The Impact of Ownership on Psychosocial Working Conditions: A Multilevel Analysis of 60 Workplaces

Abstract

With the expansion of the service sector, working conditions have changed during recent decades and it has become more relevant to highlight psychosocial factors as a complement to physical aspects of work. The main scope of this article concerns legal forms of ownership (i.e. the public sector, public enterprises, private enterprises and cooperatives), different types of operations within the service sector, and whether these organizational characteristics create differences in psychosocial working conditions for the individual employee. A total of 1384 employees in 60 workplaces within 25 establishments participated, and the data consisted of both a survey answered by the employees and structured interviews conducted with the local managers in each participating organization. Multilevel analysis showed that a rather high degree of variance in working conditions could be attributed to factors outside/above the individual level, and furthermore, that both ownership and type of operation were significant and relevant variables in order to explain differences in working conditions.