Key Terms
- Americans with Disabilities Act
- employers cannot discriminate against any individual based on a disability
- bona fide occupational qualification (BFOQ)
- requirement of certain occupations for which denying an individual employment would otherwise violate the law, such as requirements concerning religion or sex
- checklist
- method used to reduce workplace accidents
- diversity training
- training employees about cultural differences with the goal of improving teamwork
- downsizing
- process in which an organization tries to achieve greater overall efficiency by reducing the number of employees
- Hawthorne effect
- increase in performance of individuals who are noticed, watched, and paid attention to by researchers or supervisors
- human factors psychology
- branch of psychology that studies how workers interact with the tools of work and how to design those tools to optimize workers’ productivity, safety, and health
- immutable characteristic
- traits that employers cannot use to discriminate in hiring, benefits, promotions, or termination; these traits are fundamental to one’s personal identity (e.g. skin color and hair texture)
- industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology
- field in psychology that applies scientific principles to the study of work and the workplace
- industrial psychology
- branch of psychology that studies job characteristics, applicant characteristics, and how to match them; also studies employee training and performance appraisal
- job analysis
- determining and listing tasks associated with a particular job
- job satisfaction
- degree of pleasure that employees derive from their job
- organizational culture
- values, visions, hierarchies, norms and interactions between its employees; how an organization is run, how it operates, and how it makes decisions
- organizational psychology
- branch of psychology that studies the interactions between people working in organizations and the effects of those interactions on productivity
- performance appraisal
- evaluation of an employee’s success or lack of success at performing the duties of the job
- procedural justice
- fairness by which means are used to achieve results in an organization
- scientific management
- theory of management that analyzed and synthesized workflows with the main objective of improving economic efficiency, especially labor productivity
- sexual harassment
- sexually-based behavior that is knowingly unwanted and has an adverse effect of a person’s employment status, interferes with a person’s job performance, or creates a hostile or intimidating work environment
- telecommuting
- employees’ ability to set their own hours allowing them to work from home at different parts of the day
- Theory X
- assumes workers are inherently lazy and unproductive; managers must have control and use punishments
- Theory Y
- assumes workers are people who seek to work hard and productively; managers and workers can find creative solutions to problems; workers do not need to be controlled and punished
- transactional leadership style
- characteristic of leaders who focus on supervision and organizational goals achieved through a system of rewards and punishments; maintenance of the organizational status quo
- transformational leadership style
- characteristic of leaders who are charismatic role models, inspirational, intellectually stimulating, and individually considerate and who seek to change the organization
- U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)
- responsible for enforcing federal laws that make it illegal to discriminate against a job applicant or an employee because of the person’s race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability, or genetic information
- work team
- group of people within an organization or company given a specific task to achieve together
- work–family balance
- occurs when people juggle the demands of work life with the demands of family life
- workplace violence
- violence or the threat of violence against workers; can occur inside or outside the workplace