Wanted: workers with flexibility for 21st century jobs

Future workplace changes have businesses looking to psychology for help with its most important commodity.

Patrick A. McGuire Monitor staff

Like a trailer for a Hollywood film, the 90s have previewed the coming attractions we can expect more of as we merge into the re-engineered fast laneof the 21st- century world of work—blazingly faster information systems, blink-of-an-eye access to a global marketplace, virtual offices, virtual teams, even virtual organizations.

Yet all of those streamlined advances will cough and sputter, say psychologists, unless organizations, large or small, in cyberspace or on terra firma, concentrate in the next century on better understanding and nurturing the human side of business.

In fact, to accomplish that—to be able to regularly recruit and hang on to good employees who will be committed to a job even though it may not be committed to them; to train a new breed of leaders who can hold the center while keeping two increasingly disparate types of employees working together—psychologists and organizations have already put their heads together.

• Psychologists at the Center for Creative Leadership are urging organizations to be prepared to fill the 'existential emptiness of workers.'
• New research suggests a growing importance for the role of personality in determining job performance.
• Psychologists working with the Hewlett Packard Corporation, are role-playing various scenarios for managing those virtual teams learning to instill isolated team members, scattered across the globe, with a sense of belonging.
'We have gone from an era in which we have tried to get the most out of people, to the soft, touchy-feely age' says Lily Kelly-Radford, PhD, vice president of educational programs at the Center for Creative Leadership, headquartered in Greensboro, N.C. 'Now we have to go back and balance the two.'

And, says psychologist Seymour Adler, PhD, of Assessment Solutions Inc. in New York, 'the real challenge for organizations, that I think psychology is going to be uniquely capable of helping, is creating coordination and commitment.'

Less job stability
The impetus, of course, is technology. As it streaks into the future, says Kevin Murphy, PhD, president of the Society for Industrial-Organizational Psychology (Div. 14), 'organizations are moving toward flatter, more flexible structures with fewer levels of supervision and more wide ranging job descriptions. So there is less likelihood of a very stable structured job where you can write down what you will do for the next 20 years.'

There will still be large corporations—just fewer of them, say psychologists, as many organizations will begin decentralizing their operations. And while those large organizations will still need good people, the theory is that they won’t need as many of them and, because of the constant change, won’t be able to guarantee them long-term job security.
'You’ll see a dramatic increase in the use of temps, contractors and outsourcing,' says Adler, creating a need for managers who can coordinate two distinct types of employees.
'You’re going to need leaders who can manage diversity beyond the traditional sense of race or gender,' predicts psychologist Mitchell Marks, PhD, a San Francisco management consultant. 'I mean diversity in individuals with different psychological needs, like outsourced contractors or in-house team players. Leaders will have to be driving in two lanes at once.'

Road crews are already working on the problem. 'Organizations have expanded their scope in areas we never saw before,' says Chockalingam Viswesvaran, PhD, a psychologist at Florida International University. 'Topics like fairness, and justice and work-family conflicts are being pushed to the forefront' by employers, he says. 'No longer can you compartmentalize a person.'

What exactly will change with everyday work?
'Right now we have work structured so that we leave home at 8 and come home at 6,' says Viswesvaran. 'That structure won’t be there any more. People will be able to work anytime. Those who have an inner drive will be able to do well. Those who find it difficult to work without a structure will find it hard.'

Many jobs once handled by salaried employees will be outsourced, meaning it will become commonplace for future workers to develop careers built around freelance work, perhaps from home or temporary offices, going from project to project, even from company to company.

Paychecks will come in piecemeal.
The drawbacks may be outweighed by a hidden plus, says Adler, as new demands 'foster a sense of the professional, and you find people taking individual responsibility for themselves, managing their own careers.'

Constant training
Those who do stay in the more traditional jobs will find they are expected to cover more bases, while knowing their job could be eliminated or outsourced at any time. Most likely, say industrial-organizational psychologists, they will be in constant training as technology continuously spawns new products and new markets that expect new and faster ways of doing things. One expert predicts that by 2010 it will take 50 percent of a work day to come up to speed with what’s transpired since you left the day before.

'How can we prepare our organizations or our people to function in this environment?' says Adler. 'The way you will thrive in the marketplace is by living on chaos. There is the challenge of balancing work and home life when operating globally, 24 hours a day. With digital phones you can be reached any time. E-mail is filling up every hour. New items are coming in 24 hours a day. How do you balance that?'

With flexibility, he says. For example, Adler and his company recently conducted training exercises for computer giant Hewlett Packard. The goals was to assess and train managers of remote workforces. In several three- to four-hour exercises, psychologists role-played the parts of members of a virtual team, while various Hewlett Packard executives practiced coordinating those unseen team members in offices from Singapore to Silicon Valley.
'Solutions [by managers] have to be super creative from a psychological perspective,' says Adler, 'to create a sense of belongingness and to help people overcome the information deficit that comes from operating in a virtual environment.'
'We are still human beings,' adds Marks. 'We are not drones or clones in our cubicles. We will still have human needs for affiliation and attachment. There will still be a need for interaction.'
Even so, the demands of a faster pace of work will require a stable personality. Some psychologists believe this reality breathes new life into the role of personality as a predictor of behavior in the workplace. The standard measurements of work behavior have been skill and knowledge, and in fact, says Murphy, 'Industrial/organizational psychology has for a long time dismissed personality because the quality of research and applications was uneven.' But new research, along with the expanding need for multiskilled individuals in the work force, has caused many to 'take a second look,' he says.

Counterproductive behaviors
One of those engaged in the personality research is Deniz Ones, PhD, the Hellervik professor of industrial/organizational psychology at the University of Minnesota. She says organizations are interested in personality, not just for ensuring efficiency, but to screen out those prone to 'counterproductive behaviors,' such as absenteeism. 'The idea is, what do we want people to be like when they work in organizations that span the globe? There’s not enough research now to say what those characteristics might be, but we no longer are willing to write personality off.' Her collaborative work with Viswesvaran into 'integrity testing,' for instance, measures a combination of 'agreeableness, emotional stability and conscientiousness.'

A more controversial aspect of personality research has to do with the mapping of the human genome. For a long time psychologists have debated whether or not behaviors and personalities and abilities were a function of the environment or genes, says Ones. Current thought is that genes are the determining factor, and some psychologists, she says, are researching ways of measuring personality characteristics using genetic techniques.

While that raises the specter of employers one day using a blood test to screen out undesirable employees, Ones takes a more hopeful view. 'It might mean you would be suited to do this job if you had this kind of training and we’ll do this intervention to make sure you succeed in the job.'

Many psychologists doubt that genetic determinism will play a role in future work environments and concentrate their efforts on upgrading the more traditional role of leadership.
'It will require a certain kind of human being to be able to manage in the future,' predicts Kelly-Radford. While the idea of 'coaching' has taken hold in team-based work environments, she says, the new crop of leaders will need to be 'master coaches.'

They must be adept at interpersonal, on-the-job coaching, she says, sensitive enough to win an individual’s loyalty, but skilled at avoiding entanglements as they cross boundaries.
'I might be coaching you and understanding your weaknesses,' she explains, 'and we may have some emotional periods as I coach you. If you allow me to come into your personal world, I need to have good boundary management to get out of that discussion. Some managers get seduced by that sort of dialogue, and they allow it to affect their decisions.'

Future leaders will commonly face this kind of delicate position, she says, because 'with everything big and expansive and fast, there is no sense of intimacy. There’s almost an existential emptiness that people will experience.'

The leader’s job will be to 'act as the knitting that holds the structure together.' That will include filling worker emptiness with high-level discussions that reinforce positive values, she says, 'providing ground rules for functional behavior.'

Leaders, she adds, 'will have to learn how to give coaching and even be vulnerable enough to accept coaching; to not just be the omnipotent leader who knows all.'

Not just charisma
But, Kelly-Radford warns, being inspirational alone will not cut it. 'We are beyond charismatic leadership,' she says. 'A leader has to have grounding and authenticity, but also a good business understanding and very strong interpersonal skills. Flash with nothing behind it will not work anymore.'

At least, says Marks, leaders of tomorrow have already been primed by experience gained today. 'You have a generation of executives who grew up with team building,' he says. 'They have been exposed to psychologists as consultants, so the idea of using them will be less foreign. You’ll find people becoming more attuned to team-building efforts, personality assessments and other psychological interventions.'

As for Murphy, he regards predictions about work in the next century with a grain of salt. 'Whenever a millennia comes around,' he jokes 'this kind of hype is what happens.'
But is all of it hype? 'Some of it will happen,' he says. 'I would bet on it happening slowly. Don’t forget. The government and civil service won’t change fast, making this a slower revolution.'


http://www.apa.org/monitor/jul98/factor.html