Assignment
As an I/O professional, you may decide you want to make a difference about specific issues in your life or career. In fact, you might decide to work for an organization that supports your beliefs and causes or builds on your passions in life. In such a role, you will need to apply strategies and principles of cognition in support of your life or career goals. This requires self-motivation, which impacts both human behavior and emotion. Have you considered the role of your expectations, attributions, or inferences on such self-motivation? What differentiates individuals who practice such self-motivation compared to others who do not?
Read Case Study: Drowning in Plastic found in this week's learning activities.
Case Synopsis and Analysis
Plastic pollution is emerging as an important international environmental issue. Plastic creates a massive litter problem on land and threatens the world's oceans, killing the marine mammals, sea turtles, and other marine life that get trapped by plastic waste, mistake it for a food source, or block the light needed for life. Several nations, states, and cities now ban single-use plastics to combat this problem.
The politics of this issue impacts not only environmentalists but also close to a million people in the United States who are employed in this industry. Self-motivation and emotion impact those on all sides of this issue.
Imagine you are an I/O psychologist consultant serving organizations that protect the ocean and marine life, such as The Ocean Conservancy, The Nature Conservancy, and The Society for Marine Mammalogy. You are concerned about the issue of plastic pollution and feel strongly that more focus should be placed by your consultancy on lobbying senators and congress people to enact abatement and bans of single-use plastics.
Write 750 to 1,050 words proposals for the partners in your consultancy addressing your concern.
Including:
1. Describe 3 key issues you believe are faced by your consultancy, but are not currently addressed, in relation to plastic pollution and its impact on marine life.
2. Present your position regarding your identified issues, including your self-motivation that led you to your passion.
3. Explain specific strategies and principles of cognition that you would apply to these issues from the perspective of your own self-motivation, human behavior, and emotions toward them.
4. Include a minimum of 3 peer-reviewed journal articles addressing the differences between self-motivated and non-self-motivated individuals as well as strategies and/or principles of cognition relating to human behavior and emotion.