Test: Developing Psychological Skills- 2 - Humanities/Arts MCQ

The process by which members of a society are taught how to behave and feel by influential members of that society is referred to as socialization. Social roles and normative influence are part of the socialization process. The Hawthorne effect refers to the improved performance of workers based on the attention and interest given to them regarding their work. Role ambiguity refers to employee uncertainty about their job functions and responsibilities.

Work load tests are not an example of a common selection procedure used to make the best matches between people and jobs whereas each of the remaining choices are examples of common selection procedures.

Organizational psychologists have struggled with the concept of leadership since the mid-twentieth century, changing their focus from personality (‘leaders are born, not made’) to environmental factors (‘circumstances determine who emerges as the leader’) and back to personality again (Bass, 1990; Fiedler, 1967; House, 1977. Today, there is a lot of interest in charismatic or transformational leadership. Charismatic leadership represents a leadership style that enables the leader to exercise diffuse and intense influence over the beliefs, values, behaviour and performance of others (House, Spangler & Woyche, 1991).
Charismatic leaders tend to be dominant and self-confident with a need to influence others while believing strongly in their own values. They communicate their goals and visions clearly, and have high expectations of their followers’ performance. The fascination with this kind of leadership is evidenced by the number of books by or about charismatic leaders. Some studies suggest that these leaders inspire effort and satisfaction amongst their employees, resulting in higher productivity.

Hackman and Oldham’s (1976) five contributors to job satisfaction are:

• task identity – the extent to which the job represents a whole piece of work (e.g. running a restaurant compared with just washing the dishes);
• task significance – how important the task is for society in general, and for the goals of the organization;
• autonomy – the amount of freedom the person has to decide on how best to do their job;
• feedback – receiving information about job performance (imagine writing essays and never receiving feedback on how well they were written); and
• variety – varied tasks are important (compare the work of an organizational psychologist with that of a supermarket check-out worker), but too much variety can create conflicting and therefore stressful demands.

Organizations can also be described in terms of their cultures, including their values, attitudes and beliefs. Manifestations of culture include: hierarchy; pay levels; job descriptions; informal practices; espoused values and rituals; stories, jokes and jargon; physical environment. The meanings of all these aspects of the organization taken together tell us about its underlying culture (Schein, 1992).
There has been particular interest in how to ‘manage’ organizational culture, and considerable resources have been spent trying to create ‘a service culture’ or ‘an open culture’ or ‘a people culture’, to name but three examples. Organizational psychologists have adopted three approaches to understanding culture (Martin, 1992): integration, differentiation and fragmentation. These differing dimensions suggest that organizational culture is complex and that we can best understand it by adopting a multi-dimensional perspective.

Coercive power is the power to force others into action or inaction by way of threat or punishment. Legitimate power comes from actually being in a position in the hierarchy of imposed authority. Reward power comes from allocating extra tokens or bonuses. Referent power comes from being persuasive and popular. Expert power comes from having access to knowledge and information not available to others.

All of the above continue to constitute significant problems for women in the workforce.

Psychological safety is the shared belief among members of a work team that it is safe to take interpersonal risks within work teams. Team process, team viability, groupthink and team beliefs are not terms used to refer to this type of shared belief within work teams.

The differentiation perspective describes an organization with a culture that recognizes different interests, views, backgrounds and position of employees, and the different attitudes, working conditions and pay across the different levels of the organization. Integration refers to an organization-wide consensus about the values of the organization, and thus a unified organizational culture across levels of the organization. Fragmentation refers to an organization with an ambiguous culture because it lacks consensus about the meaning, attitudes and values of the organization. Pluralist refers to a view about how organizations should be as opposed to describing the way an organizational culture actually is.

Research from the 1930s to the present day has consistently shown that the unemployed have poorer mental health than comparable groups of employed people. Unemployed people have worse profiles on measures of anxiety, depression, life dissatisfaction, experienced stress, negative self-esteem and hopelessness about the future. They are also more likely to report social isolation and low levels of daily activity. Their physical health is poorer, and they are more likely to attempt and commit suicide (Fryer, 1992; Warr, 1987).
Striking, too, is the fact that the psychological effects of unemployment extend to the whole family. In a classic study of a whole village affected by unemployment, the effects were shown to spread across the whole community, lowering its spirit and functioning (Jahoda, Lazarsfeld & Zeisel, 1972).