Charles de Wolff

Social support and occupational stress: A causal analysis

This study is aimed at gaining insight into the role of social support provided by coworkers and supervisors in the reduction of job-stress. It is emphasized that, despite the inclusion of social support as an important variable in theoretical models of job stress, research on this issue is plagued by a lack of conceptual clarity, disagreement on definitions, and divergent operationalizations. Furthermore, there is little strong empirical evidence for the role of social support in alleviating job stress. Moreover, because of the use of cross-sectional designs, causal interpretations are often impossible. In this study, an attempt was made to assess the causal direction of the relationships between social support, stressors and strains, by employing a longitudinal panel design and LISREL analysis. Subjects consisted of 2034 employees of 21 Dutch companies from the eastern part of the Netherlands. All filled out a questionnaire on organizational stress and social support, and underwent a medical examination. Parts of the sample participated in two follow-up measurements. The results showed that individuals from the highest occupational levels as well as those from the lowest perceived less social support than other individuals. Furthermore, the respondents consistently reported that coworkers provide more support than supervisors. Only in the group with the lower occupational level did social support have a causal effect upon most stressors, indicating that social support indeed reduces role ambiguity, role overload, role conflict and job future uncertainty. However, there was not much evidence for a causal effect of social support by the coworkers upon the stressors.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

An invitation to construct a policy for the european work and organizational psychologist

Abstract The creation of a new journal offers the chance, to do something different and we have undertaken this task out of a sense of excitement at the new opportunities. In what follows we try to make clear what we would like to publish; we will do all we can to facilitate such contributions. In the end, we depend on you to send us work of this kind and to referee potential contributions in ways that reflect the valuations we are about to describe. What follows is an invitation to potential contributors to help construct a truly European journal to develop thought and practice in European Work & Organizational (W & O) Psychology.

The recruitment and selection of hospital medical consultants

Abstract The literature on selection has been dominated in recent decades by the ‘prediction’ paradigm. Such an approach requires a substantial number of positions to be filled in order to compute validity coefficients. There are other approaches, using a different paradigm, when concentrated on adjusting the organization and the employee. Here careful analysis of job demands is essential. This article describes such an analysis, taking the medical consultant as an example. The method can be used in an iterative way. It is useful when one has to work with small numbers of positions.

Human resource management in western organizations

Abstract How will a future historian describe the social and economic developments of the 20th century? Writing a study on this will be a complex endeavour, taking into account the numerous aspects involved but, most likely, two developments will be central to such a study: the rise of scientific management in the beginning of the century and the search for new approaches at the end of the century. The last two decades of the 20th century are a kind of crisis situation, with Western organizations facing enormous competition in global markets, and finding it difficult to meet new demands. Organizations are forced to rethink organizational practices in order to meet such new demands, which often leads to major reorganization programmes, and large downsizing projects.

Stress and Strain in the Work Environment: Does It Lead to Illness?

This paper discusses the relationship between stressors and strains in the work setting. Common wisdom has it that work makes people sick. Workers themselves may attest to same. But, until recently, in the social sciences, a precise understanding of such relationships has be non-existent. Industrial and organizational psychologists have concentrated on non-illness dependent variables, e.g., performance, satisfaction and motivation. Health and illness are lesser known concepts. For example, the handbook of Dunnette (1), widely seen as a milestone in the field, does not even mention these terms in its subject index.

STRESS INTERVENTION AT THE ORGANIZATIONAL LEVEL

There is now ample evidence that psychosocial stressors have considerable impact (strain) on the health and well-being of individuals operating within an organizational context. Given this reality, one might well ask: Can remedial action be taken either to prevent individual workers from experiencing strain and/or to help them recover from same? Of course, one might argue that the state-of-the-art knowledge about relationships between psychosocial stressors and strains, as well as about the processes linking to two, is still insufficient to justify action at this point, that such efforts would be premature. Then again, one might equally argue that experimental intervention is warranted even while research on such relationships continues, since the level(s) of strain evidenced in the normal workplace is on the rise and obviously affecting increasing numbers of workers as time goes on. Of course, one would also want to monitor any adverse effects of such experimental remedial efforts towards alleviating strain, thus gaining knowledge which might increase our present understanding of stress-strain relationships in the work setting.