Jürgen Wegge

Age and Gender Diversity as Determinants of Performance and Health in a Public Organization: The Role of Task Complexity and Group Size

The influence of age and gender composition on group performance and self-reported health disorders was examined with data from 4,538 federal tax employees working in 222 natural work unit groups. As hypothesized, age diversity correlated positively with performance only in groups solving complex decision-making tasks, and this finding was replicated when analyzing performance data collected 1 year later. Age diversity was also positively correlated with health disorders--but only in groups working on routine decision-making tasks. Gender composition also had a significant effect on group performance, such that groups with a high proportion of female employees performed worse and reported more health disorders than did gender-diverse teams. As expected, effects of gender composition were most pronounced in large groups. Effects of age diversity were found when controlling for gender diversity and vice versa. Thus, age and gender diversity seem to play a unique role in performance and well-being. The moderating role of task complexity for both effects of age diversity and the moderating role of group size for both effects of gender diversity further suggest that the impact of these 2 variables depends on different group processes (e.g., knowledge exchange, variation in gender salience).

Work motivation, organisational identification, and well-being in call centre work

Abstract Previous work has not considered the interplay of motivational forces linked to the task with those linked to the social identity of employees. The aim of the present study is to combine these approaches. Two studies with call centre agents (N=211, N=161) were conducted in which the relationships of objective working conditions (e.g., inbound vs. outbound work), subjective measures of motivating potential of work, and organisational identification were analysed. Job satisfaction, turnover intentions, organisational citizenship behavior (OCB), health complaints, and burnout were assessed as indicators of the agents’ work motivation and well-being. In both studies it was found that objective working conditions substantially correlated with subjective measures of work motivation. Moreover, employees experiencing a high motivating potential at work reported more OCB, higher job satisfaction, and less turnover intentions. As hypothesized, organisational identification was a further independent predictor of job satisfaction, turnover intentions, OCB, and well-being. Highly organisationally identified employees report higher work motivation and more well-being. Additionally, interactions between the motivating potential and organisational identification were found. However, all the results indicate that interventions seeking to enhance work motivation and well-being in call centres should improve both the motivating potential of the job and organisational identification. These two factors combined in an additive way across both studies.

Taking a sickie: Job satisfaction and job involvement as interactive predictors of absenteeism in a public organization

Correlations between absenteeism and work attitudes such as job satisfaction have often been found to be disappointingly weak. As prior work reveals, this might be due to ignoring interactive effects of attitudes with different attitude targets (e.g. job involvement and organizational commitment). Drawing on basic principles in personality research and insights about the situational variability of job satisfaction judgments, we proposed that similar interactions should be present also for attitudes with the same target. More specifically, it was predicted that job involvement affects absenteeism more if job satisfaction is low as this indicates a situation with weak constraints. Both attitudes were assessed in a sample of 436 employees working in a large civil service organization, and two indexes of absence data (frequency and time lost) were drawn from personnel records covering a 12-month period following the survey. Whereas simple correlations were not significant, a moderated regression documented that the hypothesized interaction was significant for both indicators of absence behaviour. As a range of controls (e.g. age, gender, job level) were accounted for, these findings lend strong support to the importance of this new, specific form of attitude interaction. Thus, we encourage researchers not only to consider interactions of attitudes with a different focus (e.g. job vs. organization) but also interactions between job involvement and job satisfaction as this will yield new insights into the complex function of attitudes in influencing absenteeism.

Improving work motivation and performance in brainstorming groups: The effects of three group goal-setting strategies

An experiment was conducted with 30 groups (n = 120) solving brainstorming tasks under four different group goal conditions: do your best (DYB), directive group goal setting (DGGS), participative group goal setting (PGGS), and PGGS in combination with individual goal setting (PGGS + IGS). As expected, all groups with specific and difficult group goals performed better than DYB control groups. It is hypothesized that these positive effects of group goal setting on brainstorming performance arise because group goal setting counteracts motivation losses such as social loafing. In addition, group goal setting should promote motivation gains arising from social compensation and related cognitive processes, in particular high identification with the group. Consistent with this hypothesis, it was found that group goal setting increased team identification, the readiness to compensate for other weak group members, the value of group success, and the value of group failure. Mediation analysis also indicated that concern to avoid group failure was partly responsible for performance improvements. Finally, no large differences were found between PGGS + IGS and PGGS or DGGS. On this basis group goal setting can be considered a robust strategy for improving work motivation and brainstorming performance in groups.

Customer‐induced stress in call centre work: A comparison of audio‐ and videoconference

Call centre work was simulated in an experiment with 96 experienced call centre agents. The experimental design comprised two factors. First, agents communicated with customers either via phone, pc-videoconference or pc-videoconference with additional instructions increasing time pressure. The second experimental factor varied customer behaviour: half of the customers were friendly whereas the other half were rude. Several indicators of strain (e.g. emotional dissonance, tiredness) were assessed by self-reports. Moreover, the levels of immunoglobulin A (IgA) in salvia were determined at three sampling points and specific behaviours of agents (e.g. smiling to customers) were assessed using video data. It was found that unfriendly customer behaviour led to more strain and lower call performance than friendly customer behaviour. Inducing time pressure increased IgA-levels and reduced talking-time with customers. However, contrary to the expectations, the availability of video data did not enhance strain of agents. Instead, it was found that videoconferencing increased activation of agents if customers were friendly. Since higher levels of activation can counteract boredom and because customers often prefer to see their service providers, adding videoconference facilities in call centres seem to be a fruitful way of enriching routine call centre work.

Perceived Diversity and Team Functioning The Role of Diversity Beliefs and Affect

Based on data from 38 organizational teams (N = 241), we investigated the influence of perceived diversity on team identification and relationship conflict. Moreover, we examined the roles of diversity beliefs as a moderator and group affective tone as a mediator of these relationships. Objective diversity in age, gender, educational level, nationality, or tenure was not related to perceived diversity, team identification, or emotional conflict. But as hypothesized, perceived diversity was negatively associated with team identification and positively associated with relationship conflict. Diversity beliefs moderated these effects. Negative group affective tone mediated the relationship among perceived diversity, diversity beliefs, and relationship conflict. We found a similar trend for positive group affective tone with regard to the relationship among perceived diversity, diversity beliefs, and team identification. These results illustrate the central role of shared affect and diversity beliefs in determining whether work group diversity is an asset or a liability.

Age-Differentiated Work Systems

Demographic change is an important social phenomenon in many developed countries. It is characterised by a rapidly increasing average age in the population as a result of longer life expectancies and lower birth rates. In the United States, for instance, there were approximately 37 million citizens aged 65 and over in 2006, or 12.5 percent of the total population. This number is expected to grow to about 72 million by the year 2030, or 19.3 percent of the total population. Demographic change is also having a big impact in the European Union (EU). The proportion of the working population between the ages of 55 and 64 is expected to increase from 56 million in 2006 (11.4 percent of the total population) to 70 million in 2030 (13.5 percent). Furthermore, the number of people in the EU aged 65 and older is expected to increase from 82 million in 2006 (16.8 percent) to 122 million in 2030 (23.5 percent). One way in which the government has responded to the shrinking working-age population is by raising the age at which people can start to receive their full social security retirement benefits. The German government has recently adopted this approach and changed the minimum age from 65 to 67. The literature tells us that as people age, changes occur in their perceptual, cognitive and motor systems that can have significant effects on their performance and well-being in work systems. The German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) responded to this insight by establishing Priority Programme 1184 on Age-differentiated Work Systems in 2005. This interdisciplinary basic research programme brings together a total of 13 research groups from engineering, psychology and economics with the goal of studying the implications and effects of demographic change on human work and developing live-span models to create adequate working and learning conditions for employees of different ages. For this special issue on age-differentiated work systems, we have collected a series of five papers to give readers a brief but concise overview of macroand micro-ergonomics research in Priority Programme 1184. The first paper, written by Julia Weichel, Sanjin Stanic, José Alonso Enriquez Diaz and Ekkehart Frieling, considers job rotation, a classic organizational intervention measure, and analyzes its effect on ageing and impaired employees in the German automotive industry. The results show that older and impaired employees rotate less and that employees who rotate between larger numbers of workstations assess their job performance and health more positively than employees who do not. The second paper, contributed by Melanie Hahn, Michael Falkenstein and Nele Wild-Wall, addresses the growing number of older drivers. In their study, young and old participants performed a simulated driving task in a dual task condition: a visuo-motor tracking task and a visual attention task. An age-related slowing of response speed was observed in the visual attention task. Independent of age, both groups showed similar error proportions and were able to improve their performance with time-on-task. In the tracking task, older participants generally showed poorer performance than the young group and they could not significantly improve their tracking performance with longer task experience. The third paper, by Michael Sengpiel and Hartmut Wandke, investigates the effect of computer literacy on interaction with a computer-based ticket vending machine. To compensate for any potential lack of computer literacy, an experimental

Communication via videoconference: emotional and cognitive consequences of affective personality dispositions, seeing one's own picture and disturbing events

Experiment 1 examined the behavior of 88 students participating in a simulated oral examination via videoconference. Dispositional test anxiety was assessed and the size of the picture of candidates was manipulated. As expected, high-anxious students reported higher emotional arousal and achieved lower performance than low-anxious students. However, performance differences were only found when the large picture of candidates was presented. Experiment 2 investigated reactions of 60 students during the simulation of a less threatening consultation episode. The nature of video information and the occurrence of disturbing events were manipulated. In addition, the dispositions positive and negative affectivity were assessed. As expected, these dispositions had a significant impact on the experience of emotions. Controlling for these dispositional effects, results revealed an intensification of expressing anger in conditions in which participants saw their own picture. Moreover, the occurrence of problems during communication yielded strong dislike, longing and shame, low counseling quality, and low task performance in particular if participants could see their own picture simultaneously. Thus, seeing ones own picture can easily arouse negative affective reactions. As both studies reveal that seeing ones own picture might also hinder performance, the role of ones own picture in a videoconference deserves much more attention in practice and theory.

Konsequenzen des demographischen Wandels für das Management von Humanressourcen

Zusammenfassung. Unternehmen stehen zukunftig weniger jungere Arbeitnehmer zur Verfugung und sie mussen mehr altere Arbeitnehmer (50plus) beschaftigen. Auf die hiermit verknupften Risiken und Chancen sind viele Organisationen kaum vorbereitet. Nach einem einleitenden Blick auf die bekannten Fakten zum demographischen Wandel und das in Deutschland bisher zumeist ignorierte Problem der Altersdiskriminierung im Beruf werden die aktuellen Erkenntnisse zu Leistungs- und Lernpotenzialen Alterer zusammengefasst. Diese Analysen zeigen, dass die aktuell sehr geringe Erwerbsquote alterer Mitarbeiter in Deutschland mehrere Ursachen hat und keinesfalls allein auf unvermeidliche, altersbedingte Einbusen in der Leitungsfahigkeit zuruckgefuhrt werden darf. Das Personalmanagement ist daher aufgefordert, der Diskriminierung alterer Personen in Organisationen entgegen zu wirken und mehr Anreize fur ihre langfristige Beschaftigung zu schaffen. Im Anschluss werden weitere Strategien erortert, die zur Erhaltung der Innovation...

Goal setting via videoconferencing

In two experiments (N = 126, N = 120) telework in an advertising company was simulated. Participants communicated either face-to-face or via a PC-videoconference with a supervisor who motivated employees to solve brainstorming tasks using several goal setting strategies. In addition, communication with the supervisor prior to goal setting was manipulated to examine the impact of a personal meeting with the supervisor and to investigate the effect of having some prior experience with this technology. In both experiments, stimulating challenging goals improved performance compared to “do your best” instructions when goal setting was conducted via a videoconference. Moreover, it was found that participative goal setting was more effective than directive goal setting. However, a prior personal meeting with a supervisor or an additional interaction via videoconference prior to goal setting had no impact on performance or the effectiveness of goal setting. In sum, these findings indicate that goal setting effects are robust and can be found even if communication is based on a videoconference. When difficult goals have to be set within a videoconference, participative goal setting strategies are most effective.