Why is psychology relevant for the workplace?

As an MSc student in Stirling, you have the opportunity to take Professor Alex Wood's "Psychology of Work" class in the first term. It explores the importance and role of psychology in the workplace and how practitioners apply psychological theories to issues in the workplace, with the aim of increasing organisational effectiveness and ensuring the satisfaction of people at work.  

One of the assignments I submitted this year tackles the broad sweeping question of "Why is psychology relevant for the workplace?" and it provides a detailed summary of five key areas within the British Psychological Society Curriculum for Occupational Psychology: employee engagement and relations; selection and assessment; training; learning and development; and the design of the work environment. I conclude with a discussion of the role personality plays within the work contexts.

The purpose of this post it twofold: to give MSc applicants an insight into this fascinating topic; and to give seasoned readers a resource that they can use in their research or in the design of course syllabus. 

Click here to download the paper in .pdf. 

To summarise:

1. Employee relations and engagement, defined as “managing fairly and getting the best out of people” (Gamble, 2006), has been seen through the lens of a master servant relationship, the mechanistic worker relationship and now the individual employee relationship.  
2. Selection and assessment focuses mainly on the need to have people in positions who either have the characteristics required for effective job performance or the capacities for learning and development.
3. In order to have organisational success, interactive and relative training programmes need to be developed, as do effective and validated career development and appraisal programmes for employees. 
4. Careful consideration also needs to be placed into the design of the work environment to ensure that it matches the capabilities of human performance and minimises the risks of work to health and well-being. 
5. Though any individual behaviour is not very predictable from personality, general behaviour is. It is determined by both the situation and the stable individual differences, and individuals’ can also be identified by the extent to which their personalities vary across situations.

The psychology of our bankers

The extensive analysis of the banking and economic crisis has been dominated by economic and finance experts. But on the surface anyway much of the explanation lies in psychology. So it is timely that the Irish Times carries a piece today by Vicky Menzies and Ken McKenzie providing a psychological analysis of bankers behaviour in the run up to the crisis.

Economics and Psychology Ireland: Third Annual Meeting

Details of last year's event are linked here

Last year, Professor Arie Kapteyn provided a keynote lecture. We also heard a number of talks outlining interesting new research in areas such as experimental economics, online surveys, neuroeconomics, real-time tracking studies and so on. We also, more so than in the first year, had a lot of discussion about the relevance of these new areas of research for policy and business, something that has been followed up on in a number of ways (more to follow on this).

This was a very valuable meeting in my opinion and I am happy to take the running on organising this again for the same time this year. I will post details of exact dates and venue in the next couple of weeks (It will be November and likely in Dublin). It would be good for now if people could think of suggestions for having a good meeting again this year.

The purpose of this meeting is to provide a national venue for people working on topics at the intersection of economics, psychology and cognate disciplines. The most relevant international venue is the IAREP conference that is taking place in Cologne in September. Deadline for submission to this is looming.

Stephen Lea

Professor Stephen Lea, head of the School of Psychology at Exeter, will speak at Geary on April 6th at 1pm. The title of his talk is "Materialism, Money and Myopia: The psychology of recession and recovery". Some details of Professor Lea's work are available here Details of his publications on economics and psychology stretching back to the early 1970s are available here

Economics and Psychology Event

For the last two years, we have had a lively November session, firstly in Maynooth and then in Dublin. Details of the 2010 session will be available soon. Suggestions for papers and topics most welcome. The previous session was a good mix of Irish and international speakers and generated a lot of discussion and potential for future work and collaboration. I hope to continue the trend of having speakers from different sectors and to have talks that deal with emerging infrastructures as well as specific papers. The event is not intended as a substitute for the international IAREP session (which will be announced shortly) and in some sense will act as a feeder to this session in the next few years. Funding for the 2009 event was provided by the UCD Seed Funding initiative following an application process. If anyone wants to brave the economy and provide sponsorship to cover some visiting speakers then let me know.

Economic Psychology Ireland Conference

Economics and Psychology Course: UCD and TCD

Below is a link to the course I will be giving in UCD and TCD next years. This website is evolving rapidly and I am currently in the process of linking to readings, updating lectures and so. Anyone who is interested or wants to comment on some of this, please feel free to get in contact

http://geary.ucd.ie/econpsych/

A good deadline for economic and psychology people

Call for Papers

7-11 JULY 2009
IAREP/SABE CONGRESS

Conference Web Site: http://www.smu.ca/iarepsabe09/

Halifax , Nova Scotia , Canada

International Association for Research in Economic Psychology (IAREP)

Society for the Advancement of Behavioral Economics (SABE)

Conference Theme: “Behavioural Economics, Economic Psychology: Theory
and Policy”

Dear Colleagues,

Behavioral economics and economic psychology have made significant advances over the past two decades impacting on economic theory and public policy. These realms of research are influenced by research in economics, psychology, sociology, biology, neuroscience, institutions as well as being informed by traditional empirical studies and evidence derived from experimental economics and surveys, interviews, and simulations. Thus, behavioral economics and economic psychology are enriched by a knowledge base that spans the disciplinary divide.

The IAREP-SABE Conference aims at providing voice to economists, psychologists and other academics to rigorously discuss and debate their latest research in a welcoming scholarly environment. We welcome paper submissions as well as session submissions, be they of a theoretical or empirical bent, on all relevant topics relating to behavioral economics and economic psychology.

We welcome your online submissions.

Go to http://www.smu.ca/iarepsabe09/

The deadline for submissions is March 15, 2009. You will be notified by April 30, 2009, whether or not your submission has been accepted for presentation.

All sessions will take place at Saint Mary's University.

Some Conference Highlights:

George Akerlof 2001 Nobel Laureate in Economics (University of California, Berkeley) will present one of SABE's two Herbert Simon Memorial Lectures.

Gerd Gigerenzer (Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Centre for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition, Berlin) will present the other of SABE's Herbert Simon Memorial Lecturers.

Ilana Ritov
(The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) will present IAREP's Kahneman lecture.

We look forward to seeing you in July 2009 in beautiful Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Yours sincerely,
Morris Altman (Academic convener)
Sonja Novkovic (Local convener)

Maynooth Economic Psychology Event

Just a few brief notes about the event on Friday. An updated schedule is below

http://geary.ucd.ie/behaviour/index.php/Home/One-Day-Symposium.html

For those taking behavioural economics in TCD or UCD next term, the event covers a number of the topics and feel free to come along.

Some of the themes that will be covered include:

- the early childhood development of preference parameters

- the neuroscience of decision making and ability

- how loss aversion drives decision making

- the biology of time preferences

- identity and economics

- experimental economics

Graduate Programmes in Economics and Psychology

The International Association for Research in Economic Psychology is maintaining a website devoted to graduate programmes in behavioural economics and economic psychology. Please email Ofer Azar (address at the link below) if you know of other programmes in this area

http://www.iarep.org/graduateprograms.htm

Reminder: Economics and Psychology Conference Maynooth

A one-day conference on Economics and Psychology will take place in NUIM on November 7th. The purpose of this event is to provide a forum for the discussion of work at the interface of economics, psychology and cognate disciplines such as neuroscience. The event is co-organized by the Department of Economics, Finance and Accounting in Maynooth and the UCD Geary Institute. The International Association for Research in Economic Psychology (IAREP) is the relevant international body and we would encourage attendees to consider joining this group. All are welcome and there is no registration fee. Please contact Liam Delaney ( Liam.Delaney@ucd.ie) to confirm attendance. The event will take place in the Physics Hall in Maynooth, which is on the South Campus. The Physics Theatre is number 8 on the map provided below.

http://www.nuim.ie/location/maps/south.shtml

Further details are available below

http://geary.ucd.ie/behaviour/index.php/Home/One-Day-Symposium.html

identity, values, coping styles and economic downturn

A further aspect of the link between declines in economic status and psychological well-being is the extent to which psychological constructs can provide ways of thinking about who suffers worse for a given level of economic decline.

A number of attempts have occurred in recent years to incorporate identity into economic analysis including work by Akerlof and Kranton. Viewing business failure and unemployment as identity threats is clearly one route to trying to explain the very large effects on well-being and, in particular, why they seem to be independent of income losses.

One psychological construct that is particularly relevant to this is the idea of "contingencies of self-worth". The review by Crocker and Knight below is a good overview of the concept

"Abstract—We argue that the importance of self-esteem lies in what people believe they need to be or do to have worth as a person. These contingencies of self-worth are both sources of motivation and areas of psychological vulnerability. In domains of contingent self-worth, people pursue self-esteem by attempting to validate their abilities and qualities. This pursuit of self-esteem, we argue, has costs to learning, relationships, autonomy, self-regulation, and mental and physical health. We suggest alternatives to this costly pursuit of self-esteem."

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118706337/abstract

As well as identity, a number of papers have shown that political values can moderate the relationship between socio-economic status and self-esteem

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118502361/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0

To my knowledge, there is not a wide literature on how values and identity condition the psychological response to deterioration in economic circumstances. I have been looking through some papers on the role of coping styles in moderating the effect of unemployment on psychological distress such as the paper below.

http://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/joepsy/v22y2001i4p461-482.html

One Day Event on Economics and Psychology

The website for the one day event on Economics and Psychology to be held in National University of Ireland, Maynooth on November 7th is now available below. We will place up links to papers and so on throughout the next couple of weeks

Link here