Coping with work and family: How do dual‐earners interact?

Juggling the demands of both work and family has become increasingly difficult, especially for dual‐earner households; nevertheless, families have developed strategies to deal with work‐family challenges. This paper uses couple level analyses (APIM models) with 100 dual‐earner couples to provide insight about partners' mutual influence on the use of work‐family coping strategies. The results show that women's use of coping strategies is more associated with work‐family conflict and work‐family enrichment than men's coping. In addition, using partner coping, having a positive attitude towards multiple roles, using planning and management skills and avoiding having to cut back on professional responsibilities is associated with better outcomes (more enrichment and less conflict). Surprisingly, the use of childcare facilities is associated with women's conflict and partner effects were only found concerning the use of management and planning skills. These skills, however, have distinct effects for men and women's outcomes: their use by men reduces their own conflict but increases their wives', while their use by women decreases their own conflict and increases their own and their partner's enrichment. These results point to the fact that gender roles continue to be a hallmark of work‐family issues. Our design and results point out the need for new interventions that take couple interdependences into account.     

Antecedents of employees' mental health—The role of career and work satisfaction

It was hypothesized that individual and situational variables, as a whole, will show stronger relationships with work-related attitudes than with mental health indices. Work-related attitudes, on the other hand, were expected to contribute more strongly to mental health than the individual and situational variables. Results obtained from two groups of staff professionals and retail store managers, using primarily questionnaire data, supported these hypotheses. Career and work satisfaction emerged as the strongest contributors to mental health. Situational variables such as job characteristics, supervisory style, and pay related more strongly to the attitudinal variables than to mental health. This pattern suggests that career and work satisfaction may serve as intervening variables in the relationship between situational variables and mental health.     

Intrinsic work value–reward dissonance and work satisfaction during young adulthood

Previous research suggests that discrepancies between work values and rewards are indicators of dissonance that induce change in both to reduce such dissonance over time. The present study elaborates this model to suggest parallels with the first phase of the extension-and-strain curve. Small discrepancies or small increases in extension are presumed to be almost unnoticeable, while increasingly large discrepancies are thought to yield exponentially increasing strain. Work satisfaction is a principal outcome of dissonance; hence, work value-reward discrepancies are predicted to diminish work satisfaction in an exponential fashion. Findings from the work and family literature, however, lead to the prediction that this curvilinear association will be moderated by gender and family roles. Using longitudinal data spanning the third decade of life, the results suggest that intrinsic work value-reward discrepancies, as predicted, are increasingly associated, in a negative curvilinear fashion, with work satisfaction. This pattern, however, differs as a function of gender and family roles. Females who established family roles exhibited the expected pattern while other gender by family status groups did not. The results suggest that gender and family roles moderate the association between intrinsic work value-reward dissonance and satisfaction. In addition, women who remained unmarried and childless exhibited the strongest associations between occupational rewards and satisfaction.     

How challenging was your work today? The role of autonomous work motivation

The main aim of this study was to investigate whether autonomous motivation for work can explain the distinctive associations between hindrance and challenge demands and work-related well-being (i.e., positive affect and work engagement) on a within-person level. Autonomous work motivation represents the degree to which motivation for putting effort in work is intrinsic (i.e., with a sense of volition and personal choice) or has been internalized (i.e., without feelings of internal or external pressure). In order to test our hypotheses, we employed a diary methodology and followed 153 secondary school teachers throughout five consecutive working days. The results of multilevel modelling provided support for the hypothesized research model. On days when teachers experienced more challenges, they also experienced more positive affect and more engagement in their work on the same day, and this relationship could be explained by (higher) autonomous work motivation on that day. In contrast, on days when teachers experienced more hindrance demands, they experienced less positive affect and less work engagement, and this process was explained by (reduced) autonomous work motivation that day. Our findings add to the literature by showing that daily autonomous motivation as a motivational process can explain why daily challenge and hindrance demands are differentially related to positive well-being at work.     

How do work stress and coping work? Toward a fundamental theoretical reappraisal

The main aim of this paper is to make the case for why a fundamental reappraisal rather than incremental development of work stress and coping theory is required. In order to do this we present, in simplified form, some of the basic tenets of theory in this field. These tenets are questioned and their limitations identified in two ways. The first way is through contrasting the sort of stories that emerge in counselling and psychotherapy about the causes of people's distress with the simplified accounts found in stress and coping theory. The second way is through a critical examination of the specific ideas that stressors are 'out there' in the work environment and that individuals go through a simple process of primary and secondary appraisal when dealing with potentially harmful aspects of the work environment. Drawing on the notion of the employee as an active crafter and shaper of their job and data showing the complex ways in which people make sense of potentially negative work circumstances, we show how these ideas are of very limited value. In conclusion, we suggest that these limitations are so serious that fundamental reappraisal rather than development is required.     

Does adaptive training work?

People intuitively alter the allocation of study time between items of varying difficulty, and such adaptive learning methods are widely used in education and in commercially available memory training programs. We investigated the effectiveness of a computer‐based adaptive learning system that utilises spacing and repetition effects by presenting difficult items with short gaps to establish fast learning, and easy items with long intervals to optimise long‐term retention. The immediate and delayed effects of adaptive training on cued recall were investigated relative to a control condition of non‐adaptive, random spacing. Adaptive training produced significantly higher immediate and delayed recall rates than random spacing. These results encourage the use of adaptive training in education and rehabilitation. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

“We will work for you” – Social influence may suppress individual food preferences in a communicative situation in dogs

The level of motivation (i.e. incentive power) is thought to be one of the most important factors affecting performance and learning in various tasks. We investigated whether reward quality has an effect on the performance of family dogs in a two-way object choice test in which they can find the hidden food by relying on distal momentary human pointing cues. In three experiments we varied (1) the type of food reward according to the subjects’ own preference; (2) the quality of the reward offered at the same time in the indicated and not-indicated locations; and (3) the order of the high or low quality rewards in consecutive sessions. In Experiment 1, we first tested whether dogs prefer one kind of reward over another. Then one group was tested with the ‘preferred’ food as reward in the indicated bowl, while dogs in the other group received the ‘non-preferred’ food as reward. We did not find any difference between the performance and choice latencies of the two groups. In Experiment 2 for the first group, the indicated bowl contained a piece of carrot and the not-indicated bowl was empty. In the second group the indicated bowl contained carrot, but the not-indicated bowl contained sausage. According to a preliminary preference test, most dogs prefer sausage over carrot invariably. After 20 trials, the two groups performed surprisingly similarly. There was no difference found between groups in the number of correct choices, incorrect choices and non-choices. However, the comparison between the first and last five trials revealed that subjects who found sausage when they chose the not-indicated bowl (did not follow the pointing) chose the non-indicated bowl significantly more often toward the end of their test session. In Experiment 3, each dog received two sessions with 12 pointing trials in each. For the first session, one group was rewarded with sausage and the other with carrot upon choosing the indicated bowl. In the second session, the indicated bowl contained dry dog food for both groups. We found that correct choices and response latencies did not change over two sessions in the ‘sausage’ group. In the ‘carrot’ group, the dogs chose faster in the second session, but their performance did not improve; in fact, they chose the not-indicated bowl more often than the indicated bowl. As a conclusion, we can say that reward quality had some effect on dogs’ choice behavior in these experiments. The drop in their performance was not drastic, taking into account the general refusal to eat one of the ‘rewards’ (carrot) during the preference tests and also during the test trials. It seems that incentive contrast may play a relatively minor role in dog-human social interactions. Appropriate reward quality can be very important in asocial problem solving tasks, but, when interacting with humans, following human signals may override the effect of changed incentive power.     

Self-determined work motivation predicts job outcomes,but what predicts self-determined work motivation?

Self-determined work motivation predicts important job outcomes, such as job satisfaction [Richer, S. F., Blanchard, C., & Vallerand, R. J. (2002). A motivational model of work turnover. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 32, 2089–2113], but what predicts self-determined work motivation is less fully understood. We tested general causality orientation—specifically autonomy and control orientation—as a predictor of self-determined work motivation, which in turn was expected to predict job satisfaction and identification commitment as job outcomes. Regression analyses confirmed our hypotheses such that autonomy orientation predicted job outcomes via increased self-determined work motivation. Control orientation predicted self-determined work motivation but did not affect either of the two job outcomes. Findings are discussed with respect to the importance of individual differences in understanding job outcomes.     

International–local remuneration differences across six countries: Do they undermine poverty reduction work?

Despite the rhetoric of a single global economy, professionals in poorer countries continue to be remunerated differently depending on whether they are compensated at a local vs. international rate. Project ADDUP (Are Development Discrepancies Undermining Performance?) surveyed 1290 expatriate and local professionals (response rate = 47%) from aid, education, government, and business sectors in (1) Island Nations (Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands), (2) landlocked economies (Mala?i, Uganda), and (3) emerging economies (India, China). Difference in pay was estimated using purchasing power parity, from the World Bank's World Development Indicators 2007. Psychological measures included self‐reported pay and benefits (remuneration), self‐attributed ability, remuneration comparison, sense of justice in remuneration, remuneration‐related motivation, thoughts of turnover and thoughts about international mobility. We included control measures of candour, culture shock, cultural values (horizontal/vertical individualism/collectivism), personality (from the “big five”), job satisfaction and work engagement. Controlling for these and country (small effects) and organization effects (medium), (a) pay ratios between international and local workers exceeded what were perceived to be acceptable pay thresholds among respondents remunerated locally; who also reported a combination of a sense of relative (b) injustice and demotivation; which (c) together with job satisfaction/work engagement predicted turnover and international mobility. These findings question the wisdom of dual salary systems in general, expose and challenge a major contradiction between contemporary development policy and practice, and have a range of practical, organizational, and theoretical implications for poverty reduction work.     

Does criminal offender treatment work?

In examining the effectiveness of offender treatment, this article attempts to integrate disparate bodies of knowledge. An overview of the effectiveness of offender treatment is presented. To put offender treatment into perspectives, the psychotherapy outcome literature for nonoffenders is briefly reviewed. The complexity of offender treatment is further explored by reviewing correlates and antecedents of criminality that include antisocial personality disorder, antisocial behavior in children, and substance abuse. Implications of the existing body of knowledge on future policy and more active involvement by psychologists are discussed.     

Are immigrants in the nursing industry at increased risk of bullying at work? A one‐year follow‐up study

The purpose of this study was to explore whether (a) immigrant health care workers (HCW) are more at risk of bullying at work than Danish staff members, (b) this association is increased by previous exposure to bullying and (c) immigrants experience more bullying from supervisors, colleagues and clients/residents. We analyzed cross-sectional baseline data from 5,635 health care students of whom 10.4% were immigrants, and conducted a prospective analysis by following 3,109 of these respondents during their first year of employment. More than a third of the respondents had previous experiences with bullying. The baseline analyses showed that immigrants are more at risk of being bullied during both their theoretical education and trainee periods than their Danish co-students. At follow-up we found that 9.1% of the total cohort had been exposed to bullying at work during their first year of employment, hereof 1.8% frequently. "Non-Western" immigrants had a significantly higher risk of exposure to bullying at work during follow-up than the Danish respondents independent of previous experience with bullying. Danish and immigrant health care workers were more exposed to bullying from co-workers than from supervisors with no statistically significant difference between the Danes and the immigrant groups. Both "Western" and "non-Western" respondents were more at risk of bullying from clients/residents than the Danish respondents.     

Do remedial programs really work?

The results of an evaluative study demonstrate that the remedial reading-writing program at a large urban community junior college did not produce any meaningful differences in student withdrawals from college or in grade point averages during the second semester of college; did not improve achievement in social science, humanities, or English courses; and did not result in higher scores on writing and reading tests for those students in the remedial program than for those in a randomly selected control group who did not participate in the program.     

How does running memory span work?

In running memory span, a list ends unpredictably, and the last few items are to be recalled. This task is of increasing importance in recent research. We argue that there are two very different strategies for performing running span tasks: a low-effort strategy in which items are passively held until the list ends, when retrieval into a capacity-limited store takes place; and a higher-effort strategy in which working memory is continually updated using rehearsal processes during the list presentation. In two experiments, we examine the roles of these two strategies and the consequences of two types of interference.     

The effects of physical work,mental work,and quantity on children’s time perception

Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics - An experiment was conducted to examine the effects of work and quantity cues on children’s time perception. Ninety-seven children in kindergarten...     

Building and sustaining work engagement – a participatory action intervention to increase work engagement in nursing staff

This study evaluated whether a participatory action research intervention with nursing staff on acute care older people National Health Service wards in the United Kingdom was effective for increasing work engagement. Mediation analyses between job resources (social support, influence in decision-making), job demands, work-related needs (autonomy, competence, relatedness), and work engagement explored the presumed psychological mechanisms underlying the intervention. A non-randomized, matched control group, pretest, post-test design involved three intervention and five control wards. A significant decrease in relatedness, and a borderline significant decrease in competence, was observed in the intervention group compared to the control group, with no effect on work engagement (N = 45). Work-related needs mediated between resources and work engagement, supporting the job demands-resources model and self-determination theory as an underlying explanatory theory. Intervention implementation was difficult, highlighting the need for participant and organizational readiness for change, and strong management support. This is the first known study to apply participatory techniques to increase work engagement in nursing staff and explore the underlying explanatory psychological mechanisms, offering a novel means of taking work engagement research forward. Crucially, it highlights the challenges involved in intervention research and the importance of including evaluations of intervention implementation alongside statistical evaluations to avoid erroneous conclusions.