Although the relationship between psychosocial workplace conditions and musculoskeletal problems has been extensively studied, the causal impact of psychosocial workplace factors in the development ...of musculoskeletal problems remains unclear. The purpose of the present study was to conduct a systematic review of baseline-adjusted prospective longitudinal studies estimating the lagged effect of psychosocial risk factors on musculoskeletal problems in industrialized work settings. A literature review was conducted by searching the MEDLINE, EMBASE, and PsychINFO databases dated until August 2009. The authors classified studies into categories of psychological work stressors and musculoskeletal problems. Available effect sizes were converted to odds ratios (OR). ORs were then pooled for each stressor–problem relationship using a random-effects model. Additionally, the possibility of publication bias was assessed with the Duval and Tweedie nonparametric “trim and fill” procedure. In total, 50 primary studies fulfilled inclusion criteria. Within these studies at least five effect sizes were available for 23 of the 45 possible psychosocial work stress–musculoskeletal problems relationships, leaving 9 psychosocial variables and four musculoskeletal problem areas for analyses. Of these 23 relationships, pooled OR estimates were positive and significant ranging from 1.15 to 1.66 with the largest pooled OR estimating the relationship between highly monotonous work and lower back pain. The lagged effect of low social support on lower limb problems was the only effect size for which the statistical test for bias was significant. Most psychosocial stressors had small but significant lagged effects on the development of musculoskeletal problems. Thus, organizational interventions to minimize these stressors may be promising in reducing one risk factor for the development of employee musculoskeletal problems.
► This is the first meta-analysis on the relationship between psychosocial risk factors at work and musculoskeletal symptoms. ► Psychosocial risk factors at work do in fact have a longitudinal effect on the development of musculoskeletal problems. ► Especially, high monotonous work and lack of social support at work have an influence on the onset of low back pain.
Mindfulness describes a state of consciousness in which individuals attend to ongoing events and experiences in a receptive and non-judgmental way. The present research investigated the idea that ...mindfulness reduces emotional exhaustion and improves job satisfaction. The authors further suggest that these associations are mediated by the emotion regulation strategy of surface acting. Study 1 was a 5-day diary study with 219 employees and revealed that mindfulness negatively related to emotional exhaustion and positively related to job satisfaction at both the within- and the between-person levels. Both relationships were mediated by surface acting at both levels of analysis. Study 2 was an experimental field study, in which participants (N = 64) were randomly assigned to a self-training mindfulness intervention group or a control group. Results revealed that participants in the mindfulness intervention group experienced significantly less emotional exhaustion and more job satisfaction than participants in the control group. The causal effect of mindfulness self-training on emotional exhaustion was mediated by surface acting. Implications for using mindfulness and mindfulness training interventions in organizational research and practice are discussed in conclusion.
In this research, we examined the role of mindfulness for recovery from work using a daily diary design (N = 121; 5 days; 3 measurement occasions per day). The first goal of the study was to ...investigate the relationship of mindfulness with sleep quality and the mediating role of psychological detachment from a day-level perspective. A second goal was to extend the process perspective in recovery research beyond the day level and consider systematic change trajectories in recovery variables over the course of the work week and the role of mindfulness in these trajectories. Results regarding day-level relationships confirmed that mindfulness experienced during work was related to subsequent sleep quality, and this relationship was mediated by psychological detachment from work in the evening. Furthermore, an investigation of the role of mindfulness in recovery change trajectories supported the idea that psychological detachment trajectories increase over the work week for individuals low on mindfulness while there was no systematic mean-level change for individuals high on mindfulness. In contrast, sleep quality followed a linear increase from Monday to Friday for all individuals, irrespective of their levels of trait mindfulness. Practical and theoretical implications for the mindfulness and the recovery literature are discussed in conclusion.
Adapting to task changes in work settings frequently calls not only for shifting one's thoughts and behaviors to the new demands, but also for dealing with outdated knowledge and skills. This article ...focuses on the role of control strategies in task adaptation and reports two experimental studies using an air traffic control simulation task. In both studies (N = 66 and 105 with k = 1,320 and 1,680 observations, respectively), all participants first learned and performed an initial version of the task then received instruction about control strategies, performed an altered version of the task with new execution rules, and finally worked on a memory test. Participants were instructed to either deliberately forget the old rules, remember the old rules, or simply learn the new task (Study 2 only). Results from discontinuous growth curve modeling revealed that the directed forgetting in both studies and the control group in Study 2 showed higher performance in the simulation after the change relative to their performance before the change (transition adaptation). There were no relearning differences between the groups suggesting that these differences persisted throughout the task. However, the memory test at the end of the study revealed that the directed forgetting groups and the learning control group remembered less outdated task execution rules in the memory test after the simulation than the remembering group. The findings suggest that different types of cognitive strategies have costs and benefits. Conceptual and practical implications of these findings are discussed.
Theories suggest that groups within organizations often develop shared values, beliefs, affect, behaviors, or agreed-on routines; however, researchers rarely study predictors of consensus emergence ...over time. Recently, a multilevel-methods approach for detecting and studying emergence in organizational field data has been described. This approach—the consensus emergence model—builds on an extended three-level multilevel model. Researchers planning future studies based on the consensus emergence model need to consider (a) sample size characteristics required to detect emergence effects with satisfactory statistical power and (b) how the distribution of the overall sample size across the levels of the multilevel model influences power. We systematically address both issues by conducting a power simulation for detecting main and moderating effects involving consensus emergence under a variety of typical research scenarios and provide an R-based tool that readers can use to estimate power. Our discussion focuses on the future use and development of multilevel methods for studying emergence in organizational research.
Recent research on the role of general mental ability (GMA) and specific abilities in work-related outcomes has shown that the results differ depending on the theoretical and conceptual approach that ...researchers use. While earlier research has typically assumed that GMA causes the specific abilities and has thus used incremental validity analysis, more recent research has explored the implications of treating GMA and specific abilities as equals (differing only in breadth and not subordination) and has used relative importance analysis. In this article, we extend this work to the prediction of extrinsic career success operationalized as pay, income, and the attainment of jobs with high prestige. Results, based on a large national sample, revealed that GMA and specific abilities measured in school were good predictors of job prestige measured after 11 years, pay measured after 11 years, and income 51 years later toward the end of the participants' work lives. With 1 exception, GMA was a dominant predictor in incremental validity analyses. However, in relative importance analyses, the majority of the explained variance was explained by specific abilities, and GMA was not more important than single specific abilities in relative importance analyses. Visuospatial, verbal, and mathematical abilities all had substantial variance shares and were also more important than GMA in some of the analyses. Implications for the interpretation of cognitive ability data and facilitating people's success in their careers are discussed.
Organizational researchers routinely have access to repeated measures from numerous time periods punctuated by one or more discontinuities. Discontinuities may be planned, such as when a researcher ...introduces an unexpected change in the context of a skill acquisition task. Alternatively, discontinuities may be unplanned, such as when a natural disaster or economic event occurs during an ongoing data collection. In this article, we build off the basic discontinuous growth model and illustrate how alternative specifications of time-related variables allow one to examine relative versus absolute change in transition and post-transition slopes. Our examples focus on interpreting time-varying covariates in a variety of situations (multiple discontinuities, linear and quadratic models, and models where discontinuities occur at different times). We show that the ability to test relative and absolute differences provides a high degree of precision in terms of specifying and testing hypotheses.
Interest in unintended discrimination that can result from implicit attitudes and stereotypes (implicit biases) has stimulated many research investigations. Much of this research has used the ...Implicit Association Test (IAT) to measure association strengths that are presumed to underlie implicit biases. It had been more than a decade since the last published treatment of recommended best practices for research using IAT measures. After an initial draft by the first author, and continuing through three subsequent drafts, the 22 authors and 14 commenters contributed extensively to refining the selection and description of recommendation-worthy research practices. Individual judgments of agreement or disagreement were provided by 29 of the 36 authors and commenters. Of the 21 recommended practices for conducting research with IAT measures presented in this article, all but two were endorsed by 90% or more of those who felt knowledgeable enough to express agreement or disagreement; only 4% of the totality of judgments expressed disagreement. For two practices that were retained despite more than two judgments of disagreement (four for one, five for the other), the bases for those disagreements are described in presenting the recommendations. The article additionally provides recommendations for how to report procedures of IAT measures in empirical articles.
Dishop (see record 2022-78260-001) identifies the consensus emergence model (CEM) as a useful tool for future research on emergence but argues that autoregressive models with positive autoregressive ...effects are an important alternative data-generating mechanism that researchers need to rule out. Here, we acknowledge that alternative data-generating mechanisms are possibility for most, if not all, nonexperimental designs and appreciate Dishop's attempts to identify cases where the CEM could provide misleading results. However, in a series of independent simulations, we were unable to replicate two of three key analyses, and the results for the third analysis did not support the earlier conclusions. The discrepancies appear to originate from Dishop's simulation code and what appear to be inconsistent model specifications that neither simulate the models described in the article nor include notable positive autoregressive effects. We contribute to the wider literature by suggesting four key criteria that researchers can apply to evaluate the possibility of alternative data-generating mechanisms: Theory, parameter recovery, fit to real data, and context. Applied to autoregressive effects and emergence data, these criteria reveal that (a) theory in psychology would generally suggest negative instead of positive autoregressive effects for behavior, (b) it is challenging to recover true autoregressive parameters from simulated data, and (c) that real data sets across a number of different contexts show little to no evidence for autoregressive effects. Instead, our analyses suggest that CEM results are congruent with the temporal changes occurring within groups and that autoregressive effects do not lead to spurious CEM results. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
In the last decade, there has been increased recognition that traits refer not only to between-person differences but also to meaningful within-person variability across situations (i.e., whole trait ...theory). So far, this broader more contemporary trait conceptualization has made few inroads into assessment practices. Therefore, this study focuses on the assessment and predictive power of people's intraindividual variability across situations. In three studies (either in student or employee samples), both test-takers' mean trait scores and the variability of their responses across multiple written job-related situations of a situational judgment test (SJT) were assessed. Results revealed that people's intraindividual variability (a) was related to their self-rated functional flexibility, (b) predicted performance above their mean scores, and (c) predicted their actual personality state variability over 10 days. These results open opportunities for complementing traditional selection procedures with more dynamic indices in assessment.
PDF
