Abstract
To investigate the relation between work and employee health, several work stress models, e.g., the Demand-Control (DC) Model and the Effort-Reward Imbalance (ERI) Model, have been developed. Although these models focus on job demands and job resources, relatively little attention has been devoted to the combined effects of demands and
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resources on employee well-being. The interaction between job demands and job resources - referring to a combined effect of high job demands and low job resources that is larger than the sum of their separate effects - may be an especially powerful tool for predicting employee well-being, as there may be particular demands and resources that reinforce each other, resulting in an extra strong effect on employee well-being. However, many studies do not examine the interaction between job demands (demands/effort) and job resources (control/rewards), and the few studies that do show inconsistent results. Reviews showed this may be attributable to way the interaction is operationalized.
By means of questionnaires data were gathered cross-sectionally and longitudinally (two-year time interval) to further examine this opertionalization. Two different samples were included, consisting of employees at nursing homes. Response rates were approximately 75% at Time 1 in both samples (N = 405 in Sample 1; N = 614 in Sample 2). The panel group, or employees who responded at both Time 1 and Time 2, consisted of 267 and 280 employees in Study 1 and Study 2, respectively.
First, regarding the statistical operationalization of the interaction term, the literature shows that the relation between demands, resources, and strain is usually operationalized by a relative excess term, multiplicative term, or ratio term. Testing those different interaction terms showed that the multiplicative term yielded most consistent results for both models. Moreover, regarding the DC Model and the ERI Model as balance models implies that the multiplicative term fits the key assumptions of these models most adequately: having both high demands and high resources or having both low demands and low resources (i.e., balance) enhances employee well-being, whereas imbalance does not. In addition, longitudinal results showed that high strain was experienced not only by employees with high demands and low resources, but also by employees with low demands and high resources (or work underload).
Second, the specificity with which job demands and job resources are operationalized was addressed. Assumable is that specific job demands require particular job resources to handle them. Therefore, only specific resources may have the potential to buffer negative effects of specific demands, meaning that only particular (optimal) combinations of specific demands and resources elicit an interaction effect. Job demands were extended to include the following specific demands: mental, emotional, and physical demands; and job resources were further subdivided into their single components (decision latitude into skill discretion and decision authority, and rewards into salary and esteem). In general, the findings showed the importance of including specific demands (mainly emotional demands) and specific resources (decision authority for the DC Model and esteem for the ERI Model) in the interaction term if demand-resource interactions are to be demonstrated in the prediction of employee well-being over time.
Most results were successfully cross-validated in Study 2.
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