I-O Psychology
Having separated from philosophy, psychology began to search for the application of its forces in practice in the world. The first appeals of psychologists to recruitment, promotion, or organization of workplaces looked largely random, personally or situationally conditioned. However, in the 20th century industrial and organizational psychologists began systematically offer their services, proved their necessity, and occupied an extensive niche in businesses and organizations, companies and government bodies, in the production and trade, in short, everywhere where people were engaged in socially useful activities and where the role of the human factor (and error) was sufficiently large.
Industrial and organizational psychology (I-O psychology) deals with people in the workplace. It is engaged in figuring out the impact of the industrial structure of the organization, work colleagues, and managers on people. Being a multi-discipline, I-O psychology is composed of different types of models. The two most important are the psychology of personnel and organizational psychology. The organizational psychology studies how people build relationships with each other and with organization and how companies should take into account their emotional and social needs. The psychology of personnel is involved in the recruitment, selection, training, and evaluation of employees and assists them in the context of current and future needs of the organization. The psychology of personnel is applied to traditional problems that include absenteeism, employee turnover, indifferent attitude of employees to work, lack of loyalty, recruitment, selection, training, and evaluation of employees.
Psychology of Personnel
In the context of creation of new mechanisms of management, enterprises face a need to work in new ways regardless of the laws and requirements of the market, taking possession of a new type of economic behavior and adapting all aspects of production activities to the changing situation. In this regard, the contribution of each employee to the final results of the company arises. One of the main problems for enterprises of different ownership forms is finding effective ways to ensure activation of the human factor. The flowering or decline of a state depends not only on its natural resources, geographical location, or socio-political history, but on its work force. Some countries with an unfavorable geographical location and complicated history have reached a high level of success. Such success is a merit of the peoples of these countries and their relation to work. Therefore, the psychology of personnel is one of the most important areas that studies the position of the company and the state as a whole.
The attention to a person at work is largely explained by the fact that the personnel in the developed countries have become one of the largest investment objects. High and growing wages, huge spending on search and selection of new employees, their training and retraining have led to the fact that every successful entrepreneur or visionary officer considers one’s duty to optimize this cost, which, of course, is impossible without professional psychologists.
Psychology allows understanding what motivation of the staff should be. Each employee has certain needs. One person works for personal growth and career success, while the other has a measured way of life and is satisfied with monotonous daily work. The staff is the pillar on which success of the company is based. Human resource management involves the skillful leadership of workers and ensures development and profitability of the enterprise. Management can be regarded as skillful and competent in case when each employee puts abilities and skills to the best performance of duties, is interested in high results of work, and retains the desire to work in this company.
The psychology of personnel considers such important issues as motivation and stimulation of employees’ work. If an employee considers professional growth as a significant motive, but the company provides a narrow range of duties for several years, such employee will retire. These reasons for dismissal are explained by administrative errors. To prevent them, it is necessary to study the motives of each employee and manage employees so that each of them is in the right place.
Considerable attention is paid to the placement of the staff. Business goes through several stages of development, including a variety of projects, so that it is important that employees, whose operating style corresponds to the extent of problems, are related to the implementation of the tasks at every stage. Particularly, when starting a project, there should be active employees who are ready for a new development. In order to maintain stable operation of the company, the company will need staff analysts who are able to deal effectively with routine duties.
Although the personnel psychology studies people in the working environment, studied problems and found solutions touch many other aspects of daily life. The psychology of personnel is an actively developing practice-oriented science. It ensures effectiveness of management methods, which allow creating favorable conditions for the maximum development of human potential that, in turn, is the basis for enterprise development.
Literature Review
There are a number of works that are dedicated to the study of personnel psychology, its applications in various areas of work, and its practical usefulness. Thus, Arabaci studied the perceptions of organizational climate among administration and academic personnel on the sample of Educational Faculty of Firat University. The researcher developed the scale for determining perception of an organizational climate of personnel that was employed at Firat University. The study was designed in the accordance to the descriptive scanning model. All personnel (both academic and administrative) of the Educational Faculty of Firat University participated in this research.
The research showed that there was a middle level of perception of organizational climate among faculty employees. The administrative and academic staffs had problems with participation in decision-making. Moreover, Arabaci found that administrative personnel had issues in the communicative sphere. The results showed that administrative personnel had less positive climate perception than academic personnel. Moreover, the researcher paid attention to gender and age differences. Thus, he established that old people and women had a more positive perception of organizational climate than the youth and men. However, other aspects such as marital status, educational status, and seniority do not influence perception of employees. Therefore, the researcher provided a deep study of the variability of the perception of organizational climate among the staff.
Bektas also studied the organizational climate. He paid much attention to expectations from colleagues. In this research, the personnel of Turkish State University except for the academic staff participated. The study included 30 units of the university and 270 employees of the administrative staff. The researcher prepared a questionnaire form in order to examine comprehension of ideal workmates in the employees’ minds. The method of questionnaire was utilized as a data collection tool. The literature review was done in order to examine associated previous studies. Some questions are made in a closed-ended form, while others are open-ended. The questions referred to the perception of perfect workmates. The results were analyzed with the use of a statistical program.
Bektas conducted the research with the aim to discover expectations of colleagues of the personnel. In this context, the researcher also tried to determine adopted and not adopted behaviors in the working life. The researcher paid attention to the effective application of human resource in order to understand how to increase efficiency of the organization. Bektas put relations between colleagues in the center of his study, considering this aspect to be crucial for improving personnel’s motivation. These answers were significant in terms of I-O psychology, especially personnel psychology.
Conclusion
Psychology is a wide range of specialties. Psychologists often choose specialties, which are focused on a particular topic in psychology. Many of these specialized areas in psychology require training in a particular area of interest. Industrial and organizational psychology focuses on behavior in the workplace and is one of the fastest growing specialty areas in psychology. The psychology of personnel tends to understand and measure human behavior, ways of increasing employee satisfaction in their work, promotion, selection, and, in general, how to make the workplace better for people who work there. A general designation of this aspect of industrial and organizational psychology deals with selection, supervision, and evaluation of staff, as well as a number of work-related factors such as morale, employee satisfaction, relationship management, and job counseling.
The works of Bektas and Arabaci give the deep explanation of issues that are related to I-O psychology, particularly personnel psychology. Bektas studied relations within working collective, which is the subject of I-O psychology, in particular the psychology of personnel. The study has a great significance for understanding better ways of the development of work relations. The study of Arabaci is worth of attention due to its contribution to the comprehension of problems among employees and forming of their attitude to organizational climate. It is important to consider these studies in order to have a comprehensive picture of the aim and direction of the psychology of personnel. These data can be applied to aspects of controlling, quality model of modern management, professional skills, the role and importance of communication, and life goals of managers.