INTRODUCTION

There are a number of ways one can use psychology to improve the work performance, to

build the job-related skills that will help your career, to give you a competitive edge.

Many people think of psychology as a set of theories and skills to be used by counselors

and therapists who deal with mental problems. Abnormal behavior and mental disorders

are, in fact, major concerns for some people who have studied psychology. But there are

many applications of psychological findings outside of counseling. One of the oldest

specialties in applied psychology has nothing to do with therapy and abnormality. This

specialty is the psychology of work behavior. Work or industrial psychology, in brief, is

concerned with the scientific structuring of organizations and of work to improve the

productivity and quality of life of people at work.

The field of work or industrial psychology is certainly a very applied field, but many

psychologists also address relatively basic research questions. In other words, work

psychologists very much want to produce solutions to problems in the workplace, but

they also usually want to develop a fuller understanding of life at work to produce a solid

scientific knowledge base. Work scientist/practitioners like being in an environment that

has problems that need to be solved, but they also like to discover and collect scientific

facts about work and organizational settings that they can apply to problems yet to be

faced. There is a lot of justification for this kind of activity because the world of work is

such a fast-moving target of study that many issues are hard to anticipate.

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Traditionally, work psychologists have focused on understanding individual behavior and

experience in organizational settings. That is, the worker has received the most attention.

This, of course, continues today. Today more than ever, however, work psychologists

explicitly acknowledge the importance of considering the whole work system. For

example, they conduct research at the group and organizational levels of analysis as well

as at the individual level. Also, they formally address the impact on work of

environmental factors such as labor markets, economic conditions, and governmental

regulations. In fact, operating within a systems approach to understanding people at work

has allowed work psychologists to contribute to cutting-edge issues in the design of work.

For example, work psychologists have contributed to the design and development of

team-based organizations and have developed strategies for designing organizational

structures for work that are flexible enough to ride through turbulent environmental

times. (Borman, W. C., & Motowidlo, S. J. (1993). Expanding the criterion domain to

include elements of contextual performance, Pg. 71-80)

For the purpose of the report I will be using Omantel Telecommunications, which is one

fo the biggest telecommunicaitons company in Oman to see how effectively work

psychology is used for the betterment of the employees. It is the main duty fo the

manager to handle the employees and to understand their psychology so that he/she can

cooperate with them and to see what are their requirements and what exactly they should

be given or done so that the employees give their 100% at the work place. Without

understanding the psychology of the employees it is not possible for any manager to run

the company successfully.

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Work psychology can be classified into different branches based on the purpose to

be used within the organization:

Physiological Psychology: Physiological psychology studies the physiological correlates

of behavior. It studies both very basic processes (e.g., how brain cells function) and more

readily observable phenomena (e.g., behavioral changes as a function of drug use or the

biological/genetic roots of psychiatric disorders).

Omantel is one of the biggest companies of Oman operating with a huge amount fo

workforce. The employees and the managers are very highly skilled, qualified and

skilled. The mangers study the employee very closely and they try to uderstand

psychology of the employee. The purpose of physiological psychology has been very

much useful for the managers because with the help of this type of psychology, the

manager is able to study the employee and can be able to find out if the employee is

physically fit or if he/she is into any drug or alcohol abuse and accordingly they treat the

employee.

Cognitive Psychology is the school of psychology that examines internal mental

processes such as problem solving, memory, and language. It had its foundations in the

Gestalt psychology of Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Kohler, and Kurt Koffka, and in the

work of Jean Piaget, who studied intellectual development in children. Cognitive

psychologists are interested in how people understand, diagnose, and solve problems,

concerning themselves with the mental processes which mediate between stimulus and

response. Cognitive theory contends that solutions to problems take the form of

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algorithms rules that are not necessarily understood but promise a solution, or heuristics

rules that are understood but that do not always guarantee solutions. In other instances,

solutions may be found through insight, a sudden awareness of relationships.

Cognitive psychology is radically different from previous psychological approaches in

two key ways.

 It accepts the use of the scientific method, and generally rejects introspection as a

valid method of investigation, unlike phenomenological methods such as Freudian

psychology.

 It explicitly acknowledges the existence of internal mental states (such as belief,

desire and motivation) unlike behaviorist psychology.

(Campbell, J. P., Gasser, M. B., & Oswald, F. L. (1996). The substantive nature of job

performance variability. In K. R. Murphy (Ed.), Individual differences and behavior in

organizations (pp. 258–265).

As Omantel is a big organization, disputes and conflicts rise every now and then. The

main purpose of using the cognitive psychology is to understand the employee and

his/her problem. Without understanding the problem of the employees it is not possible

to solve the dispute or the conflict. To have a healthy and friendly environment within

the organization it becomes very much for the manager to have good knowledge about

the cognitive psychology so that he/she can understand the employees demand and needs

and according to them the manager can fulfil the needs of the employees. Whenever

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there is a dispute or a conflict, the cognitive psychology comes in action and only with

the help of cognitive psychology the manager will be able to set things cool and calm.

Developmental psychology, also known as Human Development, is the scientific study

of progressive psychological changes that occur in human beings as they age. Originally

concerned with infants and children, and later other periods of great change such as

adolescence and aging, it now encompasses the entire life span. This field examines

change across a broad range of topics including motor skills and other psycho-

physiological processes, problem solving abilities, conceptual understanding, acquisition

of language, moral understanding, and identify formation.

Developmental psychologists investigate key questions, such as whether children are

qualitatively different from adults or simply lack the experience that adults draw upon.

Other issues that they deal with is the question of whether development occurs through

the gradual accumulation of knowledge or through shifts from one stage of thinking to

another; or if children are born with innate knowledge or figure things out through

experience; and whether development is driven by the social context or by something

inside each child.

Developmental psychology informs several applied fields, including: educational, child

psychopathology and developmental forensics. Developmental psychology complements

several other basic research fields in psychology including social psychology, cognitive

psychology, cognitive development, and comparative psychology. (Campbell, J. P.,

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Gasser, M. B., & Oswald, F. L. (1996). The substantive nature of job performance

variability. In K. R. Murphy (Ed.), Individual differences and behavior in organizations

(pp. 270–276).

Developmental psychology plays an important in Omantel because each and eveyr

manager of the company’s department is very much concerned about development of the

employees. The managers have different programs through which they try to develop the

psychology of the employees. There are regular weekly and monthly meetings where the

managers try to interact with the employees to know what is going on in the company and

to see if they have any problems, demands or needs. They very regularly interact with

the employees and try to encourage them and develop their psychological thinking. The

company also has various trainining and development programs where the employees

gets advanced training and help them develop their psychology.

Social psychology Social psychology is the study of the nature and causes of human

social behavior, with an emphasis on how people think towards each other and how they

relate to each other. As the mind is the axis around which social behavior pivots, social

psychologists tend to study the relationship between minds and social behaviors. In early-

modern social science theory, John Stuart Mill, Comte, and others, laid the foundation for

social psychology by asserting that human social cognition and behavior could and

should be studied scientifically like any other natural science. It is the scientific study of

how people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or

implied presence of others (Allport, 1985). By this definition, scientific refers to the

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empirical method of investigation. The terms thoughts, feelings, and behaviors include all

of the psychological variables that are measurable in a human being. The statement that

others may be imagined or implied suggests that we are prone to social influence even

when no other people are present, such as when watching television, or following

internalized cultural norms.

Social psychologists typically explain human behavior as a result of the interaction of

mental states and immediate, social situations. In Kurt Lewin's (1951), famous heuristic,

behavior can be viewed as a function of the person and the environment, B=f(P,E). In

general, social psychologists have a preference for laboratory based, empirical findings.

Their theories tend to be specific and focused, rather than global and general.

Social psychology is an interdisciplinary domain that bridges the gap between

psychology and sociology. During the years immediately following World War II, there

was frequent collaboration between psychologists and sociologists (Sewell, 1989).

However, the two disciplines have become increasingly specialized and isolated from

each other in recent years, with sociologists focusing on “macro variables” (e.g. social

structure) to a much greater extent. Nevertheless, sociological approaches to social

psychology remain an important counterpart to psychological research in this area.

(Hunter, J. E., & Schmidt, F. L. (1990). Methods of meta-analysis: Correcting error and

bias in research findings, Pg. 71-76)

Omantel is a company where a huge amount of multinationals work together and hence it

becomes quite important for the managers and company to maintain the social

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environment in a good way. The social psychology comes into action and the managers

help the emloyees to behave in a friendly way within the company. For this purpose the

company has various cultural activities within the company whereby different nationality

people participate and encourage each other. There is huge amount of entertainment in

these activities whereby the employees gets close to each other and because good friends

and respect each other and maintain good social environment within the company.

Personality psychology is a branch of psychology which studies personality and

individual differences. One emphasis in this area is to construct a coherent picture of a

person and his or her major psychological processes. Another emphasis views personality

as the study of individual differences, in other words, how people differ from each other.

A third area of emphasis examines human nature and how all people are similar to one

other. These three viewpoints merge together in the study of personality.

Personality can be defined as a dynamic and organized set of characteristics possessed by

a person that uniquely influences his or her cognitions, motivations, and behaviours in

various situations (Ryckman, 2004). The word "personality" originates from the Latin

persona, which means mask. Significantly, in the theatre of the ancient Latin-speaking

world, the mask was not used as a plot device to disguise the identity of a character, but

rather was a convention employed to represent or typify that character.

The pioneering American psychologist, Gordon Allport (1937) described two major ways

to study personality, the nomothetic and the idiographic. Nomothetic psychology seeks

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general laws that can be applied to many different people, such as the principle of self-

actualization, or the trait of extraversion. Idiographic psychology is an attempt to

understand the unique aspects of a particular individual.

The study of personality has a rich and varied history in psychology, with an abundance

of theoretical traditions. Some psychologists have taken a highly scientific approach,

whereas others have focused their attention on theory development. There is also a

substantial emphasis on the applied field of personality testing. (Anderson, N., Ones, D.

S., Sinangil, H. K., & Viswesvaran, C. (Eds.). (2002). Handbook of industrial, work and

organizational psychology, Volume 2: Organizational psychology, Pg. 111-118)

Within Omantel personality psychology is given higher priority and hence there are

several programs where the employee can develop his/her personality and improve

his/her skills. The company gives more interest on personality development as they think

that the employees are the building blocks of the company and they need to be given

special care and attention and hence they have training centers where the employees can

develop their personality, skills and techniques. The manager studies the psychology of

the individual employees and based on the findings, they decide what kind of personality

development is required for the employee and hence they go accordingly. For this

purpose there are several classes conducted by the company whereby the staff is given

coaching and lectures on personality development and see to that the employees are up to

the expected level within the company.

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CONCLUSION

Work psychology is about the people part of organizations. It’s about the well-being of

people at work and about what makes organization ‘tick’. It's concerned with what helps

people and organizations function well, what causes problems and how we can improve

the way things are at work.

The following report has been discussed about the work psychology whereby I have

selected Omantel Telecommunications as my example to see how effectively work

psychology is followed and maintained in the company. I have discussed various aspects

of work psychology and also discussed different types of work psychology with relevant

examples and shown how effectively they have used each and every psychology for the

betterment of the company.

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REFERENCES

 Borman, W. C., & Motowidlo, S. J. (1993). Expanding the criterion domain to

include elements of contextual performance. Chapter in N. Schmitt and W. C.

Borman (Eds.), Personnel Selection. San Francisco: Josey-Bass (pp. 71-98).

 Campbell, J. P., Gasser, M. B., & Oswald, F. L. (1996). The substantive nature of

job performance variability. In K. R. Murphy (Ed.), Individual differences and

behavior in organizations (pp. 258–299). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

 Hunter, J. E., & Schmidt, F. L. (1990). Methods of meta-analysis: Correcting

error and bias in research findings. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

 Anderson, N., Ones, D. S., Sinangil, H. K., & Viswesvaran, C. (Eds.). (2002).

Handbook of industrial, work and organizational psychology, Volume 2:

Organizational psychology. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications Ltd.

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