Abstract
This study explored the impact of staff group role and length of organizational tenure in the relationship between the awareness of stress interventions (termed intervention awareness: IA) and the work-related attitudinal outcomes of university employees. A two-wave longitudinal study of a sample of 869 employees from 13 universities completed a psychosocial work factors and health questionnaire. Hierarchical regression analyses examined the contribution of staff role and different lengths of organizational tenure with IA and employees' reports of job satisfaction, affective organizational commitment, trust in senior management, and perceived procedural justice. Employees' length of tenure affected the relation between IA and work attitudes, and there were also differences between academic and non-academic staff groups. For non-academic employees, IA predicted job satisfaction, affective organizational commitment, trust in senior management, and perceived procedural justice. However, for academics, IA only predicted job satisfaction and trust which identifies a need to increase the visibility of organizational interventions. Across the tenure groups, IA predicted: (1) perceived procedural justice for employees with five or less years of tenure; (2) job satisfaction for employees with 0–19 years of tenure; (3) trust in senior management for employees with 6–19 years of tenure; and (4) affective organizational commitment for employees with a tenure length of 6–10 years. Employees working at the university for an intermediate period had the most positive perceptions of their organization in terms of IA, job satisfaction, trust in senior management, and affective organizational commitment, whereas employees with 20–38 years of tenure had the least positive perceptions. Results suggest that employees in the middle of their careers report the most positive perceptions of their university. The findings highlight the need to attend to contextual issues in organizational stress and wellbeing interventions and suggest that management may need to implement new strategies and/or promote existing stress-management and reduction strategies to academics, and employees whom are either new to the university or those who have been working for the organization for longer periods of time to ensure that they are aware of organizational strategies to promote employee wellbeing and morale within their work environments.
Highlights
A body of international research shows that due to economic pressures, the incidence, and severity of work-related stress in organizations is increasing (Mucci et al, 2016)
As Bentley et al (2013) report that levels of job satisfaction are higher amongst recently promoted academics and lower amongst mid-career academics, we propose that longer tenured employees will have greater maturity, experience, and mastery of their job and will perceive that their organization supports them by offering stress intervention strategies
None of the bivariate correlations was high enough to suggest that any of the self-report measures were assessing the same constructs, job satisfaction at T2 was strongly associated with the T2 variables of perceived procedural justice (r = 0.67) and trust in senior management (r = 0.57)
Summary
A body of international research shows that due to economic pressures, the incidence, and severity of work-related stress in organizations is increasing (Mucci et al, 2016). There is research evidence that the changing and diverse work roles of academics which involve teaching, thesis supervision, research/scholarship, administration, consultancy, and community service (McInnis, 1999) are negatively impacting their wellbeing. These increasing demands have resulted in longer working hours, which have had damaging effects on the work-life balance and physical and psychological health of academics (Kinman and Jones, 2003). They found that job insecurity and work-life imbalance were strong predictors of job dissatisfaction and increased levels of psychological distress
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