Research Update Institute of Work Psychology (IWP) www.sheffield.ac.uk/management/research/iwp
Welcome to IWP 2015 We are a group of enthusiastic work psychologists and organisational behaviour researchers at the University of Sheffield, UK, and this is a brief summary of our current research. Many of our investigations benefit greatly from collaboration with colleagues in other institutions and countries, and this update might suggest topics on which to work with us. You can learn more about particular themes which interest you by clicking on the person’s name, following the indicated hyperlinks or by checking our webpage at sheffield. ac.uk/management/research/iwp. The Institute of Work Psychology (IWP) was founded in 1968 as the Social and Applied Psychology Unit and became the Institute of Work Psychology in 1994. As part of the successful Sheffield University Management School, it works to advance academic knowledge by tackling important practical issues. In June 2014 the Institute’s fourth biennial International Conference was held in Sheffield. This was a huge scientific and social success with four renowned keynote speakers, over 200 delegates from across six continents, and a range of provocative research presentations in the areas of wellbeing, leadership and performance.
Eduardo Salas (University of Central Florida) discusses team science with the IWP 2014 conference
Workplace innovation KAMAL BIRDI has continued to develop and evaluate his framework for enhancing organisational innovation – the CLEAR IDEAS model. This is based on his studies of factors associated with workers’ creativity and innovation, and a practitioneroriented version has been applied widely to assist in the generation of more creative solutions and the planning of their implementation. Kamal has run workshops for hundreds of participants in many types of workplace, and seven more organisations were included in 2014. Evaluation of the workshops has shown that their structured approach can significantly enhance performance and give rise to substantial financial savings. Click here for a presentation of this model.
In addition to continuing empirical studies, IWP has launched a CLEAR IDEAS app for iPad devices. This leads users interactively through a sequence of steps to analyse a problem they have identified, to generate and assess creative solutions, and then to help formulate a strategy for effective implementation. Click here to view it in the App Store. The CLEAR IDEAS framework builds upon the distinction between “creativity” (generating original ideas) and “innovation” (adding value by applying ideas). Differences between people in knowledge and skills of those kinds have been explored in a recent paper here.
YOUNG PEOPLE STARTING WORK In 2014, more than seven-million young people in the European Union were not in education, employment or training (NEET), and another strand of IWP research is examining psychological and social factors in finding and losing work, with particular attention to young people. EVA SELENKO (pictured left) has investigated factors that contribute to the success of employment reintegration programmes for NEETs. Drawing on theories of stress and life-span development, she emphasises that conditions can be especially demanding for this group of young people such that their chance of success in re-employment programmes is impaired. She has examined archival data from several hundred trainees in a Youth Guarantee Scheme (read more about these initiatives here) and finds that younger age, minority status and other personal characteristics that make people more vulnerable in times of unemployment also lower their chances of completing a programme. However, having a warm, supportive relationship with parents was found to significantly counterbalance these negative effects (see a presentation of this study here).
Healthcare processes and outcomes A recent investigation of causal links between human resource management practices and the performance of hospital trusts by JEREMY DAWSON, ANNA TOPAKAS and colleagues from the University of Birmingham culminated a wide-ranging report published by the National Institute for Health Research. Drawing on a framework of high performance work systems, this presents new evidence for causal links between staff experience and both intermediate (staff) and final (patient and organisational) outcomes. Full details can be found here.
A second project in this area looks at another contextual factor – the attitude of company management. In the UK, the number of entry-level jobs available for young people has been steadily decreasing for more than ten years, with fewer than a quarter of UK organisations now employing people below 24 years of age. ANGELA CARTER is taking a fresh look at ways to increase the employment of this group. Click here to see a presentation of Angela’s ideas and here for an upcoming symposium of her research. More broadly, employability at a national level is being explored by LAURA DEAN. She is examining how this notion is being presented in public policy, how it is related to a specific political and ideological agenda, and how it relates to other themes in higher education such as social justice and education’s role as an economic driver.
A new project by JEREMY DAWSON and IMELDA MCCARTHY, in conjunction with colleagues from King’s College London and The King’s Fund, involves a longitudinal evaluation of Schwartz Center Rounds® in the NHS. These Rounds bring staff regularly together on an equal footing, regardless of profession or speciality, to share experiences, motivations and challenges. The team is undertaking a nationwide study to identify how participation in the programme affects staff, improves relationships with patients, and adds to the provision of compassionate care. Further details can be found here. The great need to increase compassion and quality of care is also being investigated by MALCOLM PATTERSON, PhD student CAROLINE KNIGHT and JEREMY DAWSON in collaboration with colleagues from De Montfort University and Sheffield Institute for Studies on Ageing. Their project is introducing the ‘EnRich’ culture-change programme into acute hospital care for older people (Enhancing Relationships in Care in Hospital). Building on the team’s previous study of olderpatient care (read more here), EnRich is a nurse-led initiative to deliver greater compassion and dignity in giving and receiving care. Here you can learn more about the project’s objectives.
The formal and informal workplace
Bullying in the workplace
PENNY DICK is focusing on how and why gender inequalities are maintained through everyday practices which embed ideas about the “ideal worker”. For example, police work is based on traditional expectations of a full-time rotating shift system and the frequent requirement to work overtime, neither of which can easily be undertaken by people with caring responsibilities. In a previous study Penny identified informal changes in working procedures which could accommodate women who have chosen to work part-time, and her current project will further explore these. SARAH BROOKS is also working with the UK Police Service. Her project aims to understand how informal communication can be used to ensure better upward passing of information from employees to managers.
CHRISTINE SPRIGG is investigating aspects of bullying and other negative behaviours in the workplace. One project examines correlates of observing unacceptable behaviour targeted at a colleague, such as coworker violence, bullying and incivility. A twostage investigation has revealed significant associations with witnesses’ job-related anxiety, depression and emotional exhaustion, together with lagged moderating influences from trait optimism, negative affectivity and support from co-workers and managers. In addition to theoretical implications, Christine is concerned to emphasise managerial strategies that could usefully be applied to reduce unacceptable behaviour.
PhD student STEPHEN MCGLYNN’S research deals with informal, selfdirected learning. It is likely that more than 70 per cent of learning in a job is done informally, outside structured training courses and classrooms, and Stephen is enquiring how employers can best support their employees in that process. ROSE SHEPHERD is examining the behaviour of large collections of people and the management of crowd events. She is particularly interested in exploring how local crowd event management practices are influenced by wider contextual factors such as current financial or political constraints.
Related work by PhD student SAM FARLEY has explored e-mail and social media cyberbullying, recording significant psychological and emotional consequences for recipients. He is now developing a robust general measurement tool for assessing behaviours of this kind. Sam and Christine, with IWP colleague CAROLYN AXTELL and Iain Coyne at Nottingham University, have investigated the prevalence and causes of cyber-bullying in higher-education, with one focus on suggestions to combat this negative behaviour. An article in The Guardian’s Higher Education Network blog generated considerable interest on social media. Read the complete article here.
WELLBEING AND MOTIVATION Motivation is a major contributor to wellbeing as well as to behaviour, and forms of wellbeing can be differentiated in terms of their level of energised motivation. PETER WARR and a colleague at the University of Surrey have uncovered significant functional differences between high- and low-energy wellbeing measured as either job engagement or job satisfaction (click here to read more). Several other projects in the Institute also concern the nature, causes and consequences of worker engagement. Publications in this area have almost all reported correlations at one point in time, and PhD student CAROLINE KNIGHT is instead meta-analysing longitudinal studies of work engagement and its components measured before and after a targeted intervention. Caroline would appreciate contact from researchers aware of engagement-intervention studies which are not in the public domain. Read more about her project here. Peter Warr and colleagues have examined other issues of job engagement, such as links with traits of personality (read more here) and associations between lowand high-energised affect with different forms of job behaviour (more here). He is particularly concerned to identify the ways in which environmental and personal factors together combine in relation to wellbeing; person-situation interaction is found to be statistically significant in only a minority of conditions. One paper has introduced the notion of “affective strength” to account for this differentiation (read the paper here). Peter’s current activities include a reworking of the established “vitamin” model of happiness and unhappiness (for an overview see here) and an investigation of differences in wellbeing and motivation between self-employed and organisationally-employed workers. Many studies in the Institute examine aspects of wellbeing within their own broader aim. For example, in a range of projects on virtual and mobile work CAROLYN AXTELL is focusing on wellbeing, work-life balance, cyber-bullying, and coping with unexpected styles of communication. PhD student CIARA KELLY is investigating the contribution of valued leisure activities to the personal resources required for high performance in a job. She has worked with the British Mountaineering Council and recreational groups to collect information over ten working days in order to identify daily positive and negative effects of substantial leisure activities on job functioning. PhD student LEANNE INGRAM is making experimental comparisons between workers either receiving or not receiving mindfulness training, examining resilience and emotional regulation in addition to aspects of job wellbeing. CHRIS STRIDE, IWP statistician, is collaborating with researchers at City University, London, in a series of studies investigating the link between wellbeing and perfectionism (read more here).
Leadership and the resolution of between-group conflict For several decades psychologists have investigated the processes and outcomes of leadership, but one area which has received inadequate attention concerns leadership across more than one group. In both the organisational and political realms, leaders are often charged with coordinating two or more conflicting groups (read more about this research here ). DAVID RAST’S research has focused generally on processes by which leaders and managers can gain more support, influence and trust from colleagues and subordinates, and he is now exploring how a leader can effectively bring together two groups who are at odds with one another to collaborate and work toward a common goal. A link to one paper can be found here. His current activities include validating a scale to measure cross-group relational identity as well as carrying out studies to examine which leadership actions are most effective in establishing such an identity.
Interested to find out more? Get in touch: iwp-researchupdate@sheffield.ac.uk Please check here for all of the cited supplementary material.