Extroversion and Conscientiousness Predict Deteriorating Job Outcomes During the COVID-19 Transition to Enforced Remote Work

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations around the world rapidly transitioned to enforced remote work. We examined the relationship between personality and within-person changes in five job outcomes (self-reported performance, engagement, job satisfaction, burnout, and turnover intentions) during this transition. We conducted a four-wave longitudinal study, from May to August 2020, of employees working from home due to COVID-19, N = 974. On average, self-reported performance decreased over the course of the study, whereas the other outcomes remained stable. There was also significant between-person variability in job outcomes. Extroversion and conscientiousness, two traits traditionally associated with desirable outcomes, were associated with deteriorating outcomes over time. Extroverted employees and conscientious employees became less productive, less engaged, and less satisfied with their jobs; and extroverted employees reported increasing burnout. These results add to our understanding of how personality predicts within-person changes in performance, well-being, and turnover intentions during the pandemic.

Online Batch Scheduling of Simple Linear Deteriorating Jobs with Incompatible Families

We considered the online scheduling problem of simple linear deteriorating job families on m parallel batch machines to minimize the makespan, where the batch capacity is unbounded. In this paper, simple linear deteriorating jobs mean that the actual processing time p j of job J j is assumed to be a linear function of its starting time s j , i.e., p j = α j s j , where α j > 0 is the deterioration rate. Job families mean that one job must belong to some job family, and jobs of different families cannot be processed in the same batch. When m = 1 , we provide the best possible online algorithm with the competitive ratio of ( 1 + α max ) f , where f is the number of job families and α max is the maximum deterioration rate of all jobs. When m ≥ 1 and m = f , we provide the best possible online algorithm with the competitive ratio of 1 + α max .

‘Everything was just getting worse and worse’: deteriorating job quality as a driver of doctor emigration from Ireland

Background Medicine is a high-status, high-skill occupation which has traditionally provided access to good quality jobs and relatively high salaries. In Ireland, historic underfunding combined with austerity-related cutbacks has negatively impacted job quality to the extent that hospital medical jobs have begun to resemble extreme jobs. Extreme jobs combine components of a good quality job—high pay, high job control, challenging demands, with those of a low-quality job—long working hours, heavy workloads. Deteriorating job quality and the normalisation of extreme working is driving doctor emigration from Ireland and deterring return. Methods Semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with 40 Irish emigrant doctors in Australia who had emigrated from Ireland since 2008. Interviews were held in July–August 2018. Results Respondents reflected on their experiences of working in the Irish health system, describing hospital workplaces that were understaffed, overstretched and within which extreme working had become normalised, particularly in relation to long working hours, fast working pace, doing more with less and fighting a climate of negativity. Drawing on Hirschman’s work on exit, voice and loyalty (1970), the authors consider doctor emigration as exit and present respondent experiences of voice prior to emigration. Only 14/40 respondent emigrant doctors intend to return to work in Ireland. Discussion The deterioration in medical job quality and the normalisation of extreme working is a key driver of doctor emigration from Ireland, and deterring return. Irish trained hospital doctors emigrate to access good quality jobs in Australia and are increasingly likely to remain abroad once they have secured them. To improve doctor retention, health systems and employers must mitigate a gainst the emergence of extreme work in healthcare. Employee voice (about working conditions, about patient safety, etc.) should be encouraged and used to inform health system improvement and to mitigate exit.

Precarity’s Prospect: Contingent Control and Union Renewal in the Retail Sector

Precarity and deunionization have grown up (or down) together. Yet the focus of union renewal scholars on the forms and constituencies of organizing has neglected a holistic appraisal of their connection and the role of work itself. This article uses a focused examination of frontline retail to understand the links between deteriorating job quality, new modes of control and their effects on worker consciousness. Based on qualitative interviews with 75 workers at Macy’s and Target stores, I identify a paradigm of contingent control embodied in precarious employment, routinized tasks, “soft” management and a largely “secondary” workforce. This regime diminishes job identity and opposition but heightens workers’ solidarity, pointing toward a model of community-based industrial unionism that could serve as an organizational vehicle to reverse the growth of precarity.

Long-Term Employment and Job Security over the Past 25 Years

The authors document and contrast changes (or lack thereof) in job stability over the past 25 years between Japan and the United States. Prime-age male workers with at least five years of tenure in Japan continued to enjoy much higher job stability than did their U.S. counterparts. Most remarkably, Japan’s “Lost Decade” had little discernible adverse effect on the job stability of this group of Japanese employees. By contrast, job stability for mid-career hires and youth workers deteriorated in Japan. The authors’ cross-national regression analysis of job loss confirms the consistently more important role that seniority plays in protecting workers from job loss in Japan than in the United States and reveals that this gap in seniority’s influence on job stability between the two countries widened. Overall, it is the U.S. economy with the longest economic expansion, not the Japanese economy with the longest economic stagnation, that experienced deteriorating job stability, pointing to the absence of convergence of the Japanese and U.S. systems.

Wealth inequality among New Zealand’s Generation X

Generation X, denoting the post-baby boom generation, is a term typically used to describe those born between the mid-1960s and early 1980s. The well-known Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study cohort, born in 1972/73, are therefore near the middle of Generation X. The Dunedin cohort was born in fairly stable social circumstances. As children they experienced the social changes of 1970s New Zealand – the rise of sole-parent families, a deteriorating job market and a stagnating economy. They went through the economic reforms of the 1980s as high school students, and attended university or entered the labour market during the recession of 1989–92. They were faced with user pays in the higher education system, first through full fees and then student loans. They face the prospect of being more reliant on their own resources for providing for their living standards during their retirement than previous generations.

Fit-for-Work – or Work Fit for Disabled People? The Role of Changing Job Demands and Control in Incapacity Claims

It remains a puzzle as to why incapacity claims rose in many OECD countries when life expectancy was increasing. While potentially due to hidden unemployment and policy failure, this paper tests a further explanation: that work has become more difficult for disabled workers. It focuses on the UK as a ‘most likely’ case, given evidence of intensification and declining control at work. To get a more objective measure of working conditions, the models use average working conditions in particular occupations, and impute this into the British Household Panel Survey. The results show that people in low-control (but not high-demands) jobs are more likely to claim incapacity benefits in the following year, a result that is robust to a number of sensitivity analyses. Deteriorating job control seems to be a part of the explanation for rising incapacity, and strategies to cut the number of incapacity claimants should therefore consider ways to improve job control. Given the challenges in changing job characteristics, however, an equally important implication is that high levels of incapacity should not just be seen as a result of poor policies and a lack of jobs, but also as a result of the changing nature of work.