Documents Smulders, Peter 8 results

"The effects of work related stress and work pressure are a topic of research, however, very little research focuses on the causes of work pressure. In this article we examine some possible causes of work pressure in organizations. In research on work pressure, usually the perspective of the employee on work pressure is used. In this research we used the perspective of the employer. Data are gathered in 2001 amongst 3199 employers in the Netherlands.
Multivariate regression analyses showed that part of the work pressure in companies can be explained by the complexity and instability of the environment. The analyses also showed that work pressure is higher in organizations with flexible contracts and where process renewal recently had taken place. The most important factor in explaining work pressure, was the nature of the work in the organization. Work pressure increases as the percentage of people with unattractive tasks (heavy work, monotonous work) increases."

This work is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

"STUDY AIM:
We hypothesise that due to a lower quality of working life and higher job insecurity, the health and work-related attitudes of temporary workers may be less positive compared to permanent workers. Therefore, we aimed to (1) examine differences between contract groups (i.e. permanent contract, temporary contract with prospect of permanent work, fixed-term contract, temporary agency contract and on-call contract) in the quality of working life, job insecurity, health and work-related attitudes and (2) investigate whether these latter contract group differences in health and work-related attitudes can be explained by differences in the quality of working life and/or job insecurity.

METHODS:
Data were collected from the Netherlands Working Conditions Survey 2008 (N = 21,639), and Hypotheses were tested using analysis of variance and cross-table analysis.

RESULTS:
Temporary work was associated with fewer task demands and lower autonomy and was more often passive or high-strain work, while permanent work was more often active work. Except for on-call work, temporary work was more insecure and associated with worse health and work-related attitude scores than permanent work. Finally, the quality of working life and job insecurity partly accounted for most contract differences in work-related attitudes but not in health.

CONCLUSIONS:
Especially agency workers have a lower health status and worse work-related attitudes. Job redesign measures regarding their quality of working life and job insecurity are recommended."

"This paper reviews dynamic general equilibrium models in order to collect insights on the interaction between economic growth and environmental issues. The authors discuss the Ramsey model and extend it for natural resource inputs and pollution, as well as for endogenous technical change. Green growth becomes within reach if there is good substitution, a clean backstop technology, a small share of natural resources in gross domestic product, and/or green directed technical change."