Day One: Re-Evaluating The Origins Of Work Psychology

Work psychology as discussed in the Course Introduction arose out of a need to accept that profitable work meant understanding how to get the most out of people at work.

This was not just about the relationship between people but also the relationship of people to an organization, and what working together means.

To see where to start we need to see how organizations arose, and where the work psychologist came from. Firstly, where it did not come from.

Henri Fayol [1841 - 1925]

Not surprisingly the Industrial Revolution gave rise to the need to organize the work force - and for that we need look no further than Henri Fayol - he might truly be called the father of modern management. His fourteen rules, published in 1917 as Administration Industrielle Ét Génerale while he was managing director of the Compagnie De Commentry Fourchambeau Decazeville mining company, are still relevant:

1. Specialization of labour. Specializing encourages continuous improvement in skills and the development of improvements in methods.
2. Authority. The right to give orders and the power to exact obedience.
3. Discipline. No slacking, bending of rules. The workers should be obedient and respectful of the organization.
4. Unity of command. Each employee has one and only one boss.
5. Unity of direction. A single mind generates a single plan and all play their part in that plan.
6. Subordination of Individual Interests. When at work, only work things should be pursued or thought about.
7. Remuneration. Employees receive fair payment for services, not what the company can get away with.
8. Centralization. Consolidation of management functions. Decisions are made from the top.
9. Chain of Superiors (line of authority). Formal chain of command running from top to bottom of the organization, like the military.
10. Order. All materials and personnel have a prescribed place, and they must remain there.
11. Equity. Equality of treatment (but not necessarily identical treatment).
12. Personnel Tenure. Limited turnover of personnel. Lifetime employment for good workers.
13. Initiative. Thinking out a plan and do what it takes to make it happen.
14. Esprit de corps. Harmony, cohesion among personnel. It’s a great source of strength in the organisation.

(Taken from Irwin Gray’s 1987 translation)

Fayol’s thinking when aligned with Max Weber’s bureaucracy and Fredrick Taylor’s scientific management gave all the impetus that was needed for classical management to thrive. However, it was noted to have drawbacks.

Why didn’t seem to make workers work harder simply because they wanted too?

And why was reward or punishment the only way to get them to work?

How could this new science from central Europe, psychology, with its emphasis on human behaviour, help?

Hugo Münsterberg [1863 - 1916]

One of the, if not the, psychologists who established the field of work psychology was Hugo Münsterberg. Münsterberg was noted for his scientific rigour, his keen mind, and an an emphasis on experimental psychology (That is psychological evidence garnered from experiments).

He not only worked at Harvard, but he was president of the American Psychological Association. (There is an excellent page from Muskigum College, OH; on him, that has been up since 1997, here.)

In 1913 he published in quick succession firstly a German version Psychologie und Wirlschaftsleben: Ein Beitrag zur angewandten Experimental-Psychologie (Leipzig: J.A. Barth) that he produced in English (And claimed from the off was not simply a translation but was adaptated to American culture) Psychology and Industrial Efficiency.

(Just to show life is stranger than imagination: the work is dedicated to one Harold F McCormick, then Chairman of The International Harvester Company, heir to the McCormick newspaper fortune, beneficiary of Chicago University, a man who had married the prototypical US tycoon John D Rockerfeller’s daughter, Edith, and then divorced said Edith to marry the notoriously bad opera singer, the truly marvelous Ganna Walksa, who married six times, including a Russian count, two millionaires, and the leading US Tibetan Buddhist scholar of the day. Orson Welles would later say that both Harold, along with other leading industrialists, and Gatta, in particular, were inspirational for the characters of Charles Foster Kane and Kane’s second wife, Susan Alexander, in his 1941 classic.)

Over twenty-four chapters, Münsterberg showed through experiments with electrical railway, telephone, and shipping workers that fitting the right person to the right job produced more satisfaction that F W Taylor’s scientific management, which has sought to find universal working conditions that would make work work for everyone.

The other major problem with Scientific Management he noted was that it was open to abuse: it could be used to not increase efficiency, but rather to increase work rates, and productivity in a machine like fashion (And he wasn’t half right either).

As a footnote: it wasn’t until 1966 that J W Brehm published his famous paper A Theory Of Psychological Reactance that the other major drawback to Scientific Management was fully noted.

Reactance is a cognitive bias (Why we think in certain ways, or act according to certain cognitive processes) that says humans naturally act opposite to what they believe will curtail their personal choices.

In Taylor’s defense he never meant Scientific Management to be abused, and did honestly believe that time and motion studies, and clocking in clocking out would improve work.

I actually remain a fan of Taylor’s writings, but not Taylorism. I believe that Taylor was right fundamentally right: it isn’t what we do that matters half as much as how we do it - and there are some universal rules that make work work. What makes others see us as professional will apply no matter what type of work we do: competence, composure, commitment etc; 

Münsterberg died in 1916 and would no doubt have appreciated the Hawthorne Experiments more than most. It is a tragedy that history concentrates more on Fredrick W Taylor and the Gilbreths than on Münsterburg.

A re-evaluation of his major contribution to modern HR is long overdue. His idea that if you find people who will love their work you will create a brilliant organization is very valid.

Then something happened that changed the way we think about people at work. At, in a fit of irony worthy of a Greek comedy, what began as an experiment to put people into artificially lit buildings and so make GE good pocket money in the proceedings, turned into one of the most important discoveries of work psychology

G Elton Mayo, F. J. Roethlisberger, and the Hawthorne experiments for General Electric, from fall of 1924 through to the spring of 1927, remain proof that if we approach science experimentation with an open mind we can truly contribute. The idea was originally a short study to see if brightness of light bulbs affected workers’ efficiency. Not suprisingly it was thought brighter bulbs brighter workers, dimmer bulbs dimmer workers.. The experiments were sponsored by the National Research Council of the National Association of Sciences in co-operation with The Illuminating Engineering Society’s Committee on Research.

The result was unexpected and could have been ignored in favour of the original premise, luckily Mayo had scruples, and a good solid scientific background in experimental psychology. His team and he discovered that giving the workers control over the light bulbs was way more effective way to get more work out of that individual than any increase in brightness, and in fact, under those circumstances, the wattage and luminosity of the bulb mattered not a jot. What he discovered is important: we want control, we want to be trusted to take control, we value being treated as adults, we want to be trusted to be allowed to have input and control over our environment.

Being a meticulous and good psychologist it took eight years in total, until 1932 for Mayo, and two further experiment designs (Involving relay assembly and bank wiring) to provide a set of data that showed that the right to individual determination in our choices creates cultural change in organisations. The conclusions, which deserve to be read slowly, wisely, and with an open heart, are here:

1. Work is a group activity.

2. The social world of the adult is primarily patterned about work activity.

3. The need for recognition, security and sense of belonging is more important in determining workers’ morale and productivity than the physical conditions under which he works.

4. A complaint is not necessarily an objective recital of facts; it is commonly a symptom manifesting disturbance of an individual’s status position.

5. The worker is a person whose attitudes and effectiveness are conditioned by social demands from both inside and outside the work plant.

6. Informal groups within the work plant exercise strong social controls over the work habits and attitudes of the individual worker.

7. The change from an established society in the home to an adaptive society in the work plant resulting from the use of new techniques tends continually to disrupt the social organization of a work plant and industry generally.

8. Group collaboration does not occur by accident; it must be planned and developed. If group collaboration is achieved the human relations within a work plant may reach a cohesion which resists the disrupting effects of adaptive society.

Not bad, eh?

Tomorrow we will look at how the social psychology movement created new thoughts about what work can be; but we will also look a the practical problems of work, and start to ask how work psychology can contribute to make work more than just a growing experience for the individual, it can also help companies to be strategically poised.

Day Two: Expectations And Realities - Getting To Grounded Work