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Setting the Scene: People at Work

MARIA C. W. PEETERS, TOON TARIS, AND JAN DE JONGE

Chapter Objectives

After studying this chapter, you should be able to:

• describe the key elements of work;
• explain what work psychology is about, and what is meant by contemporary work psychology;
• specify some main features of the world’s labor force;
• understand what working means to workers;
• summarize the history of work psychology;
• explain the six most important changes that have occurred in the world of work;
• understand the general outline and structure of the current book.

1.1 Introduction

For as long as mankind has existed, people have worked. Needless to say the nature of work has changed tremendously: our distant ancestors were mostly hunters and collectors, but nowadays people work with data, “goods” or other people, or provide services. What has not changed is that we still spend a substantial part of our lives working. It is therefore not surprising that some people’s work is about understanding the nature and conditions of the work of others in an attempt to explain, predict and improve it. These are work psychologists, teachers, trainers, and practitioners in work psychology, as well as those who study the phenomenon of work and worker behavior: the researchers. This book is aimed at everyone who would like to learn more about work psychology. The primary intended readership consists of advanced (second and third year) bachelor students as well as master students in work and organizational psychology programs. In addition, this textbook will also be useful for advanced students in related fields, including ergonomics and human factors, (applied) social psychology, clinical psychology, social and occupational medicine, occupational health, human resource management, epidemiology, health sciences, industrial engineering, business administration, and management science. Finally, researchers who would like to familiarize themselves quickly with state-of-the-art issues in the area of work psychology will also be interested in this volume.

This first chapter starts with a brief introduction to what work involves and what work psychology aims to achieve (Section 1.2). In Sections 1.3 and 1.4 we consider the world’s labor force, and discuss what having and doing work means for individuals. After describing the history of the field of work psychology (Section 1.5), we describe some important changes that the world of work has witnessed over the last decennia (Section 1.6). The chapter ends by explaining the general outline and structure of the book (Section 1.7).

1.2 What We Talk About When We Talk About Work Psychology

This book is about work. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary (2023), in everyday life the term “work” refers to “perform work or fulfill duties regularly for wages or salary; to perform or carry through a task requiring sustained effort or continuous repeated operations; to exert oneself physically or mentally especially in sustained effort for a purpose or under compulsion or necessity; to function or operate according to plan or design.” That is, work is about performing activities that require sustained effort to achieve a particular objective, and these activities are conducted to obtain some form of income. More formally, work can be defined as a set of coordinated and goal-directed activities that require sustained effort and are conducted in exchange for something else, usually (but not necessarily and often not exclusively) some form of monetary reward. Three key elements of this definition are as follows:

1. Work consists of a set of goal-directed activities; that is, actions at work are intended to bring about a particular previously specified result. After all, the goal of work is to produce a good (including data and knowledge) or to deliver a particular service (Frese & Zapf, 1994).
2. Work consists of a set of coordinated activities. To achieve the intended goal, workers do not act randomly. Rather, successful task accomplishment often requires that workers execute a series of interrelated activities following particular work routines, procedures and guidelines, and often using tools and machinery especially devised to bring about the intended goal. Even the simplest jobs require incumbents to coordinate their activities. Without coordination, the intended goal will be difficult to achieve, if it is achieved at all.
3. The activities involved in working require some degree of physical, emotional and/or mental effort, and this effort is usually compensated in some way. That is, work is conducted in exchange for something else. Few of us would go to work without getting anything in return. Rather, for many people working is a necessary evil: it is easy to think of more attractive, interesting and enjoyable activities, but working is often simply essential for earning a living.

This book is also about psychology. Psychology refers to people’s behavior, motivations, thoughts and emotions related to a particular topic. Work psychology thus relates to these concepts in the context of work (Arnold, 2005). As the goal of work is to produce something (goods, services, or knowledge), one central aim of work psychology is to facilitate obtaining that goal: how can we use the knowledge and insights of psychology to help workers achieve their work goals in an optimal and sustainable manner? Or, from an organizational point of view, how can we help organizations achieving their goals?

Note that work psychologists are not only interested in pushing workers’ performance to (and perhaps even beyond) their upper limit. On the contrary, at present many work psychologists are primarily interested in maximizing worker health and well-being (this used to be different in the early days of work psychology—see Section 1.3). This interest partly follows from the idea that happy, satisfied workers are presumed to be productive workers (see Chapter 19, for a discussion). In this view, maximizing worker well-being is the same as maximizing work performance. Additionally, as we believe that psychologists should improve people’s lives, work psychologists are genuinely interested in improving workers’ health and well-being. For example, the American Psychological Association (2023), the largest professional organization of psychologists, says in its mission statement: “Our mission is to promote the advancement, communication, and application of psychological science and knowledge to benefit society and improve lives.” Similarly, the British Psychological Society (2023) states that it “helps to influence and develop a psychological approach to policy-making that puts people first.” Similar statements can be found on the web sites of other professional organizations for psychologists. Clearly, work psychologists are not solely there for the benefit of organizations or employers, but surely also for the benefit of workers. This is not to say that a focus on worker health and well-being can or should not be beneficial for organizations as well. It is by now well-accepted that work can have adverse effects on worker health and well-being (e.g., consider the potential effects of working with harmful and even carcinogenous substances, or of being chronically bullied by your supervisor and co-workers). Since many organizations frequently face difficulties in finding suitably trained personnel, it is important to them that their current staff remain healthy and motivated. Moreover, the costs of replacing sick employees are high, which also underlines the need for organizations to make sure that the workability of their current staff remains high. Stated differently, contemporary work psychology aims to promote what might be called employee sustainable performance: a regulatory process in which an individual worker enduringly and efficiently achieves particular desired work goals while maintaining a satisfactory level of well-being (Ji et al., 2021).

This book is about work psychology; that is, the way workers’ behaviors, motivations, thoughts, emotions, health and well-being relate to each other, and about ways to influence these concepts. As we have defined work in terms of the specific activities that are conducted by workers, work psychology is not primarily about the context in which these activities are conducted (e.g., the organization or the work team), that is the realm of organizational psychology. Similarly, work psychology is not primarily about the characteristics of the person conducting a particular work task (e.g., gender, age, ethnicity, level of education, experience, or personality) or selecting or hiring new staff—that is the domain of personnel psychology. Work psychology is about the tasks that are carried out at work; that is, the specific work activities that require sustained effort and are conducted to achieve a particular goal. Of course, these activities are accomplished by workers having specific characteristics within a particular context, and in this sense work psychology is inevitably and often strongly related to the other strands of what is often called “work and organizational,” “personnel” or “industrial” psychology. We therefore also pay attention to some of these subjects in this book. In the present introduction we...