Tom Hagström

Work without boundaries : psychological perspectives on the new working life

Translated and adapted from a Swedish original, Work without Boundaries: Psychological Perspectives on the New Working Life tackles the human impact of the changing nature of work. It brings together strands of research from a variety of disciplines including work psychology, occupational health psychology, social psychology, and psychobiology. Written by two leading international researchers and writers in this field, Work without Boundaries delivers new levels of understanding in the field and charts the way forward for future research.

Sustainable competence: a study of a bank

Purpose: Decentralization and company cultures have emerged to master increasing external flexibility, as in a competitive bank in Sweden, raising issues of the sustainability in terms of competenc ...

WORK VALUES AND EARLY WORK SOCIALIZATION AMONG NURSES AND ENGINEERS

The objective of the study was to gain knowledge of the early work socialization of 498 nurses and 307 engineers in the light of value changes and work experiences. The two groups were chosen to represent contrasting values and socialization conditions as well as typical and atypical gender influenced occupational choices. Questionnaires were completed at the end of their trainee period and about one and a half a year later. Results showed that nurses emphasized intrinsic qualities of work, e.g. self-realization and altruism higher than did the engineers, who, in turn, put more emphasis on extrinsic/instrumental aspects, e.g. benefits. Among male engineers and female nurses the results mainly conformed with the gender stereotypes, but male nurses showed comparatively high preferences for self realization and altruism. Post-materialistic values did not change much and the changes were not significantly related to the work conditions studied. Work values were less stable and the changes showed some relations to work experiences. Increased preferences for benefits were, e.g. related to mental strain at work among the nurses but not among the engineers. A need for a more differentiated perspective on work values beyond the intrinsic/extrinsic dimension and gender stereotypes is stressed.

Decentralized autonomy and company culture integration: Individual and organizational development incentives and potentials contextualized.

Decentralization is 1 way of mastering flexibility demands in postindustrial societies, increasing the need for employees’ autonomous work performance. Company cultures have been applied to integrate employees in organizational goals and visions. The aim of the article is to elucidate how a combination of decentralized autonomy and company culture integration is related to employees’ and organizational stage development. The overriding question concerns conditions hampering or promoting such processes. A competitive bank with this type of organization (emphasizing, e.g., local decision making, profit sharing, and employees’ developmental capability) was investigated in 2004–2010 in a multimethodological cross sectional case study. Reported results have focused on only separate aspects of the case. These results concern (a) a generally positive attitude to the company culture, (b) a frequent prevalence of expert adult developmental stage, and (c) work group interactions that mainly reproduce and reinforce company culture integration. Taken together and interpreted in an abductively further developed theoretical frame, the organizational learning and competitive advantages of the studied case are recognized. However, its stage transformative potential is problematized in terms of lacking alternative perspectives that appear to hamper using a potential space of action and development provided by decentralization.