A POSSIBLE DESIGN EXAMPLE
FOR JCQ 2.0 JOB DECISION LATITUDE SCALES (draft,
Prepared by Paul Landsbergis, with input from Aleck Ostry, Annet deLange, Leslie MacDonald, Jeffrey Johnson, Ellen Rosskam
This proposal builds
upon the excellent framework for a JCQ version 2.0 developed by Robert Karasek,
October 2004: http://www.jcqcenter.org/. At the
Table 1 includes old
JCQ items (with a Q prefix, e.g., Q3, Q4…) and new items on decision latitude
and a related concept (organizational justice) used in a pilot test of the JCQ
2.0 conducted in February 2005 among Korean transit workers. Additional items
to consider are included in Table 2. These include items on “macro-level”
support/trust/latitude suggested by Robert Karasek, Aleck Ostry and the ILO;
items on organizational level latitude used by Aleck Ostry in a study of
sawmill workers; items from the 2002
LEVELS OF
DECISION LATITUDE
Task-level (also referred to as job level, micro-level or individual level)
Definition: This most commonly used definition of job decision latitude describes features of jobs, primarily the ability of the worker to use his or her skills on the job and to have authority to make decisions regarding how the work is done and to set the schedule for completing work activities. This level of decision latitude focuses on the worker’s abilities to control his or her own activities and skill use, not to control others (1, p. 60). These concepts are operationalized by the “skill discretion” and “decision authority” subscales of the JCQ.
Organizational-level
Definition: The job demand-control model is not limited to task-level control. “Organizational level” decision latitude involves participation, influence or control over decisions made at the work group, departmental or organizational level. Such latitude can have direct effects on health and productivity as well as indirect effects through changes in the possibility of task control at the individual level (1, p. 60).
Such participation or influence can be exercised individually and directly (though meetings of a work group, or by being a supervisor), or indirectly through representative bodies (labor unions, works councils).
Validity: Organizational-level latitude questions
listed in the Table (#13-20) have rarely been tested for reliability or
validity. However, the addition of 3 items (influence over work group
decisions; work group ideas about company policy will be considered; good
chances for career development/ promotions) to the 9-item task level latitude
scale increased the odds ratio between job strain and hypertension among men
from 2.9 to 3.7-4.0 in the New York City Blood Pressure Study (2).
“Macro” level
(also referred to as "macro control-insecurity-support” or "long term
employment status control")
Definition: Other factors that affect control in the workplace are often the result of broad economic and business conditions related to technological change, the market and the globalization of the economy, generally perceived by workers to be beyond their control (1, p. 61). At the 2003 JCQ workshop, participants suggested that “macro level” decision latitude should assess the effects of neo-liberalism in the global economy, such as job insecurity, downsizing, outsourcing, privatization, labor protection losses, aggressive "flexibility" of employment contracts, and financial cost-cutting. As Robert Karasek points out, the resulting threats to workers are in overlapping areas: loss of company-level decision influence, loss of job security, loss of small-scale production control to new work systems, inventory monitoring and electronic monitoring, and a less protective social environment threatening workers’ basic security platforms and undermining trust. Thus, a broader concept is proposed– linking macro decision latitude with job insecurity and macro social support. (“Macro” social support includes concepts such as organizational justice, organizational entitlements, and perceived organizational trust.)
The primary issue is the growing concern that the work situation no longer provides a stable platform for life and family development. “Macro-level” decision latitude is at the core of this construct: it is a measure of how much "long-term control" the worker has over his/her life, via his/her employment. If work is unavailable, or is very “precarious”, there is little or no control over one's life course. Work still plays a dominant role, but in a different way than when work was more available and stable and it was the content of the work inside the workplace that played a dominant role in producing alienated and stressed workers. Thus, this new broader construct is congruent with Johannes Siegrist’s measure of “job security/career opportunities”, previously called “status control” (3).
Given the complex nature of this construct, it remains to be determined how best to measure it. 11 items proposed by Dr. Karasek are included in the Table below. Would a series of modules be appropriate? What would be the best labels for the modules or the overall construct?
Lean production and similar new systems of work organization (e.g., “team concept”, production chains, spinning off all non-core work) may “empower” employees by expanding their “horizontal control” (influence over and responsibility for the immediate job and work group levels) while simultaneously maintaining or expanding management’s “vertical control” over the total production system (4). Our new measures should attempt to distinguish true worker support and influence from managerially manipulated teams that serve to intensify production on the part of the individual (“stress amplifiers”) rather than serve as traditional stress “buffers”.
Organizational justice: The 4-item organizational justice scale proposed in the Table is a short version of the scale developed by Juhtera and Kivimaki (5). “Although organizational justice partly overlaps with these psychosocial factors, it also seems to tap additive elements associated with employee health—for example, organizational consistency, accuracy, ethicality, managerial decision making, procedures used, and discrimination in organizations” (5, p. 108). While not the same concept as decision latitude, it does describe organizational procedures designed to ensure fairness and provide for some employee "voice" in the process. Thus, it reflects this broader concept of "macro control-insecurity-support” and trust. It should probably be maintained as its own “module” to determine associations with other measures of job decision latitude and other job characteristics.
ADDITIONAL ISSUES
Worker surveys and expert surveys
Offered in the Table
are specific questions on task-level and organizational-level decision latitude
both for a worker survey and for surveys to be completed by company-based
experts. Use of company-based experts (management and union) is a useful way
to:
1) Gain additional
workplace information that may not be available to workers
2) Allow comparisons
between management, union and worker responses to the same question -- not only
for validation, but to assess whether discrepancies between such responses
predict health outcomes
3) Reduce the number
of questions required in employee surveys.
Expert surveys focus
on issues such as organizational structure, organizational change, structural
and support programs for workers, production systems, competitive pressure,
company size, unionization, profit/nonprofit, private/public sector, etc. Such
interviews would rarely be able to provide information on task-level
characteristics, a strength of the individual level
surveys. However, some expert questions will be the same as population survey
questions.
Should we substitute time-based response options: “always-often-sometimes-seldom-never “ for the prior “strongly agree-agree-disagree-strongly disagree” JCQ response options? What is the evidence on this issue?
In the JCQ v. 1.5, there were subscales for “work group influence”, “formal influence” (supervision, company policy), and “union influence”, with the total scale score being a sum of the subscales.
In addition to modules for the generic JCQ, industry specific latitude modules would be valuable.
Since task-level latitude is nested with organizational-level latitude and both are nested within the broader “macro” latitude concept, this should encourage use of hierarchical regression modeling as an appropriate analytic approach.
REFERENCES
1. Karasek
R, Theorell T. Healthy work: stress, productivity, and the reconstruction of
working life. New York, NY: Basic Books; 1990.
2. Landsbergis PA, Schnall PL, Warren K, Pickering TG,
Schwartz JE. Association between ambulatory blood pressure
and alternative formulations of job strain. Scandinavian Journal of
Work, Environment and Health 1994;20(5):349-63.
3. Siegrist J. Adverse health effects of
high-effort/low-reward conditions. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology
1996;1:27-41.
4. Landsbergis PA, Cahill J, Schnall P. The
impact of lean production and related new systems of work organization on
worker health. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology 1999;4(2):108-130.
5. Elovainio M, Kivimaki M, Vahtera J. Organizational
justice: Evidence of a new psychosocial predictor of health. American Journal
of Public Health 2002;92(1):105-108.