Industrial Psychology (20-30)

Industrial Psychology

Functional Departmentalization

• Easier communication with sub-units
• Application of high technical knowledge for solving problems
• Greater group and professional identification
• Less duplication of staff activities
• Higher product quality
• Increased organizational efficiency

Product-Based Departmentalization

• Less conflict between major sub-units
• Easier communication between subunits
• Less complex coordination mechanisms
• Providing a training ground for top management
• More customer orientation
• Greater concern for long-term issues

Decentralization and Centralization

Line and Staff Relationship

• Line Authority: Refers to the scalar chain or the superior-subordinate linkages that extend throughout the hierarchy
  • Line: Achieve objectives
  • Staff: Support the line employees

Types of Staff

• Specialized Staff: Conduct technical work that is beyond the time or knowledge capacity of top management, such as conducting market research and forecasting
• General Staff: Consists of staff assistants to whom managers assign work
• Organization Staff: Provide services to the organization as a whole; their role is to integrate different operations across departments

Job Design

• Developing new jobs or adding responsibilities to existing jobs
  • Process of assigning tasks to a job, including interdependency of those tasks with other jobs
  • Allows a company to more easily reach its goals by having more employees perform more tasks within the organization
  • May involve developing a new position or simply adjusting the set of tasks that a current position encompasses

Job Design Elements

• Define tasks and form them into natural work units to organize duties
• Structuring the content and size of jobs for efficient task performance, flexibility, and worker satisfaction
• Assignment of goals and tasks that are to be accomplished by employees
• Job Specialization: Occurs when the work required is subdivided into separate jobs assigned to different people to improve work efficiency
• Job Enrichment: An employee assumes more responsibility over the tasks
  • Combining highly interdependent tasks into one job (Natural Grouping)
  • Feel sense of ownership, therefore, increase job quality
  • Putting employees in direct contact with their clients rather than using another group or the supervisor as the liaison between employee and the customer (Establishing Client Relationships)
• Job Rotation: Workers are rotated among a variety of jobs, spending a certain length of time at each
  • Exposing workers to as many areas of the organization as possible so they can gain a good knowledge of its workings and how the various jobs and departments fit together
  • Increases worker flexibility, eliminates boredom, and increases worker satisfaction
• Job Enlargement: Adding tasks to an existing job
  • Might involve combining two or more complete jobs into one or just adding one or two more tasks to an existing job
  • Significantly improve work efficiency and flexibility
  • Employees are motivated when they perform a variety of tasks and have the freedom and knowledge to structure their work to achieve the highest satisfaction and performance

Re-engineering

• Fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical contemporary measures of performance, such as costs, quality, service, and speed

Organizational Structures

Team Organization/Team-Based

• Collaboration with other workers to get the job done
• Each worker is viewed as knowledgeable and skilled
• Team members have considerable input into organizational decision-making
• Less emphasis on organizational status
• More flexible and responsive in turbulent environments
• Reduce costs

Project Task Force/Network

• Offer flexibility to realign their structure with changing environmental requirements
• Enable flexible and adaptive response to dynamic environments
• Creates the best of the best organization to focus resources on customer and market needs
• Enables each organization to leverage a distinctive competency
• Permits rapid global expansion
• Can produce synergistic results

Centralized

• Uniformity, each department should operate with some average level of quality and efficiency
• More efficient operations

Decentralized

• Can make their own decisions
• Decision-making and problems are solved at lower levels, more

Report to Two Bosses

• Report to two bosses simultaneously can cause confusion and conflict
• Increases conflict among managers who share equal power
• Can be very difficult to introduce without a preexisting supportive management climate
• Increases role ambiguity, stress, and anxiety by assigning people to more than one department
• Without power balancing between product and functional forms, lowers overall performance
• Makes inconsistent demands, which may result in unproductive conflicts and short-term crisis management
• May reward political skills as opposed to technical skills

Greater Work Satisfaction

• Greater work satisfaction
• Makes very good use of resources and expertise
• Improves communication
• Efficiency, project flexibility, and innovation
• Makes specialized, functional knowledge available to all projects
• Uses people flexibly, because departments maintain reservoirs of specialists
• Maintains consistency between different departments and projects by forcing communication between managers
• Recognizes and provides mechanisms for dealing with legitimate, multiple sources of power in the organization
• Can adapt to environmental changes by shifting emphasis between project and functional aspects

They Expose the Core Firm to Market Forces

• They expose the core firm to market forces
• Information technology makes worldwide communication much easier, but it will never replace the degree of control organizations have when manufacturing, marketing, and other functions are in-house
• Managing lateral relations across autonomous organizations is difficult
• Motivating members to relinquish autonomy to join the network is troublesome
• Sustaining membership and benefits can be problematic
• May give partners access to proprietary knowledge/technology when work is outsourced, secret information about the organization may be breached

Components of the Structure in an Organization

Complexity

• Degree to which activities within an organization are differentiated

3 Dimensions

• Horizontal: Based on the orientation of members, the nature of tasks they perform, and their education and training
• Vertical: Characterized by the number of hierarchical levels in the organization
• Spatial: Location of the organization's offices, facilities, and personnel are geographically distributed

Formalization

• Extent to which jobs within an organization are specialized

Centralization

• Where the decision-making is concentrated

Principles of Organizational Structure

• Specialization: Facilitates division of work into units for efficient performance
  • Enables application of specialized knowledge which betters the quality of work and improves organizational efficiency
  • Can also influence fundamental work attitudes, relationships, and communication
• Coordination: Integrating the objectives and activities of specialized departments to realize broad strategic objectives
  • Hierarchy facilitates vertical coordination of various departments and their activities

Principles of Hierarchy

• Unity of Command: Every person in an organization should be responsible to one superior and receive orders from that person only
• Scalar Principle: Decision-making authority and the chain of command in an organization should flow in a straight line from the highest level to the lowest
• Responsibility and Authority Principle: Responsibility must be accompanied by proper authority
• Span of Control: Number of specialized activities or individuals supervised by one person
• Departmentalization: Process of horizontal clustering of different types of functions and activities on any one level of the hierarchy

Organizational Structure

• Defined structure as the arrangement and interrelationship of component parts and positions in an organization
• Provides guidelines on:
  • Division of work into activities
  • Linkage between different functions
  • Hierarchy
  • Authority Structure
  • Authority Relationships
  • Coordination with the Movement

Mechanistic

• Limited decision-making at lower levels
• Tasks are rigidly defined and are altered only by higher authorities
• Limited autonomy and self-determination which could lower intrinsic motivation of workers

Organic

• Emphasize information sharing and an empowered workforce rather than hierarchy and status
• Communication decentralized down to teams and individuals
• Opportunities for creativity
• More open communication
• Better employee satisfaction
• Fewer formal procedures
• Deeper employee relationships
• May lower productivity
• Too many ideas
• Slower decision-making
• Less-regulated work
• Slower adaptation for new employees

Training and Development

Determining Specific Training and Development Needs

• Organizational Analysis:
  • Determine those organizational factors that either facilitate or inhibit training effectiveness
  • Focus on the goals the organization wants to achieve, the extent to which training will achieve those goals, the organization's ability to conduct training, and the extent to which employees are willing and able to be trained
• Task Analysis:
  • Use of the job analysis to identify the tasks performed by each employee, the conditions under which these tasks are performed, and the competencies needed to perform the tasks under identified conditions
  • Interviews, observations, task inventories
• Person Analysis:
  • Determining which employees need training and which areas
  • Not every employee needs further training for every task performed
  • Based on performance appraisal scores, surveys, interviews, skill and knowledge tests, and critical incidents### Employee Training and Development
• Employee training provides learners with knowledge and skills needed for their present job.
• HRD deals with training, development, and overall growth of employees, focused on future needs of the organization and its members.

Career Management and Development

• Career management enables employees to better understand and develop their career skills and interests.
• Career development is a formal approach used by the organization to ensure that people with proper qualifications and experiences are available when needed.
• It involves lifelong series of activities that contribute to a person's career exploration, establishment, success, and fulfillment.

Performance Appraisal

• Performance appraisal is a means of evaluating an employee's current and/or past performance relative to his or her performance standards.
• It is used for base pay, promotion, and retention decisions, and ensures that each employee's performance makes sense in terms of the company's overall goals.
• Performance appraisal involves setting work standards, assessing the employee's actual performance, and providing feedback to eliminate performance deficiencies.

Types of Performance Appraisal

• Reactions: the extent to which the trainees liked the training program.
• Learning: the extent to which the principles, facts, and techniques were understood and retained in memory by the employee.
• Behavior Change: changes in job-related behaviors or performance that can be attributed to training.
• Transfer of Training: the extent to which an employee generalizes knowledge and skill learned in training to the workplace.
• Organizational Results: refer to such outcomes as enhanced productivity, lower costs, and higher product or service quality.

Training and Development Methods

• Apprenticeship: combines classroom method with on-the-job training.
• Team Training: focuses on imparting knowledge and skills to individuals who are expected to work collectively towards meeting common objectives.
• Team Coordination Training: educates team members on how to orchestrate the work they do to complete tasks.
• Cross-Training: educates team members about other members' jobs so that they may perform them when a team member is absent.
• Coaching: takes in two forms: experienced employees and professional coaches.
• Mentoring: a veteran in the organization takes special interest in a new employee and helps them adjust to the job and organization.

Orientation and On-Boarding

• Orientation (on-boarding) informs new employees about the company, the job, and the work group.
• It familiarizes them with the corporate culture and helps them to quickly become productive.

Career Paths

• Traditional Career Path: employee progresses vertically upward in the organization.
• Network Career Path: contains both vertical sequence of jobs and series of horizontal opportunities.
• Lateral Skill Path: allows for lateral moves within the firm to permit an employee to become revitalized and find new challenges.

Rating Errors

• Unclear standards: might result in unfair appraisals, because the traits and degrees of merits are ambiguous.
• Halo Effect: influence of a rater's general impression on ratings of specific ratee qualities.
• Central Tendency Error: rating all employees as average.
• Leniency Error: rater is very lenient and gives employees higher scores.
• Strictness Error: rater is very strict and gives employees lower scores.

Industrial Psychology

• Sources: Aamodt (2016), Levy (2017), Howes & Muchinsky (2019), Riggio (2013), McShane & Glinow (2018), Dessler (2017), Cummings & Worley (2009), Mondy & Martocchio (2016)

Performance Management and Turnover

• Performance Management: a continuous process of identifying, measuring, and developing the performance of individuals and teams, and aligning their performance with the organization's goals.
• Turnover: the rate at which employees leave the firm.
• Voluntary Turnover: employees voluntarily leave the organization, maybe due to dissatisfaction.
• Job Withdrawal: actions intended to place physical or psychological distance between employees and their work environment.