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~ BEHAVIOURAL STUDIES II ~
Psychological Analysis
5/11/2001
Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856 – 1915)
Method Study - Detailed observations of various simple tasks within a particular job are
carried out.
Work Measurement – Measurement of output from employees; profits can be analysed.
Incentive Payments – How workers are motivated; the main incentive being money.
Psychology focuses on the individual worker as at the end of the day, if they are
dissatisfied, they form groups (unions) and become very powerful to be able to bring a
company down. Business is after all the management of people without which a product
can easily go down the drain.
Taylor started his studies from a simple observation: “Inefficiency is rife – the
wastage of resources and time in the workplace is appalling.” He noticed how workers
were, in a way going about without giving their maximum output. Work brings about
pressure.
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Behavioural Studies – Psychology – Andrew Triganza Scott Semester 1.1
What is the source of this alleged inefficiency?
1) Natural Soldiering
2) Systematic Soldiering
3) Poor design of performance of the work by rule-of-thumb.
As Carl Barth, a disciple of Taylor noted in his testimony to the “U.S. Commission of
Industrial Relations”:
“My dream is that the time will come when every drill press will be speeded just so, and
every planner, every lathe the world over will be harmonised just like musical pitches are
the same all over the world…so that we can standardise and say that for drilling a 1-inch
hole, all over the world it will be done with the same speed. That dream will come true,
some time.” (Barth, 1914, p. 889)
Appalling – For example, a worker in a factory drilling holes each taking 5 seconds from
7.30am to 5.30pm on the assembly line (very boring and repetitive work). The
consequences of this is that his job is very monotonous, and there is too much pressure
on him to reach production; humans are expected to be turned into robots working in
situations like these.
Though Taylor was trying to analyse inefficiency, his principles of management are
very humanising. Even though management is appointed to pinpoint workers’
inefficiencies, it is their responsibility to behave in a friendly way and make their best
not to fire workers.
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Behavioural Studies – Psychology – Andrew Triganza Scott Semester 1.1
- Re-design of the entire factory: Once you can analyse in detail tasks that have
been carried out by workers, we have to re-design the factory so that we can have
more efficiency and production. If needs leave, one needs to go around workers.
- Removing control over operations from foremen to a centralised planning
department staffed with experts: Introduce experts.
- Prepared detailed instructions about the machines and methods to be used and how
long the job will take: If one has a worker doing this, the system doesn’t work out.
He would be creating levels of organisations like workers at the real end and
engineers who have to organise minimal details.
1) Discover and establish the best method and what is a reasonable time for the job
Cut away loss of time.
2) Select staff on technical criteria and use rigorous training to develop their skill in the
methods advised.
Besides specifying a job on the assembly line, staff has to be selected depending on
their skills that are appropriate for the specific job. Personality traits are needed to
do certain jobs.
3) Inspection of organisation structure and routine-technical planning.
Taking all of the organisational structure into consideration, better known as holistic
approach. One needs to identify inefficiencies in every level on the place of work.
Taylor thought there was only ONE method to maximise efficiency at the place
of work.
“And this one best method and best implementation can only be discovered or developed
through scientific study and analysis. This involves the gradual substitution of science
for ‘rule of thumb’ throughout mechanical arts.”
Through scientific study and analysis, training needs to be established from previous
experience. Employees need to have time and space to make mistakes and there is also
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the must to assess workers after training and give bonuses at a certain level of output if
necessary.
In Taylor’s view, supervisors and workers with such low levels of education were not
qualified to plan how work should be done. They were only trying to replace tasks by
simpler ones to measure the output of workers, reduce costs of wages and increase
profit. Rationalisation of work is the putting of scientific analyses on jobs in an
organisation. Managerial levels were also included in this. Maximisation of profit keeps
business going, while workers should be part of both the costs and profits.
12/11/2001
Defining Psychology
There are various misunderstandings in psychology like the occult for example, and
also various misconceptions like mental illnesses and psychiatry (The latter is the medical
aspect to try and cure illnesses by balancing chemicals in the human brain).
In Malta, we are kind of ignorant on topic areas and subject matter. In the USA, UK
and Europe, this area is heavily employed in various settings such as education and
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business. Psychology in the world is a must because all business entities and organisations
that have to do with people and behaviour need it.
Psychology is the scientific study of behaviour and mental process (how the brain
thinks). It is therefore a human science carried out through scientific procedures. It
deals with overt (visible) and covert (invisible) thinking processes and aspects. Context is
also very important because people do not live in labs or confined environments but we
live in a social environment together.
- Behaviour: Detaching oneself from the concept of demands, organisms’ actions and
demands.
- Cognition: Mental events like frames of thought – how people reason things out and
make decisions – different perspectives of people.
- Affects: Feelings, moods and emotions – experiences of situations.
- Operational definitions: What is anxiety and intelligence? The latter is not tangible;
therefore something operational must bring this phenomena to something concrete.
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Branches and roles of the psychologist
Branches of Psychology
a) Developmental psychology: Related to developmental processes in one’s life and the
stages of development are especially related to early years but also later years.
b) Social psychology: How people behave in social groups and understanding how
marketing affects people. Individuals, as a member of a group are sometimes lost in
the crowd.
c) Experimental psychology: This is related to the senses, perception of reality, and
consciousness.
d) Cognitive psychology: The way we perceive reality and consciousness.
e) Personality psychology: The way characters are formed.
f) Physiological psychology: The effect in behaviour related to substances.
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4) Forensic psychologists: The work with criminals and help them advance in the
rehabilitation of their mental processes.
5) Organisational/Industrial psychologists: They study groups at work and what goes on
at the place of these people’s work, which might sometimes reflect workers’
mentalities.
• Personal Selection – Trying to find people that have the skills needed for particular
jobs.
• Career and management development – How careers are planned and job design is
created at work. Sometimes, we have to find methods of not creating repetitive
(therefore tedious) jobs.
• Organisational change and development
• Performance appraisal systems – How one motivates his employees to be more
productive by giving extra bonuses to the heads of each section and managers.
• Job and task design – How to rotate people around particular tasks.
• Group process and skills – Groups work better and are more productive. Giving
autonomy to groups is more productive.
• Occupation safety and stress management – In Malta, we don’t have high standards of
safety. The perception of stress is different for every person; the problem is in
organisation.
• Evaluation and design of training – We need to provide training, otherwise we cannot
be flexible and elastic. It is costly to employ new people.
• Industrial relations, etc. – How management deals with unions – different
relationships, contacts and managers can discriminate some workers.
19/11/2001
Organisational Stress
One cannot take decisions on his own and stress has a different meaning to every
individual. Stress is pressure coming from deadlines derived from directors, managers
and parties that control our lives. Stress can lead to panic attacks and other
manifestations like tension, high blood pressure, baffled moods, sleepless nights and
nightmares, among other things. Furthermore, it can also lead to depression. Personal
life will come in, eventually, and influence everyone’s life at work and away. This is when a
good manager is needed to control and guide his employees and keep them away from
stress.
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illnesses including disability, or persons under therapy and depression to take respective
examples of each); turnover when people decide to leave the job; and absenteeism when
workers miss work. These few causes of stress were identified by the World Labour
Report.
Since Taylor’s research, one has realised that under pressure, output decreases,
therefore employees do not produce 100% and this brings about further costs. This area
was highly researched and mechanism to be carried out was very complex and variable.
What is stress?
Stress may be caused of physical and social stressors. The consequences of stress
can be physiological, behavioural and affective (strain). Physical causes are mainly caused
from the environment at work. To take University, for example, such stress may be a
result of small lecture rooms, lack of resources, lack of parking, directors and superiors,
etc. These factors can affect behaviour and change in body that can result in accidents.
Stressors, like for example, poor ventilation, role ambiguity, unresolved conflicts,
workloads or too much responsibility, lead to strain (when workload stretches the limits
of what one can actually do). Strain, like for example poor job satisfaction, symptom
report, Coronary Heart Disease, low risk perception, frustration and intention to quit may
lead to serious hazards if they are ignored. As a manager, one has to ask, “How am I
going to know if a worker’s intention is to quit?” For an answer, one should provide a
pleasant work environment for his employees and cater for their needs to avoid all this.
Stress results from the excessive and persistent organisational demand (perceived)
that drain an individual’s coping abilities. Managers cannot just ignore their workers’
situation, otherwise, the whole company goes down the drain. Profit is brought about by
improvement at the place of work and provision of resources for the workers’ benefit.
If everything is stress free, we would reach our ideal, however, jobs cannot be
unstressful.
Not everybody has the same level of capability to cope with stress. There are various
personality dimensions that influence the perception of stress. Negative effectivity is
when a person gets moody about a psychological event and to what extent it changes his
behaviour. Internal locus of control, one the other hand, is whether or not a person is
responsible to bring a stressful situation experienced at a certain point. External or
extroversivity is the responsibility away from oneself. Extroverts experience less stress
than introverts do as they can take critiscm and laugh about certain situations.
Coping with stress and therefore finding solutions is very important, especially as
managers. There are various methods that were pointed out concerning this idea:
i) Passive vs. Active: e.g. submission vs. voicing concern
Not speaking out the problem and keeping it to oneself brings about more stress.
ii) Positive vs. Negative: e.g. task-focused vs. emotion focused
One tries to make a task less stressful by keeping out the negative sides of the
situation. Such a person is considered to be a positivist. Emotion focuses more on
this aspect and makes use of people, such as counsellors, managers, etc. even
though managers have their own stress. From a managerial perspective, coping to
minimise stress is in itself a source of stress.
iii) Short vs. Long Term: e.g. dealing with symptoms vs. trying to solve a problem
Giving leave or short breaks is not always enough to solve problems, but at least,
this will minimise stress.
iv) Individual vs. Organisation: e.g. counselling vs. stress-monitoring indicators (SMIs)
Bringing in services of counselling, like Caritas or Sedqa, does not always help.
Individuals’ lives at work can be solved even internally between colleagues
themselves. SMIs, however, are trained persons that can either be employed by
the company itself to help its employees, or brought from outside to conduct
surveys at the place of work. Services from the outside, however, do not know how
a situation really is at work.
There are limitations in any adopted strategy. Even though forms of support are
sometimes supplied, it may not always be directed to the target. The organisation has to
be the element to accept change and therefore minimise amount of stress. If the
service is not provided 100%, clients drop out from the company.
Task is stressful so
Performance performance goes
down as stress is
increased.
Stress
Some amounts of stress that are increasing make performance increase as well,
therefore stress is important to an extent. For example, before a test, it helps to have a
slightly high level of anxiety as it helps us improve and give our best. When one reaches a
certain level (top part of the graph), one finds most stress and performance at the same
time, before the latter starts to decrease. Therefore although pressure is sometimes
beneficial, there is also a limit. Performance and stress have to be balanced. Managers
have to be aware of how stressful a job is for their employees so that when the latter
reach the highest production output level, managers should change expectations and
accept the maximum amount produced. Once performance goes down, one might realise
that something is going wrong.
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• Different jobs = different sources of stress
• Job choice = interests x abilities x personality
Once a lifestyle is changed, going for a job is stressful. Even the choices of the job
incur different reasons and hence stress. Incentives are the main elements to reduce
stress.
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