Summary of work behaviour readings

Job Decision Latitude, Job Demands, and Cardiovascular Disease:
A Prospective Study of Swedish Men
Robert Karasek, Dean Baker, Frank Marxer, Anders Ahlbom, Tores Theorell

Proposed model: psychological strain, and subsequent physiological illness, result not from an aggregated list of “stressors” but from the interaction of two types of job characteristics. Strain results from the:

• joint effects of the demands of the work situation (stressors) – instigators of action
• Environmental moderators of stress, particularly the range of decision making freedom (control) available to the worker facing those demands – constraints on the alternative resulting actions

Used in prediction of mental strain symptoms related to the job – depression, sleeping problems, exhaustion, consumption of medication, and dissatisfaction

Combination of rushed tempo and a lack of situational control may be associated with marked blood pressure and heart rate elevations, and particularly so in subjects with Type A (coronary prone) behaviour.

Methods

2 analyses

1. Association between job characteristics and the prospective development of a CHD indicator – Swedish male workforce, validated through a prospective association with CHD and cardiovascular-cerebrovascular deaths
2. A case-controlled analysis was done on the deaths during two follow-up periods (1968-1974, 1974-1977) from cardiovascular or cerebrovascular causes

Data: Swedish national Level of Living Surveys

• Self-reported symptoms of health status
• expert evaluations and self-reports for job content characteristics
• Employed male workers, self-employed individuals and farmers were excluded

CHD Indicator

• Constructed from self-reports of symptoms associated with clinically manifest cardiovascular disease, self-report of risk factor, and self-report of a diagnosis
• The CHD indicator is based on an additive scale based on these four symptoms, which is then dichotomized at level two to form our operational definition of the presence of heart disease.
• Prevalence rate of 4.1% within the study population

Job Demands Indicator

• Constructed to measure the aggregate of psychological stressors affecting work
• Does not distinguish specific demands
• Questionnaire designed to emphasize reporting on the objective nature of the work, not the reactions of the respondents.
• Objective demands were more highly correlated with CHD risk factors than were subjective demands.
• Two questions utilized for the “job demand” measure: Is your job hectic? Is your job psychologically demanding?
• “Decision Latitude” – working individual’s potential control over job-related decision making
• “Personal Schedule Freedom” – whether the individual has control over his time schedule of participation in the work process
• “Intellectual Discretion” – whether he can use judgement and assert control over his use of skill within the process itself
• “Years of training required”

Case Control Study

• Performed based on all cardiovascular-cerebrovascular deaths

Results

• Overall prevalence of the CHD indicator among respondents was 4.1% in 1968 and 5.9% in 1974
• slight positive correlation between demands and discretion (r = 0.27)
• While the increase in the CHD indicator prevalence with increasing demands and decreasing discretion is monotonic in the cross-sectional data, the incidence in the prospective study drops slightly in the extreme “strain” category
• CHD indicator prevalence demonstrates no trend along the other diagonal

Discussion

Both studies demonstrate that psychologically stressful job demands are associated with cardiovascular disease:

Low intellectual discretion was significantly associated with the CHD indicator, and shows a consistent, but not significant association, in the case-control study.

Low personal schedule freedom, in combination with high job demands, was significantly associated with CHD in the case control study, and revealed consistent but not significant associations with the CHD indicator.

Effects of job characteristics remain significant after controlling for generally accepted risk factors such as age, smoking, education, and obesity.

Study differs from major studies as they do not rely upon tests of CHD morbidity, instead they examine CHD death using cause of death from death certificates as direct indication of CHD-CVD in the case control study.

Taken together, the intellectual discretion and personal schedule freedom measures probably provide a realistic rough estimate of the employee’s broad possibilities for job related decision-making. However, the inter-correlations between decision latitude variables make it difficult to use such measures for final policy decisions.

Is it Better to Give or Receive?
The Role of Help in Buffering the Depleting Effects of Surface Acting
Marilyn A. Uy, Katrina Jia Lin, Remus Ilies

Research questions:

1. Whether the deleterious consequences of surface acting are only confined within a specific workday or whether these effects carry forward to affect one’s work the following day.
2. What can service employees themselves do to mitigate the depleting effects brought about by surface acting?

Theory and Hypothesis

• That surface acting will positively relate to emotional exhaustion within individuals

• Surface acting is detrimental to employee well-being because it threatens the individual’s sense of self
• Being an internal resource, the sense of self may not be easily replenished once depleted (Hobfoll, 1988, 1998)

• Surface acting could jeopardize work engagement indirectly through emotional exhaustion.

• The resource loss experience makes individuals adopt a defensive posture to protect one’s limited resources and minimize further resource loss
• Highly engaged employees have an enhanced feeling of the agentic self as they are physically, cognitively, and “emotionally connected to their work and to others in the service of their work”

• Emotional energy

• Influences one’s psychological availability to engage
• necessary for one’s complete self-investment and self-expression at work
• Propose that end-of-day emotional exhaustion (brought about by surface acting) will result in lower work engagement the next day
• While sleep restores one’s physical energy, it may not directly replenish one’s emotional energy

• Hypothesis

• 1a: At within-individual level, daily surface acting at work Is positively related to end-of-day emotional exhaustion
• 1b: At the within-individual level, end-of-day emotional exhaustion is negatively related to next-day work engagement
• 1c: At the within-individual level, end-of-day emotional exhaustion mediates the relationship between surface acting at work and next-day work engagement
• 2a: At the within-individual level, at-work help giving buffers the mediated  relationship between surface acting and next-day work engagement through end-of-day emotional exhaustion such that the mediated relationship is weaker if at-work help giving is high.
• 2b: At the within-individual level, the buffering effect of at-work help giving on the mediated relationship between surface acting and next-day work engagement through end-of-day emotional exhaustion will be stronger than the buffering effect of at work help receiving.  

Giving and Receiving Help at Work as Moderators

• From the organization’s perspective, at-work interpersonal helping and supportive behaviours among Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) are beneficial because these behaviours positively predict increased customer satisfaction and he organization’s market performance.
• CSRs provide each other with emotional support to enhance employee morale
• Heedful relating  - employees operating attentively to those around them, and co-workers looking out for each other to accomplish the goals of the organization, and may effectively facilitate employees’ emotional energy replenishment
• Autonomy is experienced when one’s actions are endorsed by the self and are governed by the self
• Helping co-workers is an activity that allows the CSR to gain back the sense of self that was lost from excessive surface acting
• Receiving help from co-workers is a resource gain dynamic because of the information and support offered by co-workers in the process

• we hypothesize that giving help will be a stronger moderator compared to receiving help because the former tends to be voluntary and self-initiated and thus has the potential to restore resources connected to employees’ sense of self which is essential for work engagement.
• Receiving help:

• alleviate emotional display requirements
• suggests that co-workers care about the focal employee’s well-being
• buffer the impact of occupational stressors on strain
• mitigate the relationship between non-rewarding work and job satisfaction
• protects employees against negative impact of unfair treatment at workplace

• Resource gain strategy

• for a particular resource gain dynamic, we need to look at how much gain dynamic matches up with what is actually lost
• certain gain dynamics may be more potent than others in mitigating the loss cycle
• Unclear whether receiving help is connected to regaining one’s sense of self, ambiguous how information and social support could replenish the individual’s sense of self

• Compared to helping colleagues, receiving help does not promote a sense of autonomy

• It could actually dampen one’s agentic self
• Self-threatening – could suggest a lack of competence

• Not the act of helping per se but the experience of autonomy involved in the process that facilitates restoring the sense of self

METHOD

• Full-time CSRs recruited from an inbound call center in Singapore (i.e. customers initiate contact with the call center)
• Focal variables gathered at 3 time points every day for 5 consecutive days
• Measured surface acting and deep acting at the end of the CSRs’ workday using emotional labour scale
• Other variables: work engagement, emotional exhaustion, giving help, receiving help, state positive and negative affect as controls

NEW FINDINGS

• depleting effects of surface acting can spill over to the next day’s work engagement
• temporal lag and outcome variables: e.g. found suppression of unpleasant emotions at Time 1 predicted job satisfaction and intentions to quit at Time 2
• Restorative opportunities during work – past research in break-time, but also, the role of helping and being helped as potential buffers in resource depletion processes at work

• only autonomous activities such as giving help can restore resources related to one’s sense of self that were depleted by behaviours that were not autonomous (i.e., surface acting).

• highlights the resource replenishing effect of an at-work autonomous activity and complements prior research that found lunch breaks to minimize fatigue only if employees engaged in autonomous activities during their lunch break

Affective Events Theory:
A theoretical discussion of the structure, causes, and consequences of affective experiences at work
Howard M. Weiss, Russel Cropanzano

Theory of affective experience at work which emphasizes the role of work events as proximal causes of affective reactions.

Job satisfaction – an affective (emotional) reaction to a job that results from the incumbent’s comparison of actual outcomes with those that are desired?

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