Business Psychology and Individual Differences & Hawthorne Effect and Other Factors Related to Job Performance

Solution Preview

1) Explain the premise of business psychology. Include in your posting the origins of this field and how you think the Hawthorne Effect may apply today. How might individual differences affect the workplace? Discuss Business Psychology's relationship to three major learning theories. Utilize at least one outside source in this discussion.

Origins of business psychology are well explained here in the APA (American Psychological Association) Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology: http://www.siop.org/History/historynew.aspx. Here is their brief summary "Industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology is the scientific study of the workplace. Rigor and methods of psychology are applied to issues of critical relevance to business, including talent management, coaching, assessment, selection, training, organizational development, performance, and work-life balance."

You can cite this site. If you don't know how to cite electronic sources: http://www.landmark.edu/Library/citation_guides/apa.cfm#Web_Pages

So in short, business psychology grew out of the need and desire to improve performance and contentment in the workplace.

The Hawthorne Effect

Check out Wikipedia-you cannot cite Wikipedia, but you can look up the sources used there, read them and use them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect#cite_note-AssemM-5

The Hawthorne Effect was formulated in 1950 and basically states that worker productivity improves when almost any change is made at the workplace. This short term improvement seems to occur because worker motivation appears to increase whenever it appears management is paying attention to the workers. The first experiment was to lower lighting, and raise lighting. In both cases worker performance increased, then later went back to a plateau.

The Hathorne Effect is related to B.F. Skinner's ( around the same time-1950's) work on operant conditioning and the use of variable ration reinforcement (1 major learning theory).

Here is more on Skinner: (http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/skinner.html): "Variable ratio means you change the reward each time -- first it takes 3 tries to get a goodie, then 10, then 1, then 7 and so on. Variable interval means you keep changing the time period -- first 20 seconds, then 5, then 35, then 10 ...