Industrial Organizational Psychology in Employee of the Month

Industrial Organizational

Psychology in
Employee of the Month

Laayla M. Tariq

November 18, 2011

Psych 3310

University of Houston

I.                   Introduction

Industrial organizational psychology is demonstrated throughout the media in variety of ways in television series, cartoons, and movies. Employee of the Month is a comedy film that reveals the underlying complications between employees of a retail store, “Super Club.”  The main character, Zach, is a slacker who has no ambition to accomplish any goals at work. Zach is constantly annoyed by his over-achieving co-worker, Vince, who is always stealing attention from upper management. One day Zach learns that an attractive female, Amy, has been newly employed and she only dates ambition men who become employee of the month. While Zach suddenly finds himself wanting to improve his working habits, he realizes that he will be challenged at every step by Vince, who has been known as the employee of the month for the last 17 consecutive months and who also plans to win Amy. Zach’s friendly co-workers become his words of encouragement as they point out, “Wow, that's gotta hurt. I mean, he's always doin' that to you. Stealing your thunder” – Lon. The two find themselves fighting for golden stars, which are rewarded on a weekly basis for the best employee. Eventually, Zach’s friends estrange him as they complain that he has changed from a kind hearted man to a rude and selfish man who would do anything to win, like Vince. Zach accidently gets his friend Iqbal fired and upsets Amy as he discovers that she actually transferred jobs because her ex-boyfriend was an employee of the month and was rude and egotistical. Therefore, Zach ends up taking the blame for Iqbal getting fired, resigning, and apologizing to Amy. His resignation was found not legit and he competed against Vince for the fastest check-out cashier title. As he loses, it was discovered, on camera, that Vince cheated as he would not scan all the items, causing the company great loss. Vince is fired and Zach wins the title for employee of the month along with Amy’s heart and his friends. This movie is composed of many industrial organization constructs but this paper will reveal constructs of motivation, bullying, counter work behavior, and stress.

II.                Application of Industrial Organization

Motivation

Motivation is a construct related to industrial organization and was explained as one of the three direct determinants of job performance by Campbell in Campbell’s hierarchical model of job performance (Campbell, 1990a; Campbell, McHenry, and Wise, 1990; Campbell & Zook, 1990). Motivation is defined as the “conditions responsible for variations in intensity, persistence, quality, and direction of ongoing behavior.” (Landy & Conte, 2010) A worker’s effectiveness and productivity is directly dependent on how motivated the worker feels at work. Being motivated to produce the best results will also produce quality work and help the employee stay persistent. Most work places will set goals for employees to accomplish and reward them once they do.  What motivates the employee can vary from different situations and can become responsible for any ongoing behavior, such as causing the employee to become content and satisfied or unhappy and unpleasant to be around.

Zach’s lazy behavior is directly related to his lack of motivation to achieve any goals at work. Obviously, receiving golden stars and becoming employee of the month did not matter to him since he did not see any rewards that he could potentially care for. This all changed when he found something to fight for: Amy’s affection.  Clearly in this case, Zach felt motivated to work harder by changing his working habits such as arriving on time and helping customers find their items. As he won stars on a weekly basis, he became more encouraged that he could actually win the title after all. Zach’s date with Amy motivated him not to give up and keep fighting for the title so he can win Amy’s heart and stop Vince from stealing Amy. Appraisal from upper management also played as great motivation for Zach to do better at work. He was eventually awarded with the key to the “cashier lounge.” This lounge, embellished with TV, free food, recliners, poker table, and air conditioning, motivated Zach stay as a cashier and take breaks in this lounge, rather than with his friends on one of the upper shelves in the store aisles. Being awarded a car for becoming employee of the month also motivated Zach to win since he lives with his grandmother and has to ride his bike everywhere.

Counterproductive Work Behavior

Counterproductive Work Behavior (CWB) is also one of the constructs related to industrial organization that is displayed throughout Employee of the Month. Counterproductive Work Behavior is defined as “voluntary behavior that violates important organizational norms and threatens the well-being of the organization, its members, or even both.” (Landy & Conte, 2010). According to Robinson and Bennett, there are two types of CWB: “deviance directed toward the organization” and “deviance directed toward other individuals.” (Landy & Conte, 2010). Compared to OCB, which is organizational citizenship behavior that reflects behavior that goes beyond what is expected, CWB is exactly the opposite. CWB is composed of negative behaviors that may risk the company profit, co-workers harm, and cause management to become troubled with the individual behaving in the negative way. Vardi and Weiner distinguished three types of CWB behavior: “self gain such as theft, organizational gain such as misstating profit, and destructive such as assault or sabotage.” (Landy & Conte, 2010). According to Sackett and Devore’s hierarchical model of deviance, the two main CWB are interpersonal deviance and organizational deviance. Interpersonal relates to harassment, gossip, verbal abuse, and fighting.  Organizational deviance splits into two lower level categories of CWB, property deviance and production deviance. Property deviance relates to theft, property damage and sabotage as the latter relates to absence, tardiness, long breaks, and sloppy work. (Landy & Conte, 2010).

Zach’s actions at the start of the movie can be labeled as counterproductive work behavior. Zach would constantly arrive to work late, skate around the aisles, take long breaks with his friends on the shelves and treat the place as his secret hanging out place.  He would not clean up after himself and he wouldn’t work harder to accomplish any goals. Instead, he would lie to management about working hard and would end up convincing other co workers to do the work for him. He would verbally abuse Vince at any given point and would tease him such as scribbling on Vince’s employee of the month’s picture. Since Zach would not work hard, neither would his friends, and this negative behavior would continue on. Zach and his friends would booby trap the stores at times in attempts to hurt Vince, who would always find a way to get back at them. This game of taking revenge would take up Zach’s time where he could be using that same time to achieve goals at work. Zach would play games with his friends all the time and also discourage them from working hard as well. Zach would also bribe the lady in records every time he needed some information that he wouldn’t be able to obtain, legally. For example, he was able to obtain Amy’s file by bribing the lady in records with some broken butter fingers. Lying and cheating in such a manner directly relates to the CWB in organizational psychology.

Stressors

Employees always face all sorts of stressors at their work place and respond to them in many different ways. Stressors are defined as, “physical or psychological demands to which an individual responds.” (Landy & Conte, 2010)  Reactions to these stressors are known as strains, such as someone crying, panicking, or shouting. (Copper et al., 2001; Quick, Quick, Nelson, & Hurrell, 1997) Common stressors at work can be extreme temperatures, the amount of workload, situational constraints, emotional labor, difficult work schedule, perceived control, and interpersonal demands and conflicts. (Landy & Conte, 2010). The more stress an employee experiences, depends on the amount of stressors involving in that employee’s every day shift. For example, someone’s workload might make them feel exhausted and discouraged from wanting to take on a “do more attitude.” Someone who might be content with the work load but might be in an uncomfortable work environment either due to extreme temperatures or excessive noise might not be able to concentrate thoroughly and might produce lesser quality work. There are many determinants of the kind of stressors employees face at work, resulting in different consequences. Physical consequences such as arthritis and headaches or psychological consequences such as depression and anxiety will eventually become apparent. (Cooper et al., 2011; De Jonge &  Dormann, 2006). 

            In the movie, Zach’s boss shows great strains such as panicking, shouting, and suddenly hiring Zach as the back-up cashier when he finds out that his brother, also his regional manager, is coming to evaluate him at the very last minute. Zach’s boss fears that he would not pass the evaluation since he is confident that his brother will do anything to dramatize any faults, Zach’s boss starts hyperventilating and holds an emergency meeting with his employees. He demands that everyone acts in the best manner as possible and he state show his blood pressure is increasing. Zach’s boss’s blood pressure rising shows the physical and medical consequence of stress. Vince also shows sign of stress as he notices that Zach is finally becoming better at his job and is obtaining weekly golden stars for being the better employee. Vince starts to become angry and viewers are led to view Vince’s emotional breakdown as he begins to daydream that he will lose all the respect from his co-workers and will eventually get fired.

Bullying

Bullying is displayed throughout many movies, as most people are familiar with the term from personal experience as well. Bullying can be defined as, “harassing, offending, socially excluding, or assigning embarrassing tasks to someone of subordinate status repeatedly and over a long period of time.” (Landy & Conte, 2010). Bullying is widespread and can be seen as the escalation of a conflict in an organizational setting. (Leymann, 1996; Zapf & Gross, 2001) Interestingly, the United States is known as an individualistic country where each person is left to fend for himself and throughout the decades, bullying in a work place was ignored to a large extent (Landy & Conte, 2010). Bullying behaviors increase violence in a work place and cause individuals to react in counterproductive work behavior.

In the movie, Zach is bullied by Vince’s friend who tries to make Zach look like a bad individual in front of Amy. Vince himself insults Zach on a daily basis, emphasizing how inferior he is to him since Vince has won the employee of the month title so often. Vince also belittles Zach because Zach is not a lead cashier like Vince, but instead a simply stock boy. As long as Zach isn’t promoted to cashier status, Vince is content with bullying him and harassing him for being a “loser.” Vince makes fun of the fact that Zach lives with his grandmother, doesn’t have enough money, and is surprised at the fact that Amy went out on a date with Zach and actually liked it. Zach also bullies Vince once the competition between the two intensifies. Zach starts to booby trap Vince’s equipments such as breaking his scanner gun. Zach also insults Vince for not having any friends and being too obsessed with the title of employee of the month. This bullying increases the violence in the work place, where other co workers become emotionally hurt, such as Amy.

III      Movie Opinion

            The director did a great job with examining the issues at hand. The director did portray the constructs of organizational psychology in Employee of the Month at every step. Every character’s personality was created in a way to display how the employee responds to stressors and how each employee may be responsible for bullying, counterproductive work behavior, or being motivated to accomplish certain goals. The director does understand the subjective experience of work since the four constructs used are so common in every day work place. The director did a great job displaying, from different perspectives, the constructs of I/O psychology in a comical way. The movie can be improved in a way by perhaps going more into details of each character’s background, such as their childhood. What motivates an individual has a lot to do with what they grew up having or not having, such as money, friends, comfort, success, etc. The movie did not go into details about childhoods of Amy, Vince, or any of Zach’s friends. I would definitely recommend this movie to other people since it is composed of educational material relating to not only I/O psychology, but also your everyday common behavior that people from all cultures can relate to. It is a great comedy film that can lead people to not just laugh it off, but also think about the underlying concepts of complications in a simple work place.

References

Landy, F.J., & Conte, J.M. (2010). Work in the 21st century: An introduction to industrial

organizational psychology (3rd ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.