The Social Psychology of Work
A Handbook Chapter on How Social Structures Shape the Experience of Working Life
Scott Schieman and Alexander Wilson · Handbook of Social Psychology (2025)
This chapter reviews and synthesizes research on the social psychology of work, examining how structural positions, organizational contexts, and interpersonal dynamics shape workers' experiences, identities, and well-being. Drawing on decades of sociological and social-psychological research, we trace how macro-level forces like labor market transformations, technological disruption, and institutional change filter through organizational settings to produce individual-level outcomes.
The chapter covers core themes including job autonomy and control, work-life conflict, occupational identity, workplace inequalities, and the psychosocial consequences of precarious employment. We pay particular attention to how class, gender, and race intersect with organizational structures to produce systematically different experiences of work.
A central argument is that the social psychology of work cannot be reduced to individual attitudes or personality traits. The conditions under which people work, their degree of autonomy, their exposure to demands, the security of their employment, are fundamentally social-structural, and their psychological consequences follow accordingly.