C: Demands Flashcards
- Quantitative Job Demands
Defining quantitative jobs
- Long working hours, working overtime, work overload, amount of work, wrk speed, work intensity, workload
- Quantitative job demands= elements of work environment that concern amount and speed of work, require physical and/ or psychological effort
Antecedents of quantitative Job demands
- Intensity of work influenced by external and internal factors of work context
- External: uncertainty in the organization’s environment, legal and political institutions, the labour market, technological innovations
- Internal: management style, managerial practices and innovations, HRM
- High performance work systems=increased quantitative job demands
Consequences of quantitative job demands
- Short term and long term
- Short term: optimal level of quantitative work demands for any task, demands require action and effort, results in fatigue
- Fatigue responds to rest
- Low work demands: workers may seem fatigued, but are in fatigue-like state that responds to new stimuli and not rest
- Long term: when quantitative job demands to high, might lead to health, well being, performance impaired
- Individual worker characteristics are moderators (general and specific abilities, psychological capital, private life circumstances)
Measuring Quantitative job demands: objective and subjective approaches
- Objective: external situation exposure, independent from worker, cannot be used for all jobs
- Subjective: perceptions and evaluations (workers or supervisors, HRM professionals, etc.)
- Objective measures need “ideal worker”
- Subjective measures more common
Practical Applications
- Either on person or work and organizational context
- Person: abilitiesselection, training, performance management to deal with quantitative work demands
- Work: redesigning
- Qualitative Demands at Work
The Nature of demands
• Internal and external demands (physical, emotional, cognitive)
• Challenge and hindrance demands stressors, can both cause stress symptoms
• Challenge demands can be rewarding, may lead to accepting stressful
Conditions
Action Regulation theory
- Cognitive activities regulate actions towards goals, we develop mental models, follow plans or action programs to attain goals
- Action process has sequential and hierarchical (sub-goal) aspect
- Automatization, routinization, quicker, less cognitive capacity but may lead to errors
Physical demands
• Umbrella term, load, body positions, unusual movements etc.
Cognitive demands
- Employees often have more than one role
- Role expectations
- Role conflicts if job demands compete or conflict
- Unclear job demandsrole ambiguity
- Role conflict and role ambiguity=uncertainty
- Overload if there are too many demands
Regulation problems
- Demands can make it difficult to reach goals
- Regulation/work obstacles
- Regulation uncertainty: when it is not known how to achieve a goal
- Overtaxing regulation when workers capabilities are overwhelmed because of too much regulation
Emotional demands
- Many jobs have emotional demands and display rules
- Either positive or negative
- Dissonant emotional demands=show emotions they don’t feel
- Surface acting=regulating emotion display
- Deep acting=regulating emotion
- Automatic regulation=situation triggers emotion
- Emotion deviance= showing felt but undesired emotion
- Negative emotions, dissonant emotional demands and surface acting related to poor health, low job satisfaction and reduced performance
Conclusions: person-environment fit, best way is mix of different demands , avoid too ow/too high demands, too great dominance of specific demands, action regulation theory: meeting human needs of understanding (making sense, predictability,) competence (self-efficacy, mastery, accomplishments) or control (over-processing, outcomes and environment) by hierarchical and sequential actions
