This open access book, through an in-depth process study of the interactions of two creative groups (film production crew) in temporary organizations during two media projects, explores how a team ...developmental process unfolds and proposes a model illustrating how the groups repeatedly change formation so that individuals can manage job interdependencies and new issues arising while developing, building up, and synthesizing new ideas into a final creative solution. This theory on creative group dynamic coordination builds theory on how and why creative groups coordinate, challenges assumptions about the role of formal structures and informal practices by demonstrating how the two dynamically interact and complement each other to facilitate coordination via the emergence of what one would expect to be “un-coordinated methods”, and provides an alternative perspective to the stages the groups have to go through by emphasizing a cyclical and not a linear team developmental process.
This Special Issue reprint consists of 10 research articles published in “Challenges in Work and Employment during the COVID-19 Pandemic. The authors, originating from six countries, have studied ...different professional and occupational groups during the pandemic. Their topics range from theoretical analysis of remote work to the experiences of self-leadership, and from new types of job demands to new support needs required to experience relatedness in the pandemic era.
Background
Cancer patients are 1.4 times more likely to be unemployed than healthy people. Therefore it is important to provide cancer patients with programmes to support the return‐to‐work (RTW) ...process. This is an update of a Cochrane review first published in 2011.
Objectives
To evaluate the effectiveness of interventions aimed at enhancing RTW in cancer patients compared to alternative programmes including usual care or no intervention.
Search methods
We searched the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL, in the Cochrane Library Issue 3, 2014), MEDLINE (January 1966 to March 2014), EMBASE (January 1947 to March 2014), CINAHL (January 1983 to March, 2014), OSH‐ROM and OSH Update (January 1960 to March, 2014), PsycINFO (January 1806 to 25 March 2014), DARE (January 1995 to March, 2014), ClinicalTrials.gov, Trialregister.nl and Controlled‐trials.com up to 25 March 2014. We also examined the reference lists of included studies and selected reviews, and contacted authors of relevant studies.
Selection criteria
We included randomised controlled trials (RCTs) of the effectiveness of psycho‐educational, vocational, physical, medical or multidisciplinary interventions enhancing RTW in cancer patients. The primary outcome was RTW measured as either RTW rate or sick leave duration measured at 12 months' follow‐up. The secondary outcome was quality of life.
Data collection and analysis
Two review authors independently assessed trials for inclusion, assessed the risk of bias and extracted data. We pooled study results we judged to be clinically homogeneous in different comparisons reporting risk ratios (RRs) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs). We assessed the overall quality of the evidence for each comparison using the GRADE approach.
Main results
Fifteen RCTs including 1835 cancer patients met the inclusion criteria and because of multiple arms studies we included 19 evaluations. We judged six studies to have a high risk of bias and nine to have a low risk of bias. All included studies were conducted in high income countries and most studies were aimed at breast cancer patients (seven trials) or prostate cancer patients (two trials).
Two studies involved psycho‐educational interventions including patient education and teaching self‐care behaviours. Results indicated low quality evidence of similar RTW rates for psycho‐educational interventions compared to care as usual (RR 1.09, 95% CI 0.88 to 1.35, n = 260 patients) and low quality evidence that there is no difference in the effect of psycho‐educational interventions compared to care as usual on quality of life (standardised mean difference (SMD) 0.05, 95% CI ‐0.2 to 0.3, n = 260 patients). We did not find any studies on vocational interventions. In one study breast cancer patients were offered a physical training programme. Low quality evidence suggested that physical training was not more effective than care as usual in improving RTW (RR 1.20, 95% CI 0.32 to 4.54, n = 28 patients) or quality of life (SMD ‐0.37, 95% CI ‐0.99 to 0.25, n = 41 patients).
Seven RCTs assessed the effects of a medical intervention on RTW. In all studies a less radical or functioning conserving medical intervention was compared with a more radical treatment. We found low quality evidence that less radical, functioning conserving approaches had similar RTW rates as more radical treatments (RR 1.04, 95% CI 0.96 to 1.09, n = 1097 patients) and moderate quality evidence of no differences in quality of life outcomes (SMD 0.10, 95% CI ‐0.04 to 0.23, n = 1028 patients).
Five RCTs involved multidisciplinary interventions in which vocational counselling, patient education, patient counselling, biofeedback‐assisted behavioral training and/or physical exercises were combined. Moderate quality evidence showed that multidisciplinary interventions involving physical, psycho‐educational and/or vocational components led to higher RTW rates than care as usual (RR 1.11, 95% CI 1.03 to 1.16, n = 450 patients). We found no differences in the effect of multidisciplinary interventions compared to care as usual on quality of life outcomes (SMD 0.03, 95% CI ‐0.20 to 0.25, n = 316 patients).
Authors' conclusions
We found moderate quality evidence that multidisciplinary interventions enhance the RTW of patients with cancer.
The reprint “Sustainable Healthy Working Life for All Ages—Work Environment, Age Management and Employability” provide an outlet of research contributing to the development of theoretical and ...practical knowledge influencing people’s working life. Working life is complex and there are many different factors that influence, such as the demographic change, pandemic and rapid technological development, etc., which place constantly changing demands on both employees, organizations/companies and society in different countries. This reprint covers new knowledge, as identified factors and areas that affect employees' ability to work to an older age, interventions and measures that enable a healthy and sustainable working life throughout the entire working life journey, from young to senior employees. The reprint also addresses the pressured work situation of school leaders in managing the education of children and young people in society, and what makes them stay or leave their jobs. In addition, the reprint addresses the way in which the Covid-19 pandemic has affected working life, not least for the health care professional groups and organizations.
To protect workers' safety while gradually resuming on-site operations amid the COVID-19 pandemic, many organizations are offering employees the flexibility to decide their work location on a daily ...basis (i.e., whether to work from home or to work in the office on a particular day). However, little is known about what factors drive employees' daily decisions to work from home versus office during the pandemic. Taking a social ecological perspective, we conceptualize employees' daily choice of work location (home vs. office) as a way to cope with stressors they have encountered on the previous day, and conducted a daily diary study to examine how five categories of work-related and COVID-related stressors during the pandemic (identified through a pilot interview study) may jointly predict employees' next-day work location. We collected data over five workdays from 127 participants working in a Chinese IT company which allowed employees to choose their work location on a daily basis amid the pandemic. We found that experiencing more work-family boundary stressors and work coordination stressors on a certain day were associated with a greater likelihood of working in the office (vs. at home) on the next day, while experiencing more workload stressors prompted employees to work at home (vs. in the office) on the next day. Furthermore, we found that COVID-19 infection-related stressors moderated the effects of technology stressors and workload stressors on next-day work location. Our research findings offer implications for understanding the driving factors of daily work location choices during and beyond the pandemic.
The objective of this article is to provide a theoretical framework explaining positive and negative work-home processes integrally. Using insights from conservation of resources theory, we explain ...how personal resources (e.g., time, energy, and mood) link demanding and resourceful aspects of one domain to outcomes in the other domain. The resulting work-home resources (W-HR) model describes work-home conflict as a process whereby demands in one domain deplete personal resources and impede accomplishments in the other domain. Enrichment is described as a process of resource accumulation: Work and home resources increase personal resources. Those personal resources, in turn, can be utilized to improve home and work outcomes. Moreover, our resource approach to the work-home interface allows us to address two other issues that have thus far lacked a solid theoretical foundation. The W-HR model also explains how conditional factors such as personality and culture may influence the occurrence of work-home conflict and enrichment. Furthermore, the model allows us to examine how work-home conflict and enrichment develop over time. Finally, the model provides useful insights for other psychology subdisciplines, such as gender studies and developmental psychology.
Work in our modern society that is facilitated by communication technology involves connectivity, immediacy, and a blurring of boundaries between work and non‐work domains. This 4‐day quantitative ...diary study (N = 100 employees, N = 367–400 data points) aims to shed light on the relationship between daily smartphone use and daily work–home interference (WHI). Two potential moderators of this relationship are examined: (1) (strong) social norms represented by the influence of colleagues and supervisors regarding availability after work hours and (2) work engagement. Overall, the results of multilevel analyses were in line with the hypotheses. The findings suggest that supervisors should be clear about their expectations regarding smartphone use in private hours in that they should not expect employees to be always available. In addition we conclude that engaged workers can prevent work from interfering too much with their private lives, even when they use their smartphones during evening hours.
Practitioner points
Employees working in an ‘always‐on’ culture experience more WHI.
Important role models, such as supervisors, should be aware that the emails they send during evening hours and weekends also have recipients.
Supervisors should be careful in creating expectations regarding availability when they decide to provide smartphones to their employees.
This article integrates research on gendered organizations and the work-family interface to investigate an innovative workplace initiative. the Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE), implemented in ...the corporate headquarters of Best Buy, Inc. While flexible work policies common in other organizations "accommodate" individuals, this initiative attempts a broader and deeper critique of the organizational culture. We address two research questions: How does this initiative attempt to change the masculinized ideal worker norm? And what do women's and men's responses reveal about the persistent ways that gender structures work and family life? Data demonstrate the ideal worker norm is pervasive and powerful, even as employees begin critically examining expectations regarding work time that have historically privileged men. Employees' responses to ROWE are also gendered. Women (especially mothers) are more enthusiastic, while men are more cautious. Ambivalence about and resistance to change is expressed in different ways depending on gender and occupational status.
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