This week is the first in a series of blogs from my students at Waikato University. We have a song in the lecture and there's a competition to write a short piece on how that song is related to the content of the lecture. Here are this week's winners!
Melanie Davis
War, huh, yeah What is it good for? Absolutely nothing, uhh… not quite. Apparently the answer to this question is “the development of a questionnaire to effectively identify personality preferences of women in wartime industrial employment in order to match them with an appropriate job.”
Edwin Starr almost had it right… little did he consider that with all the men going to war, there was a need for large numbers of women to enter the industrial workforce to keep the countries running. When industry realised it needed an efficient way to match individuals with industrial tasks, the mother-daughter team of Katherine Cook Briggs and Isabell Briggs Myers stepped up.
They used this predicament to develop an extension to Carl Jung’s personality theories and through a personality questionnaire they developed an effective way to identify personality preferences of these women in order to engage them with an appropriate job.
Josh Goble
The song ‘War’ by Edwin Starr revolves around the question, “what is war good for?” It then answers that question with a resounding “absolutely nothing.” That’s all well and good, except that war is proven to be a prime catalyst for innovation and advancement. Specifically relating it to this week’s lecture, war enabled progress in the field of work psychology – Charles Myers being the first work psychologist in the UK focused on worker well-being, as many people in that time were suffering from post-war trauma. This is simply one example one may choose to use when pondering whether war is actually good for absolutely nothing or not.
Sarah Gurnsey
My interpretation of the song ‘War’ by Edwin Starr is the questioning the song poses about ‘what is it good for?’. For me, this reminded me of how work psychology encourages us to question why we do what we do at work, and if potentially the norms and existing processes within the workplace could be reconsidered. Work psychology gives the opportunity for us to question the way we work, and what is the true goal of it. And if, potentially, there is a better way of accomplishing something. It encourages questioning, and a curiosity about the way we work. Combining work with psychology enables us to reconsider our first instincts (like anger, violence, or war potentially) and to aim for an approach which is more efficient and improves the lives of the employees.