LECTURE 1 & 2: HIEARCHY & POWER Flashcards
What is Social Psychology?
Explores how people perceive, interact with, & are affected by the social world around them
- Includes the impact of groups, culture, & societal norms
- Helps us comprehend why people do what they do, how they perceive others, & how they are influenced by the social environment
What is organizational psychology?
Explores how individuals & groups function within organizations
Topics: employee motivation, leadership, teamwork, job satisfaction
Why Study Organizational Psychology?
- Optimize relationship between people & the work place leading to more efficient & healthier & happier organizations
- useful in any job, team, or org
- helps build effective teams & orgs
Explain the systematic rigour of social & organizational psychology.
Experiments - scientific method; cause & effect
Survey Studies - large samples of workers
Qualitative Research - deeper analysis of context
What is the contingency approach in social & organizational psych?
Theoretical framework the considers context (situational factors) when predicting human behaviour
Behaviour = fixed traits contingent upon the dynamic between an individual & their environment
What 3 factors is an individuals behaviour contingent upon?
Individual - about the person (e.g. attitudes, personality, abilities)
Situational - immediate situation (e.g. peer group, room)
Contextual Factors - broader environment (e.g. policy, law, pandemic)
- All factors can interact or play separate roles
What are the implications of the contingency approach?
- Need to consider the demands of the situation & the context to understand behaviour, not just the person
- Simple explanations of behaviour are wrong: multiple determinants, no one solution
What is a Hiearchy?
- All groups and organizations are structured hierarchically
- A rank order of individuals or groups with respect to a valued social dimension
- Those at the top have more control over resources and deference from subordinates
- Tend to be quite stable
What is a formal hierarchy?
- Formal organizational structure: job titles, reporting structure
- Those at higher levels have more control over resources, more legitimate power
- Functional: Those at the top should have more skills, ability, and motivation than those lower
- not always -
favoritisms, nepotism - Help organizations accomplish goals in an orderly fashion
What is an informal hierarchy?
- Unrelated to formal structure
- As soon as one dimension
(resource or characteristic) is judged to be more important in a group, create hierarchy - Functional : will help the group to achieve its goals
- Hierarchies can change as the group dynamic changes - e.g. friend group
- Examples: friend groups
○ Leader = most popular, most friends, best house, age
Two Key Forms of Hierarchy: Status
Status: one’s position in the hierarchy depends on
the extent to which one is respected or admired by others
- In task-based groups, respect is based on competence on task, expertise
- People judge others’ competence based on:
- Observed task performance (good at what they do = high competence)
- Reputation
- Stereotypes about the group(s) to which a
person belongs (judge based on cues)
Two Key Forms of Hierarchy: Power
Power = the asymmetric control over valued resources in social relationships
Based on:
* Hold more of the resource
* Ability to distribute the resource
* Resources with positive value (rewards)/ may also be negative (punishment)
Name some resources that are unevenly distributed in the workplace that people care about.
- staffing
- tech
- time
- friendships
- information
- funding
- tools
What are power dynamics?
A low power party is dependent on a high-
power party to obtain rewards and avoid punishments
The degree of dependence that a person feels is based on:
* The perceived importance of the resource
* The perceived alternatives (scarce, non- substitutable)
What is the relation between one’s formal hierarchy position and holding power and status?
The higher up on the hierarchy, the more power & status one has
