Lecture 6

Question 1

What is the first principle of the course Work & Performance?

Answer 1

Work and health can influence each other, which may lead to a positive or negative cycle.

• Health influences your performances which influences your well-being

Work influences health

• Being employed leads to better health than being unemployed.

Health influences the work

• Healthy worker effect: people who are healthy are more likely to be employed than those who are unhealthy
• If you have a health problem this has an influence on your work, work performance, sickness absence and productivity.

Question 2

What is the second principle of the course Work & Performance?

Answer 2

The trichotomy of person, work and organisation

Person:

• Personal resources
• Workplace health promotion
• Training of skills

Work:

• Most of the time when we looked at work psychological models, they focus on the aspects of the work, the working conditions and the contents of the work

Organisation:

• Organisational policy
• Organisational culture
• Can influence health, performance and well-being

Question 3

What are the tools of the W&O psychologist?

Answer 3

1. Method
2. Theory
3. Practice

Question 4

The method tool of the W&O psychologist

Answer 4

• Reading scientific literature: 5 articles
   Read the articles really closely and assess it
• Benefits and limitations of several research methods
• In the group assignment we analysed a problem in an organization using interviews as empirical support for the analysis as a methodological tool
  Designing, testing and evaluating interventions.

Question 5

The theory tool of the W&O psychologist

Answer 5

• Work psychological theories and models
• General theories (e.g., self-determination theory, PE-fit theory)
• Important in the practical sense in that it helps you to steer your attention to certain kinds of thinking and prevents you from reinventing the wheel

Question 6

The practice tool of the W&O psychologist

Answer 6

• Interviewing people in an organisation, which gives an idea of how theory and method work in practice
• Regulations
• Legislation (on occupational safety and health and sickness absence)

Question 7

What was the aim of the course Work & Performance?

Answer 7

To contribute to our toolbox

Question 8

What does it mean when a personal resource is a confounder (or “third variable”) of the relationship between job demands or job resources and well-being? (Schaufeli & Taris (2014) knowledge clip)

Answer 8

• A confounder is a variable that explains everything
• It has a relationship with the job demands, job resources and well-being. All those variables don’t necessarily have a relationship with each other, the personal resource explains everything

Question 9

What is a spurious relationship? Explain with the variables workload, burnout complaints and emotional stability

Answer 9

You find in a cross-sectional study that there is a relationship between workload and burnout complaints. Based on literature you say that workload probably leads to burnout complaints. But if you control for emotional stability, a personal resource, you see that emotional stability maybe is related to lower workload and to lower burnout complaints.

If you control for this statistically, the relationship between workload and burnout complaints might disappear.

So, the relationship between workload and burnout complaints is a spurious relationship. It can be fully explained by the relationship with emotional stability.
This makes emotional stability the third variable/confounder.

Question 10

When is the needs-supplies fit high or low?

Answer 10

When there is good fit between what someone wants and what they need

If the situation, the actual autonomy that someone has in a job, is similar to what someone needs, the needs-supplies fit is high

This depends on the person

Question 11

Dos a parsimonious model have less or more degrees of freedom than a more complex model?

Answer 11

The more degrees of freedom in the table, the more df you can use to test the model, the less parameters are used, the more parsimonious and simple the model is.

So, the parsimonious model has more degrees of freedom in the table than a more complex model.

Question 12

What are the similarities and differences between detachment and recovery (Jonge et al., 2012)?

Answer 12

• Detachment is one way to measure recovery
• With detachment you try not to think about work
• Recovery is much broader than trying not to think about work, it’s also about a good nights sleep, doing fun things with friends, laying on the couch, doing sports
• Recovery may lead to detachment as well, but recovery is a much broader concept

Question 13

Job demands and job resources

Answer 13

Job demands require energy and effort, job resources can lower job demands and help you to perform your tasks. Job demands are not by definition negative, challenging job demands can be positive.

Question 14

When you don’t have enough internal resources is it then that you use external resources? (Jonge et al., 2012)

Answer 14

Internal resources are transient energy that you have that you first use to deal with job demands, but if these internal resources are high you can still benefit from external resources. You can still benefit from external resources.

You use the job resources immediately in order to not deplete internal resources