David Ferry Brown

Employee assistance programs: a review of the management of stress and wellbeing through workplace counselling and consulting

Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs) provide counselling and consulting services that focus on the prevention and/or remediation of personal problems experienced by employees, or members of their families. EAPs are currently considered one of the main vehicles for occupational stress management and are rapidly evolving into providers of holistic wellbeing programs in the workplace. This form of service delivery has, however, been criticised for focusing interventions at the individual rather than at the organisational level. This review examines the history and development of Australian EAPs, discusses issues unique to the delivery of psychological services in a workplace environment, and considers evidence for the effectiveness of EAPs. While research evidence is not fully supportive of the effectiveness of EAPs, data suggests that these programs do impact positively on employee mental health, and are perceived by employees as a desirable workplace resource.

Latent constructs of proximal and distal motivation predicting performance under maximum test conditions.

The concept of a maximum-typical performance dimension has received theoretical and empirical support in research on the construct of job performance. The critical distinction between maximum and typical performance resides in the postulate that under maximum test conditions motivational factors will be constant and maximal. The present study challenges the notion of the maximum performance paradigm by testing the effects of proximal (self-efficacy) and distal (need for achievement) motivation on performance under maximum test conditions. The authors used a walk-through performance test to evaluate the performance of 90 employees. The structural model demonstrates significant pathways between latent measures of motivation and performance ratings. The findings confirm the explanatory power of the motivation construct under maximum test conditions.

Sources of stress in policewomen: a three-factor model

It has been argued that models of stress need to be occupation specific. Policewomen are an occupational subgroup which experiences stress differently from male officers. Sixteen sources of felt stress were rated by 206 policewomen. Exploratory factor analysis suggested a three factor model of operational, interpersonal, and management/organizational stress. Confirmatory factor analysis with a second sample of 213 policewomen confirmed the three factor structure. Interpersonal stressors accounted for most variance in ratings of felt stress. The suggests that the interpersonal climate experienced by female officers contributes significantly to rated stress levels, and consideration of this finding should be given in interventions to reduce work stress for female officers

Using information systems to structurally map workplace injury

Previous authors have identified mechanical, human and work organisation factors that may contribute to accident occurrences and have noted the value of site-specific data in accident analysis. However, major criticisms of site specific safety information systems have focused on the difficulties using traditional approaches for the identification of critical paths involving processes related to injury and non-injury incidents. This paper presents an idiographic approach to the study of accidents and through contextual analysis develops maps of work processes related to injury incidents in mining. The information used in the contextual maps includes data related to work area, activity and work role being performed, and equipment being used at the time of the injury incident. The computer algorithm consists of a series of contextual conditionals where the incidents and lost days recorded in the final category of each pathway meet all of the conditionals of the previous categories. The order of selection indicates the criticality of the path. The analysis resolves the processes related to the incident into their constitutive components, and then redescribes these processes as paths in order to reveal associations. These contextual paths illustrate the processes which are part of an established pattern of recurring regularities associated with injury incidents.