Clerical Jobs Research Articles

Source of Job Satisfaction among South Korean Police Officers

Studies of police job satisfaction show consistent findings that work-related variables have greater effects than personal demographic factors. Despite the cumulative knowledge about the sources of police officers' job satisfaction, there exist several limitations, including the applicability of the findings drawn from Western studies to the Asian context and differences in the determinants of job satisfaction across organisational subgroups. This study contributes to current literature by examining both phenomena: (1) whether work-related factors dominate for South Korean police officers, and (2) whether determinants of job satisfaction vary across type of duty. Using a sample of 341 Korean police officers, this study found that work-related variables indeed had stronger effects than demographic on job satisfaction in the sample. However, the determinants of job satisfaction differ between patrol officers and clerical officers. Although perceptions of pay and commitment have significant effects on job satisfaction for both groups, autonomy, job security and citizen feedback affect only clerical officers' job satisfaction, but not patrol officers'.

Knowledge work difficulty factors: An empirical study based on different groups of knowledge workers

The determination of the difficulty factor in knowledge work can be important for improving the performance of knowledge workers. In this article a regression model for investigating the difficulty of knowledge based activities (KBAs) is proposed. Four factors are considered in the model: Uncertainty, Variability of information, Amount of information and Level of skill and expertise. An empirical study based on 119 jobs from three different groups of knowledge workers (i.e. managerial, professional and clerical) shows that there are significant differences between the difficulty of the KBAs in managerial, clerical and professional jobs, and that managerial KBAs are more difficult than the KBAs of the other two groups. Furthermore, regression models indicate that Level of skill and expertise is the most influential factor in the difficulty of the KBAs in each of the three groups.

Friend or Foe? New Managerialism and Technical, Administrative and Clerical Support Staff in Australian Universities

AbstractThe aim of this paper is to assess and conceptualise the effects of new managerialism‐related organisational reforms in three Australian public universities on technical, administrative and clerical support staff job stressors and job satisfaction. Using a mixed method approach consisting of a quantitative core component and qualitative supplementary component it was found that six different types of stressors were evident: time, information; supervisory; work environment; staffing and pay; and career. Path analysis showed that these stressors were closely connected to reduced job satisfaction, which could be ameliorated by employee participation, improved communication and work‐related social support. However, the qualitative analysis suggested that the prevailing climate of managerialism was not conducive to such improvements. It is concluded that while appropriate human‐resource management strategies have the potential to prevent the worst consequences of change, there is some doubt about the ability of university managers, captured by new managerialism, to create and implement such an approach.

Meta-Analysis of Clerical Performance Predictors: Still stable after all these years

Pearlman, Schmidt, and Hunter (1980) published a seminal paper on the validity of various measures for predicting performance in clerical jobs. They concluded that for both job and training performance criteria, 10 types of tests (e.g., perceptual speed, clerical aptitude, verbal ability) predicted performance across 5 clerical job families. This paper describes a psychometric meta-analysis of validity studies using similar measures for clerical jobs conducted since 1980 to examine the stability of Pearlman and colleagues' validity estimates. This paper contributes to the literature by investigating the long-term stability of validity generalization estimates over a period of several decades. Clerical jobs provide a compelling case study because these jobs have changed considerably due to the increased use of computers and technology in the office environment. Results showed that the mean population estimates in the present study were consistent with, or higher than, those obtained by Pearlman and colleagues, thus demonstrating the long-term stability of meta-analytic estimates of validity. The relative stability of the validity estimates also supports the robustness of g as a predictor, even as jobs change over time.

Is The Wage Gap Between High School And College Graduates Widening? A Panel Analysis

<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; margin: 0in 0.5in 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">This study examines the wage growth of high school graduates and college graduates. The NLSY-79 data is employed. The data shows that college graduates earn a premium over high school graduates and the premium is widening over time. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A panel regression model was estimated for the years 1982 until 2004. The results show that education has a significant positive effect on wages and it is the primary determinant of the wage gap. Also, age and gender were found to have a significant effect on wages. Testing the impact of occupation, only managerial, clerical, and service jobs had a significant effect on wages.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>Production jobs were statistically insignificant as suggested by the labor market polarization theory.</span></span></p>

The Intervention of the Demon

The Intervention of the Demon J. Carson In high school I wondered why I couldn’t easily get a date or go steady like my classmates. This profound sense of failure in the social scene gradually had built up in my subconscious psyche. But I felt the next time I would meet my dream lover. Hollywood movies captured my attention, instilling that dream. It would happen to me when the stars aligned just right. I would be transformed, falling in love. The right girl would be magic, just as I saw in the love stories. Rock ‘n roll parties with Elvis crooning captured my imagination. He and others invoked the theme of the dream. I didn’t know why I was looked at and avoided and snickered at in the few social events that included girls like the teen “Drop-in-Hop”. I had collected names and phone numbers there. Fewer classmates went out with me in junior high than in grade school during the 6 years I spent there. I couldn’t take the bullying from the few in the 70 student boy’s school. The rest seemed a conspiracy of silence. Lectures from the headmaster’s “helping me” only deepened my pariah status. “Next time someone bullies you, come right down to my office.” Now I earned new epithets: “squealer,” “big baby,” were added to, “homo”. (I was on the opposite side of the divide: Only the headmaster himself saved me from being beaten.) The lower my reputation became, the lower my grades went, from what was essentially honor roll from grade school when I was 8. I didn’t seem to belong anywhere but a twilight zone. Afraid of people, I was “less than.” I internalized the ridicule. What was the meaning of “special” when it applied to me? Why was it so exhausting for my folks to find a place where I would be happy? In kindergarten, far from home, why was I placed in the same institution my mentally retarded brother was? My folks found a boarding school for my senior year at age 18. This grew out of a similar summer camp. This was a respite, a new beginning, a sense of belonging I never knew before. But with graduation that had to disappear, regardless of my new level of trust in others. The family psychiatrist placed me this time in a state hospital system. Again, I was far from home. They had their own bullies, “juvenile delinquents,” who otherwise would have fared worse. I was put in a common category with the bullies among the clientele, receiving the same attitudes from the staff. All mail was opened for the year I was there. I was exiled. This was a failure. Dad and Mother found a “therapeutic farm community” closer to them and in a part of the country dear to my heart. Still, during the two years I was there, no one could crack my lack of trust and sense of isolation. The state institution had rekindled the demon parasites inside my psyche. (I was to return to this therapeutic community 13 years later.) The demons stayed dormant through the following four years of college. I gained no close friends even though I admired the “hippies.” I limped by [End Page 4] with barely passing grades to my undergraduate degree. After graduation I set myself up in a large city and tried to find my way, complete with psychological tests. I made real social efforts. It was the ‘60’s now. As before, woman after woman, after being initially attracted to me, left frustrated. All these failures with women acted like a hidden acid. August 2, 1974 was a sunny bright summer day. Possible rejection from a woman acquaintance on our upcoming vacation was intolerable. I was just finishing a task at a clerical job for a newspaper. Blackout sensations! Just stress? I was about to start a hiking vacation in a lovely area for a week. The panic came back the next day on my vacation. The woman I was with made sharp comments, something like, “getting your shit together.” I was taken to the ER and given Valium to calm me...

Out of the Revolution, into the Mainstream: Employment Activism in the NOW Sears Campaign and the Growing Pains of Liberal Feminism

At the May 1975 Sears, Roebuck, and Company stockholder meeting, the brewing tension between the National Organization for Women (now) and the retail giant came to a head. Years of Chicago-based grassroots activism against Sears, the nation's second-largest employer of women, had created a highly organized and rapidly expanding national antidiscrimination campaign. Chicago now members turned Sears's annual stockholder gathering into a media event. On the sidewalk below the massive Sears Tower, feminists held an impassioned rally and gave interviews to sympathetic journalists. Inside, stockholders and Sears workers witnessed the now board member Mary Jean Collins direct critical questions to the Sears chief executive officer, Arthur Wood. Armed with supporting statistics and surrounded by fellow now activists, Collins accused Sears of systematically excluding female employees from all but the lowest-paid retail and clerical jobs. She told meeting attendees that their failure to meet now demands could result in a financially crippling lawsuit against their corporation. “I think we've managed to put equal opportunity on Sears's agenda,” Collins triumphantly told the Chicago Tribune.1

Prevalence of Hypertension and Associated Variables in Hospital Staff in Iran

Introduction: The aim of this study was estimating the prevalence and risk factors of pre hypertension (Pre-HTN) and hypertension (HTN) among the staff of Shiraz (located at south of Iran) hospitals. Methods: A random sample of 1027 staff was selected. Sampling method was categorical random sampling. Part of the data was collected using interviews, while the rest was obtained from clinical examinations. Results: In this study 30.5% were males and 69.5% females. The prevalence of pre hypertension (Pre-HTN) and hypertension (HTN) was 37.0% and 8.6% respectively. Among these, 95.45% had Grade 1 and 4.55% Grade 2 hypertension. The prevalence of Pre-HTN and HTN was significantly higher in men than in women. Only 6% of hypertensive staff were on anti-hypertensive pharmacological treatment. Among the treated patients, BP was under control in 35% of staff. Multiple multi nominal regression analysis revealed that overweight and non-smoking males were strongly associated with Pre-HTN. The Male gender, increasing age, to work in clerical group and job dissatisfaction was strongly associated with HTN. Conclusion: The strikingly low level of knowledge and failure to control hypertension in hospitals are problems that need to be considered. Due to prominent difference in prevalence of this disease in men and women, male hospital staff should be considered as a high-risk group. Body mass index (BMI) and job satisfaction are two adjustable variables which need practical remedies. Advancement of knowledge and emphasis on physical activities for white-collar personnel are important steps that have potentially positive effects. In addition, although more studies are needed to investigate the relationship between cigarette smoking and blood pressure, it is prudent to monitor blood pressure closely in cardiac patients who are obligated to quit smoking.

Functional and Oncological Outcome After an Innovative Surgery for a Recurrent Elbow Sarcoma

We report one of our patients with recurrent synovial sarcoma of the dominant right forearm who was treated with the rotation plasty technique 5 years ago. No similar case report is available in the literature. The patient has been on regular follow-up and is satisfied with the limb, which is useful for his clerical job. The patient has been disease-free at follow-up.

The use of personality test norms in work settings: Effects of sample size and relevance

The value of personality test norms for use in work settings depends on norm sample size (N) and relevance, yet research on these criteria is scant and corresponding standards are vague. Using basic statistical principles and Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) data from 5 sales and 4 trucking samples (N range=394–6,200), we show that (a) N>100 has little practical impact on the reliability of norm‐based standard scores (max=±10 percentile points in 99% of samples) and (b) personality profiles vary more from using different norm samples, between as well as within job families. Averaging across scales, T‐scores based on sales versus trucking norms differed by 7.3 points, whereas maximum differences averaged 7.4 and 7.5 points within the sets of sales and trucking norms, respectively, corresponding in each case to approximately ±14 percentile points. Slightly weaker results obtained using nine additional samples from clerical, managerial, and financial job families, and regression analysis applied to the 18 samples revealed demographic effects on four scale means independently of job family. Personality test developers are urged to build norms for more diverse populations, and test users, to develop local norms to promote more meaningful interpretations of personality test scores.

Job Polarization in Europe

The structure of employment is always changing, and economists are always trying to understand those changes. In the 1990s the idea of skill-biased technological change (SBTC) was used to understand the shift in employment toward more educated workers (see David H. Autor and Lawrence F. Katz 1999, for a survey). However, in recent years, it has become appar ent that a more nuanced approach is needed. The idea of SBTC might lead one to predict a uni form shift in employment away from low-skilled and toward high-skilled occupations, but studies for the United States (Autor, Katz, and Melissa S. Kearney 2006) and the United Kingdom (Goos and Manning 2007) have shown that there is growth in employment in both the high est-skilled (professional and managerial) and lowest-skilled (personal services) occupations, with declining employment in the middle of the distribution (manufacturing and office jobs). This is what Goos and Manning (2007) term job polarization (although see the introduc to Goos and Manning 2007 for antecedents of these ideas). There are several hypotheses about the rea sons for job polarization. First, the routiniza tion hypothesis (first put forward by Autor, Frank Levy, and Richard Murnane 2003) sug gests that the effect of technological progress is to replace routine labor which tends to be clerical and craft jobs in the middle of the wage distribution. Second, there is the view that globalization in general, and offshoring in par ticular, is an important source of change in the job structure in the richest countries (see, for example, Alan S. Blinder 2007). Third, there may be a link between job polarization and

Knowledge of, perceptions of, and attitudes toward epilepsy among university students in Kuwait

The aim of this study was to explore, using a self-administered questionnaire, university students' knowledge of, perceptions of, and attitudes toward epilepsy. Approximately 1.7% considered epilepsy a contagious disease, and 10.5%, a form of insanity. About 25 and 34% of students thought that epilepsy is caused by an evil spirit and the evil eye, respectively, and 17.4% thought epilepsy is punishment from God. About 8% believed patients with epilepsy should not marry, and 12.5% thought they should not have children. Similarly, 11.7% thought patients with epilepsy cannot think or judge like people without epilepsy, and 26.2% would not employ someone with epilepsy in a clerical job. Approximately 56% objected to marrying someone with epilepsy, and 12.5% would not allow their child to play with a child with epilepsy. In conclusion, university students in Kuwait have a vague knowledge of the causes of epilepsy. Misconceptions about and negative attitudes toward epilepsy are unexpectedly high among these university students.

The expanded Laboratory of Collaborative and Field Research

Along with David Asher and Richard Benfante, who also attended the End of Kuru conference, I spoke there as a member of the wandering and far-flung community of Carleton Gajdusek's Bethesda Laboratory at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). I worked there, originally talking my way into a clerical job, despite having no particular qualifications, as a ‘social science analyst’ from 1967 to the mid-1970s; I tend to think of my job description throughout, however, as ‘handmaiden’. For years I worked on whatever came to hand, or whatever was thrust into my hands by Carleton. After I left the laboratory to go to graduate school in anthropology, I edited with Carleton the volume called Kuru: Correspondence and Field Notes from the Collection of D. Carleton Gajdusek. Since then I have been working on health and medicine in China as a social anthropologist, teaching and doing research in Chicago, North Carolina and Beijing. Like many nostalgic historians and travellers who can claim many homes, like Carleton, even, I have a very partial, very personally motivated version of that place and time. Still, because Carleton, kuru, its scientists and the laboratory had such an important role in my own formation as a person, it interests me to ask: ‘What was kuru from the point of view of the laboratory? What kind of a place was the laboratory?’ My answers to these questions have become broader and vaguer over the years but my interest in understanding this past is no less intense than it ever was.

India: Employment Black Hole?

With a very low wage level, an abundance of college graduates, and an ability to speak English, India has become the most favored nation for the outsourcing of back-office operations. Not only are clerical and customer service jobs being outsourced to India, increasingly the outsourcing has moved up the job food chain to include financial analysis and medical support tasks. The case explores the increasing practice of the outsourcing of jobs to India, the competition India faces as other developing countries seek to attract outsourced work, and the impact the practice has on the economies of developed countries.

From Servants to Secretaries: The Occupations of African-American Women, 1940-1980

This paper examines changes in the occupations of African-American women during the period 1940-1980 using U.S. Census samples, with an emphasis on the breakthrough of black women into clerical work. In contrast with some previous studies, my results indicate that increased educational attainment played a significant role in opening black opportunities for clerical jobs. But changes in education still explain less than half of the overall increase in probability of a clerical job, suggesting that declining discrimination may also have been important. Employing an illustrative tipping model of endogenous discrimination, the paper argues that a range of historical forces might have tipped the labor market toward an equilibrium with less employment discrimination. Some preliminary evidence suggests a potential role for public employment and the educational qualifications of the black labor pool.

The co-construction of a gatekeeping encounter: An inventory of verbal actions

The success or failure of a gatekeeping encounter – in this case, employment interviews – is not simply the result of the interviewee's performance, but is also a result of the interviewer's responses to that performance, and of the interaction between the two; the outcome, whether successful or not, is co-constructed by the interlocutors. Using a data set of transcribed interviews from a national employment agency, the concepts of successful and failed interviews are described. Participants’ perceptions of the required qualifications for achieving successful job interviews are investigated. Results include a complete inventory of verbal actions in these gatekeeping encounters. Their distribution in successful and failed interviews is examined, in order to understand whether they can predict the relative success of particular encounters. Patterns associating social factors such as gender and job type with the occurrence of certain verbal actions and success rates in this dataset are discussed. Male candidates and candidates for light industrial jobs are at a disadvantage in comparison to their female counterparts and to those applying for clerical jobs. Not coincidentally, they are also less likely to establish co-membership with their interviewers. Interestingly, second language learners do not seem to be disadvantaged in the same way. Implications for job candidates, employment training programs, employment agencies, and English language teachers and learners are discussed.

Young people and work injuries: an examination of jurisdictional variation within Canada

Objective: The purpose of this study was to identify risk factors of work injuries among Canadian adolescents and young adults and to examine provincial differences in work injury rates. Methods:...

Individual Differences in Applicant Reactions: A Job‐Search Perspective

This study used three variables from a self‐regulatory job‐search framework to investigate individual differences in the relationship between applicants' perceived procedural fairness of selection tests and job‐pursuit intentions. Employment commitment, job‐search self‐efficacy, and motivational control were hypothesized to moderate the procedural fairness – job‐pursuit intentions relationship while controlling for pretest attitudes and perceived performance. Applicants (N=291) for entry‐level clerical jobs with large federal agencies completed pretest and posttest surveys. Results suggested that only job‐search self‐efficacy and motivational control moderated the relationship between perceived procedural fairness and job‐pursuit intentions. The relationship was stronger for applicants with higher levels of job‐search self‐efficacy and lower levels of motivational control.

Clerical jobs more stressful than nursing

Clerical jobs more stressful than nursing

A Study Of Patients With Low Back Pain Who Underwent Surgical Treatment

Back pain is known as an important cause of debilitation of the working adult population in all countries, especially industrialized nations. Cigarette smoking and strenuous physical activity are recognized factors involved in the etiology of the back pain syndrome. Identification of risk factors of back pain can assist the physicians in taking preventive measures and rehabilitating patients. This 7-year study deals with some of the risk factors of back pain. This is a seven-year study of 450 patients with back pain who ultimately underwent surgical treatment. Demographic factors such as age, gender, occupation and type of physical activity (including jobs which require strenuous activity, clerical jobs and those which involve long standing hours) were classified and studied. The established diagnoses of patients which had been confirmed by surgical and pathological findings were extracted from their medical records. Data were analyzed using SPSS software. 450 patients were studied. 58.2 of patients were men and 41.8% were women (1.3:1). 40% of patients were aged between 21 and 40 and 36% were aged between 41 and 60 years. Only 24% of patients were over 60 and below 20 years of age. 29.4% of patients were laborers or porters, 8.2% had jobs with long working hours and 25.5% had clerical jobs. In this study the cause of patient referral was intervertebral disc hernia in 53.3% of cases, spinal stenosis in 12.6% of cases, trauma in 11.1% of cases and spinal column in 10% of cases. 76% of patients in this study were aged between 20 and 60 years, most of whom were men, at the height of their physical activity. Given the similarity of findings of this study and those of other studies, it is recommended that the risk of back pain be more precisely identified and that suitable jobs be chosen for different individuals accordingly, in an effort to reduce the incidence of the debilitating complications of back pain.