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Industrial/Organisational Psychology
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Welcome | What is I/O Psychology? | Practice | Teaching | Research |
Research
In the IO Lab, we develop, conduct and disseminate innovative business-relevant research aimed at improving organisational effectiveness and individual wellbeing. Our staff are active in the research community - researching, consulting, presenting and publishing in a wide variety of areas. Our students develop an expert knowledge of the I/O Psychology literature and use their outstanding research skills to practise and advise on data-driven and evidence-based management strategies in the workplace. Our facilities enable us to work on a wide range of research projects, from detailed experiments testing the impact of various environments on worker safety and wellbeing right through to high-end administration and analysis of national and international workplace surveys, and the many variations of research in-between. Contact us at iolab@psy.uwa.edu.au to discuss your needs.
Effects of red and blue lighting on human performance The role of personality in proneness to human error: The case of conscientiousness and anxiety Injury type and fake-bad responses to the HEXACO-PI and detecting distortions at variable base rates of malingering
The objective of this research was to find evidence that Human Error Probability Parameter (HEPP) could be assessed with self report questionnaires. Research has produced much evidence about antecedents of human error, incidents, and accidents. However there is a lack of practicable and cost-effective instruments that enable supervisors and managers to conduct proper organisational level Threat and Error Management. 169 participants completed an online experiment, including a self-report questionnaire that assessed personality facets, attributional style, and state affect plus actual visual memory, risk taking behaviour, and sustained attention performance tasks. A large amount of variance in visual memory, risk taking behaviour, and sustained attention performance (85%, 61%, and 58% respectively) could be explained by the developed instrument. The results suggest that precisely defined HEPP can be captured in self-report questionnaires and that such measures can reliably assess the most common cognitive errors responsible for incidents and accidents.
Autonomy has long been considered an influential predictor of important outcome variables in organisational research. Recent research into work autonomy suggests that sub-facets of work autonomy exhibit different relationships with important outcome variables. By measuring Breaugh’s (1985) facets of autonomy – method, schedule and criteria autonomy, the current research was able to investigate the role of control in Karasek’s (1979) Demand Control Model at a finer level of detail in order to understand the effects of different facets of autonomy on key outcome variables, such as job satisfaction, anxiety and depression. Results indicated that Breaugh’s (1985) facets of autonomy differentially predicted job satisfaction, anxiety and depression. There was evidence to suggest that criteria autonomy was more strongly related to job satisfaction, whereas schedule autonomy was more strongly related to anxiety. The implications of these findings are discussed along with limitations of the present study and recommendations for future research.
Despite the uptake rates by organisations, little research has evaluated the effectiveness of ethical codes, particularly in relation to their influence on employee behaviour. The few studies that have investigated this impact have used disparate outcomes measures and methodologies. This study provides theoretical justification for moving research towards the assessment of individual-level psychological processes linking codes and behaviour. It builds upon the 2001 study of Wotruba, Chonko and Loe and finds that ethical environment is a predictor of the perceptions employees have of ethical codes, and that familiarity with code content can be an intermediary in this relationship. It also creates and tests a set of measures around these constructs for use in future research.
The present research investigated the relationship between personality and intelligence. Considering inconsistent findings and methodological limitations of previous research examining these two constructs, this study utilised canonical correlation analysis to conduct a statistically rigorous test of a relationship previously researched using simple correlation and regression analysis. In accordance with previous research it was hypothesised that the personality factors of Openness to Experience, Extraversion, Neuroticism and Conscientiousness would be significant predictors of mental ability. However, analysis of a data set containing over 21 000 respondents to the Fifteen Factor Questionnaire (15FQ) and the General Reasoning Test Battery (a timed mental ability inventory including three sub-tests of verbal reasoning, numerical reasoning and abstract reasoning) indicated that the relationship between personality and intelligence was negligible, and that personality was a poor predictor of intelligence at both factor and facet level. The study’s findings indicate that information obtained from measures of personality and cognitive ability should be interpreted separately and inferences should not be drawn about one construct in light of the other. Therefore, this research endorses the continued use of both personality and cognitive ability measures in processes of recruitment and selection.
The present study tested the effect of work-family conflict on turnover intention and the moderating effect of gender role orientation. Data were obtained through online surveys of 113 employees in a private Australian organisation. Hierarchical regression analysis showed a direct association between work-family conflict and turnover intention. Additionally support was found for the moderating effect of gender role orientation on the family-work conflict/turnover intention relationship, such that traditional individuals had higher intentions to resign from their job when they experienced family-work conflict. However the work-family conflict/turnover intention relationship showed no significant interaction with gender role orientation. One implication of this finding is that conflict originating in the office increases turnover intentions, however gender role orientation has no impact on the relationship. Conversely gender role orientation does moderate the relationship between family-work conflict and turnover, such that traditional individuals have higher turnover intentions when they experience conflict originating in the home.
Although work-life balance (WLB) programs are available in most organisations, they are seldom utilised. Organisational support, manager support, co-worker support, organisational time demand and career consequences are some barriers previously found to restrict WLB programs utilisation. Instead of a direct relationship between these organisational barriers and WLB programs utilisation, it was proposed that organisational barriers would influence WLB programs utilisation through the attitude, subjective norm and perceived behavioural control constructs of the theory of planned behaviour. A path analysis using data from 242 employees of a State Government agency supported this hypothesis. The results also showed that, 1) low organisational time demand was related to greater perceived control over the use of WLB programs, 2) positive career consequences was related to positive attitudes towards using WLB programs, 3) co-worker support for WLB was related to high social pressure to use WLB programs, 4) organisational and managerial support for WLB was related to greater perceived control over the use of WLB programs, and 5) organisational and managerial support for WLB was related to positive attitudes towards using WLB programs. Theoretical and practical implications of this study are discussed.
Studies have demonstrated that Karasek’s operationalisation of job demands in his well-known Job Demand-Control model (Karasek, 1979) cannot capture the complexities of working with patients or clients in health care work. The present study on burnout among health care providers expanded Karasek’s model by including emotional job demands and testing the potential moderating role of social support from family and supervisors on the relationship between the job demands and burnout. The inclusion of a job demand that refers specifically to the emotional aspects of working with people that are either critically ill, frail, or requiring great amounts of high level of emotionally demanding attention, can be especially relevant for major health care providers. The results showed that social support from family and supervisors had a significant effect on emotional exhaustion. Implications for management and for the research literature are discussed.
Despite its popularity, there has been little empirical research conducted to date on the effectiveness of coaching interventions in organisational settings. Where coaching has been evaluated empirically in a field setting, conclusions regarding coaching-related improvement have suffered from common design flaws, such as the lack of a comparison (control) group or the lack of attention to pre-testing effects. This study utilised a Solomon four-group experimental design to test coaching efficacy and to simultaneously rule out a number of design-related alternative hypotheses. 82 coachees and non-coached controls in a State Government Department were assessed on a range of potential coaching outcomes, including positive and negative affect, self-efficacy, life satisfaction, goal difficulty and goal attainment. Results indicated empirical support for coaching as an intervention for a number of these outcomes. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed.
Organisations today are facing human resources challenges related to retention, turnover and productivity. Assistance in understanding and addressing these areas adds value to both employers and employees. The concept of Job Engagement and it’s translation into the workplace is thus an area of interest for many organisations. The current study assessed Rich’s construction of job engagement as a three-factor model (physical, cognitive and affective engagement) using confirmatory factor analysis. The discriminant validity of the Job Engagement Scale (JES) by Rich (2006) was also assessed by controlling for other related constructs such as job satisfaction, job involvement and intrinsic motivation. The sample utilised was voluntarily recruited from 500 staff (approx 400 employees and 100 contractors) at a Distribution Centre who were administered a paper and pencil survey. A series of confirmatory factor analytic models assessed within AMOS 7.0 indicated a good fit of data to a 3 factor model, providing evidence of the validity of Rich’s (2006) conceptualisation of engagement. Further confirmatory factor analysis provide evidence of discriminant validity when job engagement is considered amongst other related constructs, namely; job satisfaction, intrinsic motivation and job involvement. The implications for the research literature and for management are discussed.
In the current study, the confounding role of affectivity was investigated for self-reported relationships between burnout and two of its antecedents; job demands and job resources. Using the Conservation of Resource (COR) theoretical framework, job demands and job resources were operationalised as emotional dissonance and autonomy respectively. Based on comments outlined by Burke, Brief and George (1993), it was hypothesised that negative affectivity (NA) would confound the emotional dissonance-burnout relationship and positive affectivity (PA) would confound the autonomy-burnout relationships. Whilst the confounding role of NA on the self-report of stressor-strain relationships has received considerable attention in the literature, there is an absence of research that considers PA, or is applied within a burnout context. Results indicated full confounding effects for both these relationships using an adapted version of Baron and Kenny’s (1994) four-step mediational procedure. Findings within the current investigation suggest a differential role of NA and PA in the measurement of burnout relationships and highlight the importance of including them within future research designs. |
