Module 82 REVIEW

• 82-1 What is flow?

• Flow is a completely involved, focused state of consciousness with diminished awareness of self and time. It results from fully engaging one’s skills.

• 82-2 What are three key areas of study related to industrial-organizational psychology?

• I/O psychology’s three subfields are personnel, organizational, and human factors psychology.

• 82-3 How do personnel psychologists facilitate job seeking, employee selection, work placement, and performance appraisal?

• Personnel psychologists work with job seekers to improve their searching and self-presentation skills, and with organizations to devise selection methods for new employees, recruit and evaluate applicants, design and evaluate training programs, identify people’s strengths, analyze job content, and appraise individual and organizational performance.
• Unstructured interviews foster the interviewer illusion; structured interviews pinpoint job-relevant strengths and are better predictors of performance.
• Checklists, graphic rating scales, and behavior rating scales are useful performance appraisal methods.

• 82-4 What is the role of organizational psychologists?

• Organizational psychologists examine influences on worker satisfaction and productivity and facilitate organizational change. Employee satisfaction and engagement tend to correlate with organizational success.

• 82-5 How can leaders be most effective?

• Effective leaders set specific challenging goals and choose an appropriate leadership style. Leadership style may be goal-oriented (task leadership), group-oriented (social leadership), or some combination of the two.

• 82-6 What cultural influences need to be considered when choosing an effective leadership style?

• Leaders who fulfill their culture’s expectations—by promoting individualism or collectivism, kindness or aggressiveness, or the accentuating or downplaying of gender roles—tend to be successful.
• Other leader behaviors—such as supporting employees by focusing on their strengths—are universally effective.

• 82-7 How do human factors psychologists work to create user-friendly machines and work settings?

• Human factors psychologists contribute to human safety and improved design by encouraging developers and designers to consider human perceptual abilities, to avoid the curse of knowledge, and to test users to reveal perception-based problems.

Multiple-Choice Questions

1. Carla is reading a gripping novel and loses track of time, making her late for practice. Carla may have been experiencing
   1. flow.
   2. I/O psychology.
   3. self-efficacy.
   4. performance appraisal.
   5. the curse of knowledge.
2. Job-seekers at a company are screened by different interviewers, but each is asked the same questions. The company is making use of
   1. flow.
   2. structured interviews.
   3. employee engagement.
   4. unstructured interviews.
   5. human factors psychology.
3. The overall goal of 360-degree feedback is
   1. self-rating.
   2. achieving flow.
   3. performance appraisal.
   4. employee selection.
   5. achieving transformational leadership.

Practice FRQ

1. Compare and contrast the type of work done by the following psychologists:
   • Organizational
   • Human factors
   • Personnel

(3 points)