Psychology opened the doors to a universe different from the daily one, which could be calculated and warned, as if it were the application of Newton's laws; This science allowed access to a plane where the reaction was not the same when faced with the same action, where not all causes necessarily had the same effect.
Known by the Greek word psyche that refers to the human spirit, this science studies the physiological reactions (psychophysiology), the development of the child (genetic psychology), the study of language and the behavior of the individual in relation to the nervous system (psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics) the study of comparative qualities (differential psychology) and the study of group behavior (social psychology), which make up various ways of visualizing the individual seeking as a goal to know the whole.
Each individual experiences a natural learning process that allows them to incorporate into their development all the information necessary to successfully face future challenges. For example, an activity as fluent as speech results from a complex process that takes years to execute, which usually goes unnoticed once you have acquired enough vocabulary to start and sustain a coherent conversation; this is also the case with the motor, sensory and perceptual functions which have been sufficiently studied by psychology and which undoubtedly represent a whole compendium of knowledge of which, at least, the basic should be known.
In the administration of human resources the application of psychology as part of managerial development is practically new, if it is compared with other techniques, an example of this is the study of Emotional Intelligence and Neuro-linguistic Programming, which reached an important boom in the last decade of the 20th century.
However, one of the elements studied by psychology, less disclosed in the managerial field, refers to the Cognitive Function, a sort of ten logical and sequential steps that facilitate learning and help to reach levels of responses of significant importance and that if properly understood, internalized and reinforced, they can achieve extraordinary work development in people, these steps are: perception, attention, observation, imagination, description, comparison, classification, analysis, memorization and reasoning, the latter divided into induction and deduction.
Now, how can these concepts be introduced into human resource management? To what extent would handling them be useful?
One of the trends with the greatest force at present is precisely that which is geared towards the development of competencies, those individual talents that can be located in various categories or levels of maturity and that facilitate the placement of the employee in the place where he will be most productive, as well as the efforts they must make together (company-worker) to develop that little exploited talent; However, the ten steps of the Cognitive Function are usually overlooked in the implementation plans of selection, compensation and training programs, as part of the talent to be developed in the individual.
In order for the employee to be able to integrate into the production process in an optimal way, he must first perceive the process itself, this is only achieved if the process is interesting enough to attract the attention of the individual, once this must direct their attention to him, being able to isolate and visualize it in its entirety through the observation of its different steps, since the process is part of the whole, it must be offered enough information so that the worker can imagine the pros and cons of the work to be carried out, which affects In a positive or negative way, the way in which he carries out his work, fulfilling the first four steps - the most basic ones - of the cognitive function, which are sufficient for eminently operative tasks that do not require the use of previously acquired information.
In order to have employees capable of guiding others by exercising an operational coach role, it is important to guide efforts not only to offer the ideal technical vocabulary, but also those examples of the environment where the process is carried out so that the worker is able to describe it without distort the essence of it and in doing so be able to compare it with similar processes, or not, that can illustrate its importance, through their coherent and precise classification.
But since the scale of knowledge is on the rise and being operational is important but not sufficient, every individual must be trained to develop their capacity for analysis, based on the data they have managed to know and memorize throughout their experience and that They allow you to reason carefully about the strategies that you will put in place to optimize processes for the benefit of the organization. In this exercise of systematic reasoning, the deduction of the answers must be emphasized, since this occurs when the scenarios are widely known, a necessary principle to have a managerial coach.
The foregoing allows us to suppose that the cognitive function posed by psychology as the proper steps that an individual performs to achieve knowledge are also –and should be– applicable to the development of the potential of our personnel, linking these ten steps with the levels of knowledge that An employee must possess, manage and practice in any position he occupies within the organization according to the responsibilities assigned to him.
Competency development programs are often understood as a compendium of courses and workshops that, once experienced by the employee, will be sufficient to reach the maturity required by a particular talent, which is not only naïve but also in their own right. time completely false.
How many times when attending a course do you skip the described steps of cognitive function? It is easy to see how the employee may have perceived its importance, but his attention was focused more on details other than its content, avoiding looking at it in depth and imagining its insertion in the process that corresponds to the company, which is why all other steps in the chain are affected.
There are usually few companies that follow up on the training provided, in fact most consider the fact of having offered it sufficient and that is why the training ends up becoming an expense and not an investment.
Although the success of employees who have more than taken advantage of the investment they have made in the development of their competencies through systematic training cannot be denied, studying these examples shows not only respect for cognitive function on the part of the worker, whether consciously or not, but his ability to memorize the content allows him to reason in such a way that he manages to link what he has learned with the company - and even with his performance - either by induction or deduction. If this is done by successful individuals, why not apply it to performance improvement programs?
What is intended is to establish the importance of the inclusion of elements from other sciences in the complex world of human resource management, the more people are known, the closer they are to success, so it is not just about development of techniques to supervise, motivate or compensate people, in addition to this, efforts should be directed to facilitate the development of the individual from its roots, through knowledge, and only in this way can the company be built in that immediate future that it hopes to be. explored.
Psychology is a window to the study of man, without man it is not possible to conceive the company. It is, then, necessary to include in the comprehensive training of the manager all the necessary information that allows him to know what will be useful to develop his staff, the above is just a sample.
