Implications of knowledge of psychology in Human Resource Management Course: Introduction to Psychology

Course Code: GEN 205

Section: 02

Prepared for:

Dr. Sheikh M. Shahidullah

Department of Social Science

Prepared by:

Shati Itminan

ID: 2008-2-10-121

Date of submission: 18th April, 2010

Introduction: The scientific study of behavior and mental process is known as

psychology. It deals with the latent, hidden, conscious and unconscious stages of

human mind. Psychology is important as it is concerned with the study of behavior and

mental processes and at the same time, it is also applied to many different things in

human life. Everything we perform is very much related to or with psychology.

Psychology, primarily studies who and what we are, why we are like that, why we act

and think like that and what we could be as a person. Having a firm knowledge in

psychology certainly helps to enjoy a better career in future. In this tough and

competitive arena of job world, it is a tiresome work to do well in a job having only

bookish or general knowledge about the job content. A person gets success both in

term of intrinsic and extrinsic, if he/she possesses broader sphere knowledge about the

job context and the cognitive or mental stance of the employees, supervisors,

customers and clients of that particular job. Hence, knowledge of psychology often

supports a person to achieve the desired target effectively.

My Career of interest: As a business student, I was given several choices to select like

Marketing, Accounting, Finance, Management, HRM etc. Among these alternatives, I

chose HRM or Human Resource Management. Human Resource management deals

with carrying out the “people” or the human resource aspects of a management

position, including recruiting, screening, training, rewarding and appraising. Human

resource management is the study that helps to implement a smooth operation of the

employees through an organization. HR manager’s main responsibility is to monitor the

optimal level of performance and to correct them if any deviations occur.

Implication of knowledge of psychology in Human Resource Management field:

When one people have a firm knowledge in psychology, he/ she certainly get

advantages to deal with the mind of employees or the human resources effectively than

other people. As human resource management is directly related with the employee

performance, it is necessary to understand the mental stance of the employees. To get

fairly clear information about the will, desire, expectations of the employees, apt in

psychology is recommended. I can apply my knowledge of psychology in the fields

given below.

1. Selecting the best candidate: The first step of a HR manager is to find a

candidate who is capable of doing best for the organization. The candidates can be

screened out according to their personality, mental aptitude, physical fitness, dexterity

etc. It is proved in research that, personality checking is the most effective method to

predict one’s future performance in the organization. However, it is most difficult to

measure one’s personality properly. The knowledge of psychology can be implemented

to do this. “Big five model” is one of the most commonly used mean to categorize a

person based on his/her personality. According to big five models, a person can have

five different styles like extraversion, agreeableness, and openness to experience,

neuroticism and conscientiousness. Once identified, it becomes easy to measure one

future job performance. Extraversion, characterized by sociable, active and assertive is

a predictor of success on jobs like sales representative. Agreeableness means trusting,

caring and compliant and it predicts fair representation ability in job. Conscientiousness

is the relationship between dependency and achievement. It is the most important

predictor of future job performance. It positively relates with intrinsic and extrinsic job

success. Openness to experience, extraversion and conscientiousness are also a

strong predictor of future leadership. On the other hand neuroticism or low emotional

stability is negatively related with job performance. So it is important to know about an

employee’s personality.

Moreover, it is necessary to judge one employee’s intelligence before hiring. Higher

intelligent quaint or IQ is needed for doing well in some jobs like handling customer

calls. It is also recommended to measure one person’s crystallized and fluid intelligence

to estimate his/her ability in the job field.

2. Motivating the employees: Employee motivation is an essential ingredient to

achieving success within your organization; motivated employees directly correlate to

performance, job satisfaction, and employee retention. As a result, the ability to

motivate and engage employees is a vital and necessary skill for managers in any

industry.  In psychology, the term "motivation" can be defined simply as the reason for

engaging in a particular behavior; basically, motivation is the "why" behind any given

action. A vast amount of research concerning motivation theory has been conducted

over the course of decades, with many diverging theories.

A major motivation theory is Abraham Maslow’s "Hierarchy of Needs." The basic

principle behind this theory is that human beings are motivated by meeting their most

pressing needs first. Maslow’s hierarchy contains five levels, and, theoretically, each

successive level can only be attained by meeting those beneath it. They are (in order

from lowest to highest): physiological needs, security needs, social needs, esteem

needs, and self-actualization. According to Maslow, employees’ lower level needs would

have to be met in order for them to achieve a higher functioning level of motivation. If an

organization adopted Maslow’s approach to motivation, it would seek to meet the most

basic needs of their employees in order to equip them for higher levels of performance.

While providing resources to meet one’s physiological needs such as food, shelter, and

clothing is as simple as writing a paycheck, helping employees achieve higher levels

like social and self-esteem needs are more complicated. Still, these needs can be

remedied through various vehicles like employee interaction and genuine praise,

appreciation, and recognition from supervisors. If an organization can free their

employees from the pressures of fulfilling lower level needs, their employees will feel

comfortable and capable to operate at their greatest potential.

3. Training the Employees: Employee can learn through classical, operant and

observational learning.

• Operant conditioning is an important concept in psychology. Operant

conditioning is a learning process that involves an increase or decrease in the

likelihood of some behavior as a result of the consequences. There are four

types of learning processes in operant conditioning: positive reinforcement,

negative reinforcement, positive punishment, and negative punishment.

Positive Reinforcement: Positive reinforcement occurs when the likelihood of a

certain behavior increases as a result of the presentation of something pleasant

after the behavior. For example, it may include increasing the salary of an

employee when he/she does some overtime works or does better performance.

Negative Reinforcement: Negative reinforcement occurs when the likelihood of

a certain behavior increases as the result of removing something unpleasant

after the behavior. For example, it may include not responding to an employee if

he/she does something which is not acceptable in the terms of the organization.

Positive Punishment: Positive punishment occurs when the like hood of a

certain behavior decreases as the result of the presentation of something

unpleasant after the behavior. For example, a manager may yell or charge a fine

to an employee if any deviant behavior occurs.

Negative Punishment: Negative punishment occurs when the likelihood of a

certain behavior decreases as the result of the removal of something pleasant

after the behavior. For example, a manager may withdraw an employee’s some

better condition as a mean of compensating.

• Employee learn when and how to work hard etc through classical conditioning.

For example, after the month of Ramadan, eid comes. And before eid, employee

get bonus. So an employee may feel the temptation of bonus just after a couple

of days of Ramadan.

• They can also learn through social or observational learning. A HR manager may

announce one “employee of the month” or “best employee of the season”. The

other employees can follow them and try to become like them.

4. Behavior Modification: Behavior modification is the use of empirically

demonstrated behavior change techniques to improve behavior, such as altering an

individual's behaviors and reactions to stimuli through positive and

negative reinforcement of adaptive behavior and/or the reduction of maladaptive

behavior through its "extinction", punishment and/or therapy.

One employee’s behavior can be modified by giving them reinforcement. In operant

conditioning, schedules of reinforcement are an important component of the learning

process. When and how often we reinforce a behavior can have a dramatic impact on

the strength and rate of the response. Certain schedules of reinforcement may be more

effective in specific situations. There are two types of reinforcement schedules:

i. Continuous Reinforcement

In continuous reinforcement, the desired behavior is reinforced every single time

it occurs. Generally, this schedule is best used during the initial stages of

learning in order to create a strong association between the behavior and the

response. Once the response if firmly attached, reinforcement is usually switched

to a partial reinforcement schedule. For example, praising an employee after

doing each works.

ii. Partial Reinforcement

In partial reinforcement, the response is reinforced only part of the time. Learned

behaviors are acquired more slowly with partial reinforcement, but the response

is more resistant to extinction. There are four schedules of partial reinforcement:

a. Fixed-ratio schedules are those where a response is reinforced only after a

specified number of responses. This schedule produces a high, steady rate of

responding with only a brief pause after the delivery of the reinforcement. For

example, it may include reinforcing an employee after making 5 successful sales

order.

b. Variable-ratio schedules occur when a response is reinforced after an

unpredictable number of responses. This schedule creates a high steady rate of

responding. Gambling and lottery games are good examples of a reward based

on a variable ratio schedule. For example, reinforcing somebody at a random

level of successful sales calls like 5, 10, 12 etc.

c. Fixed-interval schedules are those where the first response is rewarded only

after a specified amount of time has elapsed. This schedule causes high

amounts of responding near the end of the interval, but much slower responding

immediately after the delivery of the reinforce. It may include, reinforcing

somebody weekly, fortnightly or monthly.

d. Variable-interval schedules occur when a response is rewarded after an

unpredictable amount of time has passed. This schedule produces a slow,

steady rate of response. For example, a HR manager can reinforce one

employee at a random order. Here no specific date of reinforcement is declared.

5. Psychology of change: Employees not only need to feel good about the change

process; they need to feel confident in their ability to execute the newly required tasks.

Psychologist Albert Bandura called the judgment an individual makes about his or her

ability to execute a particular behavior, ‘self-efficacy’. He also outlined four ways

individuals learn self-efficacy around a particular task: through performance

accomplishments, through vicarious experiences, through social persuasion and

through positive emotional states.

Here are some ways organization can take advantage of this knowledge to create the

necessary experiences to reduce employee anxiety and boost confidence, leading to

improved performance and less emotional distress:

1. Creating performance accomplishments. Past successful experiences with

similar tasks will tend to raise self-efficacy, while repeated failures lower them.

Savvy organization make sure that employees see how their old way of doing

things has prepared them to successfully deal with the upcoming changes,

provide skill training to build confidence, and stagger the change process to

insure employee successes early-on. In short, they build confidence and skills at

the same time.

2. Providing access to vicarious experiences. Observing others perform the new

activities successfully can generate expectations in observers that they can

improve their own performance by learning from what is observed. The more

powerful the role model, the larger the impact, which is why savvy corporations

have a key executive justify the need for change, model and monitor the process,

define acceptable performance, and demonstrate how improvements can be

made.

3. Increasing management persuasion. Social persuasion refers to activities where

people are led, through suggestion, into believing that they can cope successfully

with specific tasks. Coaching and giving evaluative feedback on performance are

common types of social persuasion

4. Positive emotional states. A certain level of stress can be a motivator for change.

However, emotional reactions to specific tasks – such as anxiety - can lead to

negative judgments of one’s ability to complete them.

6. Employee Counseling: Employee counseling can be explained as providing help and

support to the employees to face and sail through the difficult times in life. At many

points of time in life or career people come across some problems either in their work or

personal life when it starts influencing and affecting their performance and, increasing

the stress levels of the individual. Counseling is guiding, consoling, advising and sharing

and helping to resolve their problems whenever the need arises.

Technically, Psychological Counseling, a form of counseling is used by the experts to

analyze the work related performance and behavior of the employees to help them cope

with it, resolve the conflicts and tribulations and re-enforce the desired results.

Counseling of staff is becoming an essential function of the managers. The organization

can either take the help of experienced employees or expert, professional counselor to

take up the counseling activities. Increasing complexities in the lives of the employees

need to address various aspects like:

• Performance counseling: Ideally, the need for employee counseling arises when

the employee shows signs of declining performance, being stressed in office-hours,

bad decision-making etc. In such situations, counseling is one of the best ways to

deal with them. It should cover all the aspects related to the employee performance

like the targets, employee's responsibilities, problems faced, employee aspirations,

and inter-personal relationships at the workplace.

• Personal and Family Wellbeing: Families and friends are an important and

inseparable part of the employee's life. Many a times, employees carry the baggage

of personal problems to their workplaces, which in turn affects their performance

adversely. Therefore, the counselor needs to strike a comfort level with the

employees and, counseling sessions involving their families can help to resolve their

problems and getting them back to work- all fresh and enthusiastic.

• Other Problems: Other problems can range from work-life balance to health

problems. Counseling helps to identify the problem and help him / her to deal with

the situation in a better way.

7. Employee mental health: Sometimes the employee in the organization can have

some mental illness like schizophrenia, sudden loss of memory, some phobias etc. It is

helpful for a manager to identify and take necessary steps to solve these problems if

he/she has knowledge of basic psychology.

Conclusion: psychology is such a special branch of science which is necessary for

success in myriad job fields. The knowledge of psychology is essential for jobs

regardless of whether the job is commercial, arts or science in nature. Rationally, a fair

knowledge of psychology is certainly helpful for a career in Human Resource

Management. All the work of a human resource manager is to deal with the human

aspects of an organization. Understanding the psychology of the employees increases

the likelihood to handle them properly. So the knowledge of psychology is very

important to become successful in future. I am very happy to take the basic psychology

course and I strongly believe that the change in my behavior after taking this course will

certainly frame my future career of interest.