THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGY
The order that candidates are called to interview could also make a
difference. In 2005, Wandi de Bruin at the University of Technology in
Holland reviewed Eurovision Song Contest scores and scores given in
European and World Figure-Skating Championships. The pattern was
always the same – the later that a performer appeared, the higher the
score she or he tended to receive. De Bruin surmised that perhaps there
is no benchmark for the earlier candidates to be compared against, and
it’s therefore easier for later candidates to stand out. Taken together,
these research findings suggest that you should try to sit in the middle
during a group interview, and for one-on-one interviews, that you should
try to be one of the last to be called.
In the office
Once the interviews are complete and the candidates selected, the focus
for psychologists shifts to optimizing performance. For years, the most
important factor in this regard was considered to be job satisfaction.
Time and again, studies have found that staff who are more content also
tend to be more productive. For this reason, a great deal of effort has
been expended on finding out how to improve employees’ job satisfac-
tion.
A study published in 2005 by Professor Francis Green at the
University of Kent used data recorded by the long-running British
Household Panel Survey and others like it to find out why job satisfac-
tion had tumbled in Britain during the 1990s. His findings pointed to
people’s loss of freedom to use their own initiative at work, combined
with employees feeling that they were expected to work harder than
they wanted to.
Other psychologists have tested ways to boost job satisfaction. To
take just one example, in 2008 a Canadian programme called “Spirit
at Work” was shown to reduce absenteeism and staff turnover. The
programme derives from a movement within Positive Psychology (see
p.349) that argues for the importance of employees finding meaning
in work, forging connections with their colleagues and feeling that
their work has a larger purpose. In their study of the programme, Val
Kinjerski, director of the business consultancy Kaizen Solutions for
Human Services, and Berna Skrypnek of the University of Alberta,
Edmonton, provided the programme to 24 staff at a residential-care
unit. Exercises focused on ways to live more purposefully and spir-
itually, on workplace community and inspired leadership, and how to