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Work Effort (work + effort)
Selected AbstractsIt's Been A Hard Day's Night: The Concentration and Intensification of Work in Late Twentieth-Century BritainBRITISH JOURNAL OF INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS, Issue 1 2001Francis Green This paper presents evidence on trends in work pressure in late twentieth-century Britain. The main findings are: (1) Average hours of work levelled off at the start of the 1980s, following a long historic fall, but have not increased since. However, the dispersion of hours has increased, and working hours have been concentrated into fewer households. (2) Work effort has been intensified since 1981. Intensification was greatest in manufacturing during the 1980s, and in the public sector during the 1990s. (3) Between 1986 and 1997 there have been substantial increases in the number of sources of pressure inducing hard work from employees. [source] Estimating the Effects of a Time-Limited Earnings Subsidy for Welfare-LeaversECONOMETRICA, Issue 6 2005David Card In the Self Sufficiency Project (SSP) welfare demonstration, members of a randomly assigned treatment group could receive a subsidy for full-time work. The subsidy was available for 3 years, but only to people who began working full time within 12 months of random assignment. A simple optimizing model suggests that the eligibility rules created an "establishment" incentive to find a job and leave welfare within a year of random assignment, and an "entitlement" incentive to choose work over welfare once eligibility was established. Building on this insight, we develop an econometric model of welfare participation that allows us to separate the two effects and estimate the impact of the earnings subsidy on welfare entry and exit rates among those who achieved eligibility. The combination of the two incentives explains the time profile of the experimental impacts, which peaked 15 months after random assignment and faded relatively quickly. Our findings suggest that about half of the peak impact of SSP was attributable to the establishment incentive. Despite the extra work effort generated by SSP, the program had no lasting impact on wages and little or no long-run effect on welfare participation. [source] Exploring alternative relationships between perceived investment in employee development, perceived supervisor support and employee outcomesHUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT JOURNAL, Issue 2 2010Bård Kuvaas The purpose of this study was to explore alternative relationships between perceived investment in employee development (PIED), perceived supervisor support (PSS), and employee outcomes in the form of attitudes (affective commitment and turnover intention) and work performance (work effort, work quality and organisational citizenship behaviour). A cross-sectional survey among 331 employees from a Norwegian telecommunications organisation showed that the relationship between PSS and employee attitudes was partially mediated by PIED. In addition, PSS was found to moderate the relationship between PIED and three self-report measures of work performance. The form of the moderation revealed a positive relationship only for high levels of PSS. These findings suggest that line managers are of vital importance in implementing developmental HR practices, either because they influence how such practices are perceived by employees, which, in turn, affects employee attitudes, or because positive experiences with both line managers and HR practices seem to be needed in order for developmental HR practices to positively influence employee performance. [source] ORGANIZATIONAL AND OCCUPATIONAL COMMITMENT: KNOWLEDGE WORKERS IN LARGE CORPORATIONS*JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT STUDIES, Issue 6 2002TAM YEUK-MUI MAY Previous discussion of knowledge work and workers tends to overlook the importance of contextual knowledge in shaping the organizational form of knowledge workers who are employees in large corporations. This paper proposes a model to understand the way knowledge base and organizational form are related to the work commitment, effort and job satisfaction of knowledge workers. The model is derived from (1) a critical examination of the market model of knowledge work organization, and (2) the results of empirical research conducted in two large corporations. We argue that contextual knowledge is important in the relationships between the corporation and knowledge workers. A dualistic model and an enclave organizational form are suggested to examine the relationships between the commitment, work effort and job satisfaction of knowledge workers. We noted from our empirical cases that enclave-like work teams enhanced the expertise and job autonomy of knowledge workers vis-à-vis management. These work teams together with the performance-based pay system, however, led to unmet job expectations including limited employee influence over decision-making and careers, and communication gaps with senior management. Under these circumstances, and in contrast to the impact of occupational commitment, organizational commitment did not contribute to work effort. The study highlights the importance of management's strategy in shaping the organizational form of knowledge work. The paper concludes by noting general implications of our study for the management of expertise and for further research. [source] Incentives, challenges, and dilemmas of TANF: A case studyJOURNAL OF POLICY ANALYSIS AND MANAGEMENT, Issue 4 2002Barbara L. Wolfe This paper compares the incentives inherent in TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families), the U.S. welfare system in place after the 1996 reforms, with those of TANF's predecessor, AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children), using the experience in one state, Wisconsin, as an example. Is the new program successful in avoiding the "poverty trap" of the old welfare system, in which the marginal tax rates imposed on earnings and benefits were so high that they discouraged work effort outside a narrow earnings range? As women receiving assistance begin working more hours and earning more, income-conditioned benefits (Food Stamps, EITC, Medicaid, and subsidies for child care) are reduced and withdrawn, in effect constituting a "tax" on earnings. Under TANF, there is more support for these families, at least in Wisconsin, and so economic well-being should be higher for most women with earning in this range than it was under AFDC. But marginal tax rates under TANF remain high, and in some income ranges they are higher than under AFDC. Once in the work force, former TANF recipients have earnings over the long run that expose them to very high marginal tax rates, which decrease the benefits of working harder and make it very difficult to gain full eonomic independence. Evidence from other sources suggest that most low-skilled women have earnings in the same range and so are likely to face similar reductions in benefits such as child care subsidies or the EITC as their earnings increase, even if they are not receiving welfare-related benefits. © 2002 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management. [source] Peripheral social awareness information in collaborative workJOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, Issue 11 2003Michael B. Spring People working in physical proximity have access to information about one another. Much of this information is unavailable when people collaborate remotely using groupware. Being aware of other members of a team in a collaborative environment involves knowing both what people are doing and what is happening to the shared information space or artifact. Increasing the amount of information about the group in a computer-mediated system may increase the group's ability to complete the task. This article reports on a study that examined group performance on a task that was computer mediated with and without awareness information. In particular, the study examined how an awareness tool impacts the quality of the work effort and the communications between group members in the completion of a collaborative authoring task. The study found that the use of an awareness tool decreased the quality of the work effort. The number of communications also decreased when the tool was used. Although the results contradict some of the theoretical predictions, an examination of the data suggests theoretical support for a more complex interaction. There was evidence that the awareness tool may have reduced the users' need to communicate and this reduction in communications may have caused the reduction in the quality of the work effort. There is also data to suggest that the existence of the awareness tool may have negatively influenced the effort of some participants, and it was that effort reduction that caused the reduction in the quality of the product. [source] Disclosure on author work effortMOVEMENT DISORDERS, Issue 14 2007Christopher G. Goetz MD [source] Children's Economic Roles in the Maya Family Life Cycle: Cain, Caldwell, and Chayanov RevisitedPOPULATION AND DEVELOPMENT REVIEW, Issue 3 2002Ronald D. Lee This article examines the relationship between household demographic pressure and interage transfers for a group of Maya subsistence agriculturists in Yucatán, Mexico. The authors use data from a field study conducted in 1992,93 on individual time allocation, relative productivity by age and sex, and caloric costs of activities to estimate age schedules of average consumption and production. Using these, they investigate the net costs of children to their parents and find that children have a negative net asset value up to the time they leave home. The direction of net wealth flows in this group is downward, from older to younger, and in economic terms the internal rate of return to children is highly negative up to the time they leave home. Nonetheless, children play a critically important role in the family's economic life cycle. On average, girls offset 76 percent of their consumption costs before leaving home at age 19, and boys offset 82 percent before leaving home at 22. Without the contributions from children as a group, parents would have to double or triple their work effort during part of the family life cycle if they were to raise the same number of children. By the thirteenth year of the family life cycle, children as a group produce more than half of what they consume in every year, and after the twentieth year children produce more than 80 percent of what they as a group consume. The authors also find that the elderly in the sample, ages 50 to 65, produce more than they consume. Thus while children have a negative net asset value to parents, the timing of their children's economic contribution across the family life cycle plays a key role in underwriting the cost of large families. [source] Rural,Urban Differences in Primary Care Physicians' Practice Patterns, Characteristics, and IncomesTHE JOURNAL OF RURAL HEALTH, Issue 2 2008William B. Weeks MD ABSTRACT:,Context:Low salaries and difficult work conditions are perceived as a major barrier to the recruitment of primary care physicians to rural settings. Purpose: To examine rural,urban differences in physician work effort, physician characteristics, and practice characteristics, and to determine whether, after adjusting for any observed differences, rural primary care physicians' incomes were lower than those of urban primary care physicians. Methods: Using survey data from actively practicing office-based general practitioners (1,157), family physicians (1,378), general internists (2,811), or pediatricians (1,752) who responded to the American Medical Association's annual survey of physicians between 1992 and 2002, we used linear regression modeling to determine the association between practicing in a rural (nonmetropolitan) or urban (standard metropolitan statistical area) setting and physicians' annual incomes after controlling for specialty, work effort, provider characteristics, and practice characteristics. Findings: Rural primary care physicians' unadjusted annual incomes were similar to their urban counterparts, but they tended to work longer hours, complete more patient visits, and have a much greater proportion of Medicaid patients. After adjusting for work effort, physician characteristics, and practice characteristics, primary care physicians who practiced in rural settings made $9,585 (5%) less than their urban counterparts (95% confidence intervals: ,$14,569, ,$4,602, P < .001). In particular, rural practicing general internists and pediatricians experienced lower incomes than did their urban counterparts. Conclusions: Addressing rural physicians' lower incomes, longer work hours, and greater dependence on Medicaid reimbursement may improve the ability to ensure that an adequate supply of primary care physicians practice in rural settings. [source] Leeway for the Loyal: A Model of Employee DiscretionBRITISH JOURNAL OF INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS, Issue 1 2008Francis Green This article examines the factors underlying task discretion from an economist's perspective. It argues that the key axis for understanding discretion is the trade-off between the positive effects of discretion on potential output per employee and the negative effects of greater leeway on work effort. In empirical analysis using matched employer,employee data, it is shown that discretion is strongly affected by the level of employee commitment. In addition, discretion is generally greater in high-skilled jobs, although not without exceptions, and lower where employees are under-skilled. Homeworking and flexitime policies raise employee discretion. The impact of teamworking is mixed. In about half of cases team members do not jointly decide about work matters, and the net effect of teams on task discretion in these cases is negative. In other cases, where team members do decide matters jointly, the impact is found to be neutral according to employees' perceptions, or positive according to managers' perceptions. There are also significant and substantial unobserved establishment-level factors which affect task discretion. [source] Differences in the Annual Incomes of Emergency Physicians Related to GenderACADEMIC EMERGENCY MEDICINE, Issue 5 2007William B. Weeks MD ObjectivesTo examine the association between physician gender and income for emergency physicians (EPs) after correcting for factors likely to influence income. MethodsThe authors used survey responses collected during the 1990s from 392 actively practicing white EPs. Linear regression modeling was used to determine the association between provider gender and annual income after controlling for workload, provider characteristics, and practice characteristics. ResultsWhite female EPs reported seeing 7% fewer visits but worked 3% more annual hours than their white male counterparts. White female EPs had practiced medicine for fewer years than white male EPs, although the distribution of respondents across categories of years practicing medicine was not dramatically different. Female EPs were more likely to be employees, as opposed to having an ownership interest in the practice. Female EPs were less likely than their male counterparts to be board certified. After adjustment for work effort, provider characteristics, and practice characteristics, the mean annual income of white female EPs was 193,570, or 47,854 (20%) lower than that for white male EPs (95% confidence interval =,82,710 to ,12,997; p = 0.007). ConclusionsDuring the 1990s, female gender was associated with lower annual income among EPs. These findings warrant further exploration to determine what factors might cause the gender-based differences in income that were found. [source] The role and function of quality assurance officers in Ontario hospitalsQUALITY ASSURANCE JOURNAL, Issue 3 2005Kent V. Rondeau Abstract This article examines the role and job function of quality assurance officers in hospitals in Ontario, Canada. Results from a mail questionnaire suggest that hospital quality assurance professionals in our sample are much more likely to be female, at mid-career, and to have advanced graduate degrees, although most lack professional certification and formal training in quality management. Although the job duties of hospital quality assurance professionals are broad and varied, many report being engaged in traditional quality assurance managerial activities including hospital accreditation efforts, risk management assessment, and patient satisfaction measurement. Coordinating quality assurance activities, performance reporting, and leading the Total Quality Management (TQM)/Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) initiative remain central functions associated with their work efforts. Nevertheless, limited formal training in the principles and methods of quality management and improvement may be placing significant constraints on their effectiveness. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] | |||||||||||||