I believe that using psychology at work is incredibly important to boost staff morale and increase productivity. Rather than treat your employees like machines that are solely there to increase your companies profits, you should treat them as the individual people that they are and strive to make their working environment as pleasant as possible. My views couldn’t be further than those of Milton Friedman, who stated in his essay titled “The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits”, that the decision makers of a company were not there to exercise any social responsibility but were instead to concentrate on increasing the companies profits.
My way of thinking is more along the same lines as American philosopher Edward Freeman, who believes the stakeholder theory is the way forward. He argues that the shareholder theory Friedman backs, is outdated and doesn’t work very well and that business and ethics go together. By incorporating customers, employees, suppliers and shareholders, a company can create something that no one of them can do alone.
Being a mature student who left school at the age of 16 to enter in to the workforce, I have worked for many different companies over the years. One that always comes to mind is the first company I experienced psychology being used at work. It was the biggest telecommunications company in the UK where I worked as a telemarketer. I was paid commission on top of my basic salary, so money was an incentive to sell but the thing that motivated me even more was getting on the “wall of fame”. The top ten sales people each week/month had their names proudly displayed for everyone to see. After the first time my name appeared there, it became my goal to stay on it every week. I didn’t know then, but the company was using positive psychology to motivate the sales teams even more than the financial rewards were.