Sarven S. McLinton

Work stress and driving anger in Japan

We investigated the relationship between work stress arising from effort-reward imbalance at work (ERI) and driving anger in a community sample of workers in Nagoya, a mid-sized city in Japan. We hypothesised that ERI would exert a positive effect on driving anger via its influence on trait anger. The study also pioneered the use of the Driving Anger Scale (DAS) in a non-western country and explored cultural differences in the experience of anger on the road. A random sample of 215 (N = 138, 64% females; N = 77, 36% males) full-time Japanese workers was obtained through random selection of one participant per household in three randomly selected suburbs (response rate 71% of each eligible participant approached). Participants completed a confidential self-report questionnaire. Japanese motorists reported significantly higher levels of ERI than all comparative western samples, and lower total driving anger and anger on all DAS subscales compared with American and Australian samples. British and Japanese drivers did not differ significantly on total driving anger. The findings indicate that Japanese may possess a different acceptance and expression of anger on the road. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses supported our hypothesis. Stress experienced in the workplace originating from a perceived disparity in extrinsic efforts and rewards was associated with increased enduring feelings of anger in employees, and through this anger an elevated level of aggressive feelings on the road. Stress from ERI may spill over into other domains, and changes at work are necessary to alleviate the impact on the individual, organisation and economy.

Psychosocial safety climate, emotional exhaustion, and work injuries in healthcare workplaces

Preventing work injuries requires a clear understanding of how they occur, how they are recorded, and the accuracy of injury surveillance. Our innovation was to examine how psychosocial safety climate (PSC) influences the development of reported and unreported physical and psychological workplace injuries beyond (physical) safety climate, via the erosion of psychological health (emotional exhaustion). Self-report data (T2, 2013) from 214 hospital employees (18 teams) were linked at the team level to the hospital workplace injury register (T1, 2012; T2, 2013; and T3, 2014). Concordance between survey-reported and registered injury rates was low (36%), indicating that many injuries go unreported. Safety climate was the strongest predictor of T2 registered injury rates (controlling for T1); PSC and emotional exhaustion also played a role. Emotional exhaustion was the strongest predictor of survey-reported total injuries and underreporting. Multilevel analysis showed that low PSC, emanating from senior managers and transmitted through teams, was the origin of psychological health erosion (i.e., low emotional exhaustion), which culminated in greater self-reported work injuries and injury underreporting (both physical and psychological). These results underscore the need to consider, in theory and practice, a dual physical-psychosocial safety explanation of injury events and a psychosocial explanation of injury underreporting.

Australian and Japanese Differences in Predispositions to Anger: Looking at Targets of Interpersonal Anger in the Workplace

The construct of interpersonal anger relates to how an individual’s potential to anger towards others may be influenced by the characteristics of those people targeted. These may include the relative relationship to the target, such as how intimately they know each other, or their relative positions within a social hierarchy, for example, within a workplace. The McLinton Interpersonal Domain-specific Anger Instrument (MIDAI) has been tested in Australia and Japan in order to identify similarities and differences in the nature of the anger experience. It allows a researcher to build an “interpersonal anger profile” for an individual or group, which details the varying predispositions to anger towards different individuals based on their relationship (family member, stranger, work colleague). Data from two random stratified community samples were collected from metropolitan Nagoya, Japan (N = 300), and Adelaide, Australia (N = 301), yielding a workplace interpersonal anger profile for each of the two samples. The Japanese workers reported different levels of interpersonal anger depending on the target’s organisational status relative to their own (i.e., superior, co-worker, or subordinate), suggesting that workplace social hierarchy influenced the Japanese interpersonal anger profile. Australian workers did not differ in interpersonal anger towards others in the workplace, suggesting less influence of social hierarchy. Levels of interpersonal anger towards supervisors differed between Australian and Japanese workers, indicating that the tendency to anger towards others may be influenced by sociocultural variables. The importance of understanding cross-cultural differences in anger in the Asia-Pacific region is also discussed.

Prevention through job design: Identifying high-risk job characteristics associated with workplace bullying.

Work environment hypothesis, a predominant theoretical framework in workplace bullying literature, postulates that job characteristics may trigger workplace bullying. Yet, these characteristics are often assessed by employees based on their experience of the job. This study aims to assess how job characteristics, independently assessed via Occupational Information Network (O*NET), are related to perceived job characteristics reported by employees, which, in turn, are associated with self-reported workplace bullying. Multilevel mediation analyses from 3,829 employees in 209 occupations confirmed that employees, whose work schedules are more irregular and whose work involves a higher level of conflictual contact (as assessed by O*NET), report experiencing higher job demands, which are associated with higher exposure to bullying. Moreover, employees working in jobs structured to allow for more discretion in decision-making (as assessed by O*NET) report experiencing more job autonomy and are less likely to experience bullying. The results offer some clues as to how the way in which a job is structured is related to how that job is perceived, which in turn is associated with exposure to bullying. Our findings also suggest that a job design perspective to redesign certain job characteristics may offer an additional viable approach to prevent workplace bullying.