Implementing Research in the Clinical Setting

It has become clear that too little compatibility between our own and the organisational convictions and values leads to poor functionality of both tasks and task environments. The same applies to work in or by which we cannot sufficiently realise our personal goals in this respect. In essence, there are several kinds of problem here. First, there are the persons for whom it is difficult, for all kinds of reasons, to find such compatibility anywhere. This applies for instance to some people from a different national culture. However, similar problems arise for everybody who differs too much in convictions and values, or has “non-realistic” goals. From the perspective of the organisation, many of them disappear from view. Some of them, however, adapt themselves to a certain degree and stay in the organisation, under far from optimal circumstances. Read the rest of this entry »

As the primary object of work and health psychology consists of occupational health and well-being in their own right, this chapter goes into the dynamics of everyday working life and its relation to well-being.

The first part of the chapter focuses on everyday working life and the concept of integrity. This concept refers to the habitual organisation of the interaction between person and environment, which is conducive to good task performance, well-being and motivation, as well as to personal development and integration in the social environment. Appropriate integrity furthermore gives us a feeling of reality and normality. As integrity is not an intra-personal concept, the perspective here is essentially a cultural–anthropological one. Attention is paid to the repetitive nature of everyday working life and the discipline of attention inherent in it. The parallel with animal territories and the role of social representations, which connect us to the rest of the social world, are explored.

In the next section, the focus is on the motivational dynamics of integrity. This is about why we start working at all, why we go on, what makes it fun, the outcomes for other life realms and the necessary conditions to be able to work at all. As such, the perspective here is more of a psychological nature. The last section goes into the breakdown of integrity. Stress is described as an important signal that something has gone wrong with integrity, a signal that can be used as a fruitful starting point for personal as well as organisational development.

EVERYDAY WORKING LIFE

In this section, we show how overwhelmingly repetitive our everyday life actually is. By continuously acting in a familiar way and not paying attention to other options, we create and maintain our own small niche in theworld, our own treadmill. This niche has an obvious resemblance to an animal territory and has similar outcomes as well. This niche is tied in with the rest of the social world with the help of social representations, cognitive structures of meanings, images and rules that we share with other people.

Repetition

The role of repetition in everyday (working) life, and its impact on well-being has not been studied extensively in psychology. This may be the case because the idea of repetition does not appeal to us. Leading a life of continuous repetition sounds to most of us more like a punishment, the sad fate of slaves and prisoners, than the normal way of living. After all, aren’t we free and creative, can’t we choose what we want? We just love excitement and think that we lead challenging lives. However, maybe we just don’t notice the repetition in our lives because is it so omnipresent, so common and normal. Isn’t the fish the last one to detect the water?

So let us take a closer look at a normal working day. Each day, we rise at the same time, probably with the help of an alarm clock. Next to us, either somebody is lying who is highly familiar to us, or there is nobody there and in either case we are not surprised. What follows is a series of highly familiar routines, by which we expose ourselves actively to all kinds of highly familiar sensory input on all channels. So, there are the typical smells of our bed, maybe our partner, our home, our urine, our usual toothpaste and soap, our aftershave or make-up. There are also the pleasant tastes of our breakfast, consisting of the more or less fixed items we prefer, our coffee or tea, and so on. When we look around, we see very familiar surroundings. We see a familiar face in the mirror and, if there are other people around, they also look and sound very familiar. If there is nobody else, we can put on the TV or radio, which happens to broadcast very familiar programmes brought to us by familiar people.We will not go into the modalities of touch, temperature, kinaesthetics and hearing, but we all know that these too are far from strange to us. Then, it is “time” to go to work, usually by a familiar route and by our usual means of transportation. Now we’ve got the hang of it, we realise that our work, its environment, the people there, the more or less fixed hours, punctuated by our usual coffee, tea and lunch breaks, are not so exotic either, and neither is the lunch itself. The same applies to the rest of our day. Finally, we return to our beds again. Maybe we indulge in some sexual activity, but then—after having set our alarm clock!—we are overtaken by sleep, at least when everything is going well, and lose consciousness again. We call this a day.

Striving toward stability by continually repeating ourselves obviously has a high priority for us and takes a lot of effort and energy, also in our working life. Seen from a more distant point of view, we choose a place to work, subject it—as much as possible—to our taste and preferences, and adapt ourselves to it. We develop fixed lines of conduct there and fixed ways to divide our attention, and then we repeat these over and over, with a calm kind of fanaticism. In spite of our individual differences in this respect, we all greatly limit the variety of our daily work life, at least compared to the endless possibilities of variation that—at least in principle—are open to us. All in all, when we look honestly at a normal working day, we can only be surprised about the immense quantity of repetition we bring about. Think of all those emotional processes, familiar thoughts, feelings, smells and other sensations that we evoke time after time, by our normal projects, our normal ways of acting and everyday conversations.

What are the consequences of all this repetition? What does it afford us? The following quotation by Schutz gives a good impression of what this is about: The experiences are apprehended, distinguished, brought into relief, marked out from one another; the experiences which were constituted as phases within the flowof duration now become objects of attention as constituted experiences. We learn to use our feelings as clues to where, or how far, we are, and whether we are still on the right track. Apparently, we learn to recognise or install some markers in the activities. These act as signposts and milestones that tell us where we are and what turn we have to take now. In this way, we structure these activities, we punctuate them and invest them with a growing sense of reality. So, the repetition of the experiences enables us to distinguish different activities and projects and locate ourselves in these different activities. This punctuation enables us—after ample practice—to activate automatically the right mental contents. Generally speaking, we find ourselves in a focused state of consciousness: we are busy, with a certain intensity and effort, bodily as well as mentally, focusing exclusively on our activity of the moment, without unnecessary role switches. The activity dominates what we think. It also steers our memory, in the sense that relevant information is automatically retrieved. We experience all of this as living in the here and now, temporally forgetting about the rest of the world. However, this only happens if our activities are sufficiently challenging and engrossing to get and keep us involved (Goffman, 1963). At the same time, this challenge should not be too great, in the sense that the activity should not be too difficult or too much.

Living in the here and now means also that we experience what we are doing as the only reality possible at this moment. James (1890/1950) describes this state of mind as one of faith . Though we abstain in this way from all other possible realities at that moment, most of the time, we do not experience this as a restriction. Still, as life happens only once and is of a limited length, every reality that we abstain from is a lost possibility forever: by behaving as we do, we develop our talents in a certain direction, while necessarily aborting further developments in all other directions. In the process, each activity or project becomes more and more an independent Gestalt. Repetition also helps us to feel at home in a project and helps to remind us that we are our normal selves. Apparently, we are constantly busy rebuilding and re-enacting our surrounding reality. Being ourselves is obviously a lot of work. The result, however, is a nice comfort zone, consisting of some well-trodden paths of repetition, spiralling through our lives. As a result, we can see ourselves as able and competent. Moreover, we also think of ourselves as the originators or authors of our activities and their results. We know we can do it, because we have done it before, many times. We have developed skills.