Human Work Environment Research Articles

Is Swedish Pension Reform the Right Medicine for Aging Europe?

Following the Second World War, the idea of the life course with distinct periods of education, work, and retirement became popular as a result of the alliance of interests of unions and management, with politicians seizing the opportunity to accommodate them. These “social partners” implemented benefit rules and created practices for using old age and disability to ease the exit of older workers. Although justifiable at the time, now those rules and practices hinder individual and employer incentives to invest in human capital and work environments that enable older workers to remain in the workforce. The article argues that the workforce environment of the coming half-century, which is relevant for persons born around 2000, is much different from that a hundred years earlier, which determined the opportunities for people born around 1900. People are healthier and live much longer and work environments are friendlier. The article argues that it is no longer justifiable to subsidize exit from the workforce around the age of 60 for healthy workers, especially in view of the coming labor shortage in Europe. It also argues that the introduction of the principles of the Swedish NDC pension reform in Europe would provide possibilities for flexible exit from the workforce and remove impediments to labor mobility in Europe, which are embedded in many of Europe's present pension arrangements.

The ethics of leadership trust

According to Exchange Theory, leaders and followers set goals and carry out actions by calculating interests, efforts required to achieve goals, and possible payoffs. Leaders and followers negotiate a relationship based on reciprocity. If leaders or followers fail to meet mutual expectations, however, the leader-follower relationship deteriorates. Reciprocity, the paper asserts, fails to build relationships of trust. To achieve trust, leaders have an ethical responsibility to reduce fear and increase follower participation. Through this, leaders help followers re-define norms and demonstrate behaviors that achieve a more humane work environment. The article identifies 11 variables that affect leader-follower relationships of trust and suggests areas for future inquiry and organizational change.

INTERREGIONAL WAGE DIFFERENTIALS: AN EQUILIBRIUM PERSPECTIVE*

ABSTRACT This paper empirically analyzes two competing explanations for observed interregional wage differentials among full‐time U.S. workers: (1) differences in the average levels of market valued labor characteristics, and (2) differences in rates of return to the characteristics. Hedonic wage equations are estimated for broad U.S. regions using detailed measures of human capital, work environment, and personal attributes collected by a national random sample mail survey. Statistical tests reveal little tendency for interregional structural shifts in the wage equations estimated, an outcome which rests on the inclusion of important, but seldom measured, wage determining variables.

Toward a differentiated view of burnout: personal and organizational mediators of job satisfaction and stress.

This study examined the relationships between the characteristics of the human service work environment, workers' attitudes towards their jobs, and their reported attitudes and behaviors towards clients. The sample consisted of 168 workers employed in a range of human service programs in the Northeast. Job-enriching characteristics were found to be related to workers' levels of job involvement, job satisfaction, and personal accomplishment, but had little relationship to reported levels of emotional exhaustion. Job stressors were clearly associated with higher levels of emotional exhaustion, but were not related to levels of work involvement or accomplishment. Feedback from clients was central to determining the amount of accomplishment workers felt and their commitment to clients. By contrast, feedback from staff strongly related to workers' job satisfaction. Finally, higher levels of involvement with clients were associated with decreased resistance to the stresses of human service work while general job involvement was associated with increased resistance to such stress.

Designing systems for performance

Real-time systems and systems to interface human work environments will dominate the growth of computer applications over the next decade. These systems must execute their functions with the time-liness and responsiveness required in these environments. The design, development and testing of such systems must guarantee performance as well as functionality and reliability. There is not yet in place a technology to support this requirement for engineering of performance. The research and development community in performance has focused primarily on analysis and deduction rather than the performance arena. This talk will define and discuss the tasks of engineering performance into software systems and describe the recent progress towards this goal.

Corporate social reporting in Germany: Conceptual developments and practical experience

As in all other highly developed market economies of the Western world, the impact of business activities on the quality of human and social life, and specifically the living environment, has become a prominent subject of debate and concern in Germany during the past decade. This development is mainly influenced by a growing recognition of the social cost of economic development (Mintrop, 1976, p. 4; Budtius, 1977, p. 187) and the basic value change in the intellectual and political elite. Beyond this, an increasing proportion of the general public is gradually turning away from the purely economic orientation of the past towards the emphasis of post-industrial, post-material values (Striimpel, 1977, p. 10; Inglehart, 1977). After a period of tremendous economic growth and achievements, and a high degree of consensus about the prevailing economic interest in society in the late sixties/early seventies, other priorities, summarized as “quality of life” issues, have become increasingly prominent and politically significant. Scholars of social change consider 4 developments as having been instrumental to these basic changes: 1. The tremendous volume of publications discussing the need for reorientation on society (Eppler, 1975), the ecological burden of mounting industrial production as well as the growing depletion of natural resources (Gruti, 1974). 2. The rapid growth of citizen groups demanding participation in decision-making in areas like industrial location and the nuclear power debate (Battelle-Institute, 1975). 3. The reorientation of major unions from away demanding only higher wages and reduced working hours, to stressing the importance of a humane work environment for human health as well as for intellectual and personal development (Brinkmann-Herz, 1975, p. 109). 4. The increasing attention these concerns receive in the general media (Hartmann & Furch, 1974). The growing reco’gition of the broad spectrum of social costs caused by rapid economic growth stimulated the search for a new paradigm quality of life and related academic resiarch on “social indicators” and “social reporting” as an extension of traditional reporting on national growth rates, productivity achievements and the amount of consumption goods available to different parts of the population. Added to the concern with the rising social costs of economic development was the strong movement criticizing the capitalistic system as an uncontrollable exploitive super-power in our societies. It was stimulated by the student revolution in the late sixties in Germany and produced an overwhelming volume of literature on this issue and stimulated nationwide discussions particularly among the intellectual elite. A merger of these 2 developments pointed to an obvious scapegoat: the business corporation was considered to be the main cause of the newly perceived misallocation of natural and human resources. Smoke stacks and industrial complexes which up to now had been used as an indicator of progress, prosperity and wealth became symbols of (wrong perspectives and goals when the physical