Free The Case for Working with Your Hands Essay Sample

This paper is going to look at five psychological concepts and how they are relevant to the study article titled "The case for Working with your Hands by Michael Crawford" .The first concept is high involvement management which entails providing workers with opportunities to make decisions regarding their jobs and actively participate in organisational activities. High level decision making increases the decision making opportunities that employees have in the workplace meaning that they become actively involved in the strategic direction of the organisation. High Involvement management is quite absent in Mathew Crawford's job because the junior worker in the Bay Area company that he was working in was not in any way involved in active decision making. The role of the worker was to take orders made from an absentee manager.

The second concept is Type A/B personality theory which is a psychological theory that describes two common but contrasting personality types labelled using letters A and B. Personality type A are high strung, aggressive, ambitious, highly competitive, impatient, controlling and pre occupied. They are high achieving people who like to multitask and are usually workaholics. One the other hand, people with personality type B are happy go lucky, easy going generally patient without an overriding sense of urgency and are generally considered as apathetic. In the article titled by Matthew Crawford, his team had three people who worked as abstracters. There was Mathew himself, Mike and Henry and none of the three belonged to personality type A. None of them was a workaholic and none of them had that sense of service that required them to go the extra mile. They were all easy going people who were quite indifferent to their work and generally apathetic.

The third concept is Locus of Control. Locus of control is social psychology is the degree to which people believe they can control the events that affect them. Looking at the life of Michael Crawford, it is easy to see that he has a low level of locus of control. Michael does not have a control over his life. He gets a job that's suits his academic credentials but is not happy at the job. He does not earn as much as he would like but remains stuck at his job, yet he was self employed prior to his graduate studies, was earning well and was happy , but cannot go back to that low life job he used to manage because of the societal expectations of a graduate. This means that his life is being controlled more by societal expectations.

The other concept is which refers to affective commitment is the psychological attachment that employees have to their organisation or the degree to which workers experience a sense of oneness with the organisation they are serving. In the case of Michael Crawford and his team members, it is easy to see that they do not have that affective commitment mainly because they are not satisfied with their job. Their work related attitudes show that they have a low level of affective commitment.

The final concept is Maslow's Hierarchy of needs which takes a pyramid shape where the most fundamental needs come at the bottom of the pyramid and the need for self actualisation at the top. A look at Michael Crawford's life it is evident that he hasn't reached self actualization and he remembers his self managed welding job and moans that this job would have made him reach the highest point of Maslow's hierarchy, self actualisation.

 

Have NO Inspiration
to write your essay?

Ask for Professional help