Occupational Tenure Research Articles

Labour Mobility and Earnings in the Uk, 1992–2017

Abstract We combine information from the British Household Panel Study and the United Kingdom Household Longitudinal Study (also known as Understanding Society) to construct consistent time series of aggregate worker stocks, worker flows and earnings in the United Kingdom over the period 1992–2017. We propose a method to harmonise data between the British Household Panel Study and United Kingdom Household Longitudinal Study, which we validate by checking the consistency of some of our headline time series with equivalent series produced from other sources, notably by the Office for National Statistics. In addition to drawing a detailed aggregate picture of the United Kingdom labour market over the past two and a half decades, we use our constructed data set to compare the impact of industry, occupation and employer tenure on wages in the United Kingdom. We find that returns to occupation tenure are substantial. All else equal, five years of occupation tenure are associated with a 3.3% increase in wages. We also find that industry tenure plays a non-negligible part in driving wage growth.

Occupational Stress, Correctional Officers, and Training for the Job: Probing Sources of Stress During the Correctional Service of Canada’s Correctional Training Program

Occupational stress remains a remarkable problem among correctional officers. While the scholarship on correctional services has scrutinized correctional work to identify and analyze sources and consequences of stress, correctional training has received little attention. Drawing on the literature on sources of stress in corrections work, we analyze and compare whether sources of stress on the job overlap with those of correctional training. We base our analysis on interviews with correctional officers from Canada’s federal prison system who were interviewed while completing the Correctional Service of Canada’s Correctional Training Program. Findings suggest that sources of stress in training are not consistent with those of correctional work. The training program conditions succeed in preparing recruits to manage pressure, strain, and anxiety. However, the program does not necessarily equip recruits to deal with on-the-job stress, and does little to eliminate the occupational stressors and mental health disorders that too often emerge during occupational tenure. Correctional training programs in Canada and beyond must ensure that recruits are equipped with tools to deal with the specific sources of stress and possibly eliminate such sources in the course of work.

Nursing turnover in a large, rural health system.

Nursing turnover is a leading cause of inefficiency in health care delivery. Few studies have examined turnover among nurses who work in rural areas. We accessed human resources data that tracked hiring and terminations from a large health system operating in South Dakota, North Dakota, and Minnesota between January 2016 and December 2017. Our study sample included 7,634 registered nurses, 1,765 of whom worked in a rural community. Within the health system, there were 27 affiliated hospitals, 17 of which were designated critical access hospitals. We estimated nursing turnover rates overall and stratified turnover rates by available demographic and occupational characteristics, including whether the nurse worked in a community with an affiliated acute care hospital or critical access hospital. Overall, 19% of nurses left their position between January 2016 and December 2017. Turnover rates were associated with state, nurse gender and age, and occupational tenure, but were similar in urban and rural areas. Of note, turnover rates were significantly higher in communities without an affiliated acute care hospital or critical access hospital. Between 2016 and 2017, nearly 1 in 5 nurses working in this health system left their position. Turnover rates differed based on nurse demographics and selected occupational characteristics, including tenure. We also found higher turnover rates among nurses who worked in communities without an affiliated hospital, which points to a potential but unexplored benefit of hospitals in rural areas.

Reflecting on an academic career: associations between past mentoring investments and career benefits

ABSTRACT Receiving mentoring is associated with lasting career benefits ; however, less is known about long-term career gains for mentors. A national sample of retired academics were surveyed to examine associations between past mentoring behaviors and current evaluations of their careers. Participants (N = 277) were on average 73.6 (SD = 6.2) years old with 34.9 (SD = 8.0) years of occupational tenure and 7.7 (SD = 5.8) years post-retirement. Structural equation modeling results demonstrated that having more protégés (β = .19, p = .024) and engaging in more mentoring behaviors (β = .18, p = .027) were associated with objective career achievements. However, mentoring behaviors, and not the number of protégés, were linked to subjective career achievements (β = .33, p < .001). While prior research demonstrates that mentors experience short-term benefits from mentoring, the present study’s findings suggest that mentors may also experience long-term objective and subjective career benefits.

Lifetime trajectories of socio-economic adversity and their associations with psychosocial factors and attitudes towards social class

Scientific understanding of the associations between socio-economic adversity and other domains such as health and psychosocial functioning may be improved by employing extensive, prospective life course data to model inter-individual heterogeneity in socio-economic trajectories. This study applied Latent Class Growth Analysis to derive a typology of trajectories of socio-economic adversity, and compared the psychosocial profiles of the groups based on this typology. Data were used from 2,950 men and women participating in the MRC National Survey of Health and Development in Great Britain, ascertained prospectively since birth in 1946 until age 53. Trajectories of socio-economic adversity were based on indicators of occupational class, overcrowding, housing tenure, household amenities and financial hardship at ages 4, 11, 15, 36, 43 and 53, and education at age 26. Psychosocial factors included parental interest in education, self-management, neuroticism and attitudes towards social class and social mobility. Seven distinct trajectories were identified: persistent high; persistent low; strongly declining; gradually declining; increasing; early childhood; and relapsing high adversity. Key findings include that those with increasing adversity had high parental interest in education but low self-management and high neuroticism; that those with only early childhood adversity had a less favourable psychosocial profile than those with persistent low exposure; and that groups with declining adversity had relatively favourable attitudes towards education. Findings emphasise the need to consider socio-economic and personality mechanisms in the context of one another in order to better understand later life inequality.

The moderating effect of long-haul truck drivers’ occupational tenure on the relationship between safety climate and driving safety behavior

This study aims to advance safety climate research by applying sociotechnical systems theory to investigate the moderating effect of occupational tenure (as an external influence) on the safety climate and driving safety behavior relationship. Safety climate research has largely focused on the internal work environment, but, from a systems perspective, long-haul truck drivers are highly influenced by the external environment of their organization because they are a distributed workforce. Although drivers are exposed to their company’s internal message that safety is important, their knowledge of the overall trucking industry and their experiences external to their company may interact with their perception of safety climate. The sample consisted of long-haul truck drivers from seven U.S. trucking companies. Results were consistent with those of prior research in that safety climate had a positive impact on driving safety behavior for long-haul drivers and safety behavior mediated the relationship between safety climate and near misses. Additionally, and unique to this study, driving safety behavior was less dependent on safety climate for drivers with longer occupational tenure compared to those with shorter occupational tenure, albeit with that moderator accounting for a small percentage of variance. Implications regarding examining safety climate and safety outcomes in the trucking industry, and also regarding external and internal organizational influences affecting safety climate, will be discussed.

Job Mobility and Sorting

Abstract Motivated by the canonical (random) on-the-job search model, I measure a person’s ability to sort into higher ranked jobs by the risk ratio of job-to-job transitions to transitions into unemployment. I show that this measure possesses various desirable features. Making use of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), I study the relation between human capital and the risk ratio of job-to-job transitions to transitions into unemployment. Formal education tends to be positively associated with this risk ratio. General experience and occupational tenure have a pronounced negative correlation with both job-to-job transitions and transitions into unemployment, leaving the risk ratio, however, mostly unaffected. In contrast, the estimates suggest that human-capital concepts that take into account the multidimensionality of skills, e.g. versatility, play a prominent role.

Relationships among social support, empathy, resilience and work engagement in haemodialysis nurses.

To describe the levels of work engagement, and to analyse the reciprocal relationships between social support, empathy, resilience and work engagement among haemodialysis nurses in China. Work engagement is a critical workplace health indicator. Previous studies have examined work engagement perceived by nurses working in diverse hospital wards, or a specialty area (emergency care or intensive care), no previous studies have highlighted work engagement and its affecting factors among haemodialysis nurses. Participants in the cross-sectional study were 345 haemodialysis nurses employed in 17 hospitals in Chengdu, China. Hierarchical regression analyses were carried out to analyse the relationships between social support, empathy, resilience and work engagement in haemodialysis nurses. Resilience was the strongest positive significant contributor to work engagement, followed by other support and perspective taking (cognitive empathy). Nurses with longer occupational tenure reported higher levels of work engagement. Male nurses also reported greater work engagement than female nurses. Influence of work engagement was explored by social support, empathy and resilience, reflecting the need of haemodialysis nurses to understand the significance of focusing on their personal and environmental factors. Positive resilience, other support and cognitive empathy can result in increased work engagement. Training programs, such as mindfulness meditation training and empathy skills training, are recommended for nursing managers to enhance resilience and empathic capacity in nurses. Nursing policies should be developed to establish supportive work environments in clinical practice settings and to support the education and training of psychological resilience and empathic capacity in order to foster work engagement.

Migrant workers in Italy: an analysis of injury risk taking into account occupational characteristics and job tenure

BackgroundMigrants resident in Italy exceeded 5 million in 2015, representing 8.2% of the resident population. The study of the mechanisms that explain the differential health of migrant workers (as a whole and for specific nationalities) has been identified as a priority for research. The international literature has shown that migrant workers have a higher risk of total and fatal injury than natives, but some results are conflicting.The aim of this paper is to study the injury risk differentials between migrants, born in countries with strong migratory pressure (SMPC), and workers born in high income countries (HIC), taking into account individual and firm characteristics and job tenure. In addition to a comprehensive analysis of occupational safety among migrants, the study focuses on Moroccans, the largest community in Italy in the years of the analysis.MethodsUsing the Work History Italian Panel-Salute integrated database, only contracts of employment in the private sector, starting in the period between 2000 and 2005 and held by men, were selected. The analysis focused on economic sectors with an important foreign component: engineering, construction, wholesale and retail trade, transportation and storage. Injury rates were calculated using a definition of serious occupational injuries based on the type of injury. Incidence rate ratios (IRR) were calculated using a Poisson distribution for panel data taking into account time-dependent variables.ResultsInjury rates among SMPC workers were higher than for HIC workers in engineering (15.61 ‰ py vs. 8.92 ‰ py), but there were no significant differences in construction (11.21 vs. 10.09), transportation and storage (7.82 vs. 7.23) and the wholesale and retail sectors (4.06 vs. 4.67). Injury rates for Moroccans were higher than for both HIC and total migrant workers in all economic sectors considered. The multivariate analysis revealed an interaction effect of job tenure among both SMPC and Moroccan workers in the construction sector, while in the wholesale and retail trade sector an interaction effect of job tenure was only observed among Moroccan workers.ConclusionsMigrant workers have higher occupational injury rates than Italians in the engineering and construction sectors, after two years of experience within the job. Generally the risk differentials vary depending on the nationality and economic sector considered. The analysis of injury risk among migrant workers should be restricted to serious injuries; furthermore, job tenure must be taken into account.

Building community resilience: business preparedness lessons in the case of Adapazarı, Turkey.

The lack of attention paid to businesses in disaster management systems from the standpoint of state policies hampers efforts to build community resilience. This paper examines, therefore, the extent of business preparedness for disasters. Empirical research was conducted in Adapazarı, Turkey, 13 years after the İzmit earthquake, which struck the northwest of the country on 17 August 1999, claiming the lives of some 17,000 people. For the study, 232 firms were selected to inquire about their preparedness before and after the event. It is hypothesised that business preparedness is influenced by the following set of variables: business size; business sector; business age; financial condition prior to the disaster; occupancy tenure; market range; education level; and previous disaster experience. In line with the findings of the research, a policy framework is constructed to rationalise the allocation of resources for building resilience at the aggregate level by facilitating business preparedness.

Economic difficulties and subsequent disability retirement.

This study examined whether economic difficulties are associated with subsequent disability retirement while controlling for covariates. Survey data among middle-aged employees of the City of Helsinki in 2000-2002 were linked with the Finnish Centre for Pensions register data on all-cause disability retirement among women (n=4816) and men (n=1354) until the end of 2010. Additionally, disability retirement due to musculoskeletal diseases and mental disorders (ICD-10) was examined among women. Frequency in difficulties paying pills and buying food and clothes, and covariates (occupational class, income, housing tenure, and work- and health-related covariates) were self-reported at baseline. Hazard ratios (HR) and their 95% confidence intervals (95% CI) were calculated from Cox regression analysis. Frequent economic difficulties were associated with all-cause disability retirement after adjusting for age among both women (HR=2.11; 95% CI 1.63-2.73) and men (HR=2.69; 95% CI 1.65-4.41). Adjustment for covariates somewhat attenuated the associations, but they remained. Economic difficulties were also associated with disability retirement due to both mental disorders (HR=3.29; 95% CI 1.98-5.46) and musculoskeletal diseases (HR=1.85; 95% CI 1.24-2.75) among women. Adjustments made a minor contribution to the risk of disability retirement due to mental disorders, whereas the risk of disability retirement due to musculoskeletal diseases reduced after considering socioeconomic circumstances. Conclusions: economic difficulties are independently associated with disability retirement. Thus, they should be considered in attempts to tackle early exit from the labour market due to disability.

Multidimensional Skill Mismatch

What determines the earnings of a worker relative to his peers in the same occupation? What makes a worker fail in one occupation but succeed in another? More broadly, what are the factors that determine the productivity of a worker-occupation match? In this paper, we propose an empirical measure of skill mismatch for a worker-occupation match, which sheds light on these questions. This measure is based on the discrepancy between the portfolio of skills required by an occupation and the portfolio of abilities possessed by a worker for learning those skills. This measure arises naturally in a dynamic model of occupational choice and human capital accumulation with multidimensional skills and Bayesian learning about one’s ability to learn these skills. In this model, mismatch is central to the career outcomes of workers: it reduces the returns to occupational tenure, and it predicts occupational switching behavior. We construct our empirical analog by combining data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79), the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) on workers, and the O*NET on occupations. Our empirical results show that the effects of mismatch on wages are large and persistent: mismatch in occupations held early in life has a strong negative effect on wages in future occupations. Skill mismatch also significantly increases the probability of an occupational switch and predicts its direction in the skill space. These results provide fresh evidence on the importance of skill mismatch for the job search process.

Wage Returns to Experience and Tenure for Young Men in Italy

AbstractThis paper provides estimates of wage returns to experience‐, firm‐, sector‐ and occupation‐specific tenure for a sample of young Italian male workers. By comparing returns obtained using different estimators, I evaluate the importance of endogeneity and selection problems generated by specific unobserved components and individual fixed effects. After controlling for the role of collective bargaining agreements and occupation categories, results indicate that general labour market experience is the fundamental source of wage growth for blue and white collars, while returns to firm tenure are insignificant. There is some evidence of positive returns to sector and occupational tenure for white collars. Estimates from different sectors suggest that union coverage can be relevant in offsetting the role of search and matching in wage determination.

The returns to general experience, job and occupational tenure: a study using Australian panel data

This article uses Australian panel data for the years 2001–2009 to estimate returns to general experience, job and occupational tenure. We pay particular attention to issues of unobserved heterogeneity bias in our estimations. We find that both general experience and occupational tenure have statistically and numerically significant effects on wage outcomes, even after controlling for unobserved heterogeneity. Job tenure on the other hand only seems to matter in OLS regressions that do not control for heterogeneity biases. Once these biases are controlled for, only a modest effect from job tenure remains. The inclusion of occupational tenure in the estimating equation tends to negate even this modest job tenure effect. The only exception to this is for workers in large organizations. For these workers a small but statistically significant effect from job tenure remains, even once we have controlled for heterogeneity and included occupational tenure in the estimating equation. The results reported in this article have implications for the various theories of the labour market that predict upward-sloping wage-job-tenure profiles.

Occupational Human Capital and Wages: The Role of Skills Transferability Across Occupations

This paper examines the effect of accumulated human capital, and particularly occupational human capital, on the workers’ wages. Unlike previous studies that apply occupational tenure as a proxy for occupational human capital, this paper applies the concept of Shaw’s (1984) occupational human capital to capture the transferability of occupational skills and estimates a new measure of occupational human capital, so-called occupational investment. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) from 1979 to 2000, the key findings of this paper suggest that occupational skills from the previous jobs can also affect the workers’ wages at the current job and that occupational investment is one of the important sources of wages supporting the Shaw’s original work on wage determination. Specifically, 5 years of (3-digit) occupational investment relative to current occupational tenure could lead to a wage increase of 7.7 to 18.4 %. I also find that the general labor market experience accounts for a large share of workers’ wages.

Delivering Mixed Communities: The Relationship between Housing Tenure Mix and Social Mix in England's Neighbourhoods

For a number of years, housing and regeneration policy in Britain has focused on creating social mix through changing housing tenure mix, particularly in deprived social housing areas. Policies are founded on the perception that segregation of rich and poor is increasing, and this reinforces disadvantage. Little work has examined the degree of correspondence between social and tenure mix. We examine the relationship between these variables in English neighbourhoods, using occupational mix to measure social mix. We examine the regional differences in this relationship. We show neighbourhoods are generally more mixed in occupation than tenure. Tenure mix has a positive relationship with occupational mix, but the relationship is moderate and contrary to conventional wisdom; occupational mix and tenure mix increase with level of area deprivation. Regional analysis shows that tenure mix is higher in the tighter housing markets of London and the South. If policy is genuinely concerned with increasing social mix, attention needs to focus on affluent areas.

Elderly Mobility and the Occupancy Status of Single-Family Homes

This research explores the occupancy status and tenure transitions of single-family homes from which elderly homeowners recently moved. First, we compare the housing and neighborhood characteristics of homes vacated by nonelderly and elderly homeowners. Then, we use a multinomial logit model to test the extent to which these characteristics are associated with the home's subsequent vacancy and tenure status. The results indicate that a lack of recent updates and modern amenities may hinder subsequent owner occupancy of homes vacated by the oldest homeowners.

Could We Huddle on This Project? Participant Learning in Newsroom Conversations

Huddles—informal gatherings of two or more individuals, convened to discuss substantive issues regarding the work of one or more of the participants—are a form of social interaction that can play a critical role in the learning of organizational actors. We identify their defining properties and propose a multi-level framework for understanding the participant- and huddle-level factors that promote individual learning that is important to the work of the organization. We test our hypotheses using data obtained from huddles conducted in newspaper newsrooms using an experience sampling approach. Results confirm the importance of occupational tenure heterogeneity, perceived job relevance, attention to others’ emotions, and conversational reflexivity for participant learning in huddles. These results set the stage for understanding how the informal structure of an organization can be developed in ways that promote learning and adaptation.

APPLYING UNCERTAINTY MANAGEMENT THEORY TO EMPLOYEE VOICE BEHAVIOR: AN INTEGRATIVE INVESTIGATION

Drawing on uncertainty management theory, this study integrates justice research with the elaboration likelihood model and considers employee voice behavior as a function of 3 (interpersonal, procedural, and distributive) facets of justice perceptions in combination. Specifically, a positive relationship is hypothesized between interpersonal justice and employee voice behavior, which is buffered by high procedural justice. This 2‐way interaction effect is also examined to determine whether it would be mitigated by low distributive justice. Results from a sample of 395 manager–employee dyads provide support for these predictions. Furthermore, results from a supplementary analysis show that the 3‐way interaction effect on employee voice behavior was more pronounced for those who had a high feeling of uncertainty (i.e., those with a shorter job tenure or occupational tenure). Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.

Lifelong Effects of Attendance at Kindergarten Union Preschools in South Australia

While there is some evidence of long-term social benefits from early childhood educational interventions conducted in socially disadvantaged populations in the USA, there is limited evidence of similar benefits in different populations and countries. This study examined a range of social outcomes of adults aged 34-67 years who, between 1940 and 1972, attended a Kindergarten Union preschool in South Australia, a comprehensive, high-quality, centre-based preschool program. There were modest benefits on educational attainment, risk of unemployment and income, but no evidence was found to support effects on type of occupation, full-time employment or housing tenure. Preschool programs have the potential to enhance human capital development into adulthood.