the idiosyncratic combinations of sets of variables at the individual level that collectively define who a person is. Such variables may also be relevant to organizational behavior and vocational adjustment, but it is difficult for an organizational consulting psychologist to identify them except through careful assessment or finely tuned clinical sensitivities. Other limitations of the methods arise from their inability to identify their relations to, say, biological or social causes. The methods are correlational and simply identify variables that hang together. Also, overly zealous advocates of the methods assume that broad factors identified through the methods are necessarily the most important and represent all the important variables in a domain. Neither is necessarily the case. It may be that particular facets of a broad factor are, in some applied contexts, more important to know and work with than the broad factor itself. Additionally, some important variables may be relatively rare but still important, and factor analytic methods will generally miss these.

Character and Memes

Characteristics of individuals also exist that are more likely to mature given particular cross-domain or iterative combinations of primary characteristics. Such characteristics also develop only through interaction with, and through acquiring ideas provided by, the groups, organizations, and the wider culture in which the individual matures. Examples include identity, leadership, creativity, entrepreneurial character, and values (and particularly complex combinations of values, such as religious or philosophical beliefs).

Many of these variables may function as memes (see Blackmore, 1999; Brodie, 1996), that is, as “elements of a culture that may be considered to be passed on by non-genetic means, especially imitation” (Oxford English Dictionary, cited in Blackmore, p. viii). A term originally coined by Dawkins (1976), memes serve, within individuals, as the means of storage, replication, and transfer of complexes of ideas active at the cultural level. They act as a bridge between the individual, group, and organization. Of course, one might argue that memes constitute an interaction of two ability factors—crystallized intelligence and memory—but advocates of meme theory might argue that memes merely exploit such ability and other resources as a means of replicating themselves across individuals. For example, memes that direct individuals to act in creative ways might be more likely to copy into individuals with particular personality traits (high on openness, and high on the facets of aesthetics, ideas, and fantasy) and interests (artistic). Once incorporated by the individual, a creativity-related meme might serve to maximize behaviors that make use of particular abilities (for example, cultural literacy, ideational fluency, associational fluency, expressional fluency, originality/creativity), which would in turn increase the likelihood of the meme’s transmission to others.

With those cautions in mind, we will briefly outline the characteristics of traits identified through research. Readers interested in a systematic treatment beyond this discussion can consult Lowman (1991).

INTERESTS

Interests refer to individual differences that govern the degree to which one feels that one must do something. Interests therefore relate to the element of motivation (or perhaps compulsion) regarding approach-avoidance behavior. Strong (1955), one of the pioneers of the measurement of interests, stated that they direct us toward “activities for which we have liking or disliking and which we go toward or away from, or concerning which we at least continue or discontinue the status quo; furthermore, they may or may not be preferred to other interests and they may continue varying over time. Or an interest may be defined as a liking/disliking state of mind accompanying the doing of an activity, or the thought of performing the activity” (pp. 138). Interests do not require conscious thought; Strong (1943) said, “they remind me of tropisms. We go toward liked activities, go away from disliked activities” (p. 7).

Types of Interest Patterns

Holland (1997) extended earlier findings of basic factors of interests into a very popular theory of six main personal orientations, or interest structures. Some authors have challenged the criticality of the six factors, and suggest instead that the number of factors is essentially arbitrary, or that there might exist more important underlying, second-order, or meta-factors (see Lowman & Carson, in press). However, the six factors persist both in the research literature and in most popular treatments. Our present concern is therefore with the six personal orientations (Holland, 1959) that focus on interests, and not with his subsequently proposed vocational personality types (Holland, 1997), which are superordinate constructs that subsume interests as well as abilities, temperaments, values, and other variables. However, we shall refer to the six orientations by the same ter...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• INTRODUCTION
• PART ONE: FOUNDATIONS OF ORGANIZATIONAL CONSULTING PSYCHOLOGY
• PART TWO: INDIVIDUAL LEVEL APPLICATIONS
• PART THREE: GROUP LEVEL APPLICATIONS
• PART FOUR: ORGANIZATIONAL LEVEL ISSUES
• PART FIVE: BRIDGING LEVELS
• PART SIX: ISSUES IN CONSULTING TO SPECIFIC TYPES OF ORGANIZATIONS AND FOR SPECIFIC TYPES OF CONSULTING
• PART SEVEN: MEASUREMENT, EVALUATION, AND EFFECTIVENESS ISSUES
• PART EIGHT: PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE ISSUES
• APPENDIX: Principles for Education and Training at the Doctoral and Post-Doctoral Level in Consulting Psychology/Organizational
• ABOUT THE EDITOR
• ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
• NAME INDEX
• SUBJECT INDEX
• End User License Agreement