Industrial and organizational psychology: concepts and applications

¶ … workplace is anchored in the realm of the financial, we are inclined to use economic models to study it. However, while certainly economics and business in many ways make good partners, if we are interested in understanding how it is that businesses work on a day-to-day basis we must be at least as interested in understanding the social and psychological elements the obtain in the workplace as we are interested in economic models. The research described in this proposal outlines a strategy for obtaining a clearer understanding of the importance of the socio-psychological relationships among individuals in an organization and the reasons why some organizations foster both higher levels of worker satisfaction as well as higher levels of organizational commitment (while some must be content with one or the other and some with neither.)

Central to this research design is a reliance on a workplace social exchange network model. This model incorporates a number of different perspectives to create a more integrated conceptualization of the many - and many different kinds - of social exchanges that occur continuously in the workplace. These include the exchanges between and among individuals (especially those on work teams) between workers and their supervisors and between individual workers and the organization itself.

While much of current research focuses on one or another of these three different types of exchanges, this research is designed to consider all of them on the grounds that it creates an artificial distinction between these different types of interaction. Workers themselves blend these different interactions together, and so should research design. It is not, of course, that workers are incapable of distinguishing how they feel, for example, about their supervisor from how they feel about their colleagues or the company as a whole. Rather, it is the case that workers combine their feelings (based in large measure on the compilation of thousands of examples of social interactions) about their co-workers, their supervisors and their firms to create an internal composite that expresses their overall satisfaction with their job. The goal of this research is both to determine the individual components that go into overall feelings of worker satisfaction and loyalty as well as to understand the dynamics of how they all work together.

The scope of this research will be three "average" large workplaces, each with about 100 workers. Both hourly workers and as well as their salaried managers will be surveyed and interviewed to determine their understanding of the social interactions that take place in their workplaces. This research is designed both to elicit the "native" (or emic, to use the ethnographic term) perspective on how small social exchanges add up over time to create an overall sense of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with their work and their firms as well as to create an "etic" or outside perspective on the causes of worker satisfaction (or the lack thereof).

Both qualitative as well as quantitative methodologies will be used in this research, which should result in findings that are both "thick" (to use anthropologist Clifford Geertz's term) and yet that can also be extrapolated to other firms and sets of workers. In other words, there has been an attempt made to design research that both allows us an in-depth understanding of a particular trio of companies and their employees and how these people interact with each other and their firms to produce an overall high-functioning (or mediocre or dysfunctional) organization while also attempting (through the use of statistical analysis) to produce research that is applicable beyond the specifics at hand.

The firms selected for this research are sufficiently varied that they allow for such applicability to other companies. They also offer sufficient internal variability that they allow for the gathering of information on a wide range of types of social exchanges. The hierarchy in firms of this size is deeper than it is in smaller firms; there are also (simply by virtue of the number of employees) a wide range of people, which allows for the gathering of information on more types of social exchanges.

One of the key human relations issues of the 21st-century workplace is the way in which people of diverse backgrounds, talents, skills and experiences can come together. As American society grows increasingly diverse, so does the American workplace, and so the average American worker is likely to engage in an increasing number of cross-cultural social interactions in the workplace. This is many (and indeed probably most) ways a good thing both for the individuals involved as well as for the company as a whole. However, it is also true that when individuals from different cultures interact with each other there is a greater chance of misunderstandings to arise than is the case when those two individuals are from the same culture.