Edad, trabajo y salud ocupacional: retos y oportunidades para los trabajadores y las organizaciones en Iberoamérica

El envejecimiento de la fuerza de trabajo debido a los cambios sociodemográficos globales plantea un conjunto de retos y de oportunidades cuya gestión es compleja y cuyos resultados pueden traer consigo consecuencias muy diversas para las personas y para las organizaciones. El principal objetivo de este artículo es analizar los más importantes identificados por la investigación internacional aplicados al contexto iberoamericano. Tras una contextualización de esos cambios sociodemográficos y sus impactos en el mundo del trabajo en los países de Iberoamérica, se abordan tres de los principales retos. En primer lugar, el relacionado con los conceptos de edad cronológica y edad subjetiva, así como otros tipos de conceptualizaciones de la edad aplicados en contextos organizacionales y laborales. En segundo lugar, analizar la evidencia disponible sobre la motivación, las actitudes y el desempeño de los trabajadores mayores, con objeto de reflexionar y cuestionar los estereotipos heredados acerca de su comportamiento y capacidad laboral. Y en tercer lugar, identificar los principales elementos del enfoque de la empleabilidad sostenible, con el que se pretende responder al reto de mantener y prolongar la vida laboral de los trabajadores mayores en buenas condiciones de satisfacción, desempeño, bienestar y salud. El artículo concluye identificando algunas de las principales futuras líneas de investigación e intervención en este ámbito cuya importancia seguirá aumentando en los próximos años

Experiencias de trabajo bajo la Nueva Gestión Pública en Chile. Análisis de los significados atribuidos a los Programas de Mejoramiento de la Gestión (PMG) por profesionales del sector público

El artículo busca contribuir al análisis de los procesos de modernización del Estado y reforma a la Gestión Pública implementados en Chile bajo el paradigma gerencial de la Nueva Gestión Pública (NGP). Se presenta los resultados de una investigación psicosocial de corte cualitativo, cuyo objetivo fue describir y comprender los significados que trabajadores profesionales del sector público asignan a los PMG, uno de los principales instrumentos de gestión dentro del trabajo de los servicios públicos en Chile. Se realizaron 12 entrevistas semiestructuradas en un Servicio Público en Chile buscando conocer los sentidos y experiencias de trabajo en torno a los PMG. Los resultados dan cuenta de 8 grandes significados en torno a los PMG, los que dan luces del carácter tensionado, ambivalente y problemático de las experiencias laborales de los profesionales del sector público en el marco de los nuevos sistemas de gestión. Se discuten las implicancias de los hallazgos en relación a los debates actuales sobre los límites e implicancias precarizantes de las reformas gerenciales implementadas bajo el paradigma de la NGP.

Professional undergraduate internships as a work insertion device: work modality and hiring.

The article discusses the need to reflect on the educational level related to changes and transformations in the world of work, especially regarding higher education's professional internships. Issues related to preparedness and the legitimation of social institutions are recognized, as well as the recognition of production and work systems. Those are referred to as devices for labor incorporation, as they become scenes to apply disciplinary theories and knowledge, in order to assume problems at real contexts, institutions, and organizations, with conditions associated with “decent or full jobs”. In this case, internships refer to a traditional status job, a concrete project-oriented to ensure a better future, (uncertain) working conditions, and to match with some kind of professional who works fiscally or virtually, collets data, is involved with technological structures, duplicates in networks, is flexible, handles with uncertainty, and works – as an identifiable trend- on precarious paradoxical condition of being a student-worker, characterized as well as a means for the actual re-institutionalization of the world of work as a form to be included and hired. This reflection is based on research experiences and conceptual approximation from academic and applied spaces at professional levels, related to concepts such as Employability in its multi-dimensional sense and includes labor insertion and recognizes the undergraduate professional internships phenomena as a working modality which is being consolidated at re re-institutionalization of the work itself, and ends up legitimating other social spheres of occupational activity that must be discussed beyond curricular and academic aspects exclusively. Finally, undergraduate professional internships are reconfigured as a social space of projection an insertion in and for work.

Do intellectual activity and manual work imply different links?

In the context of contrasting intellectual and manual work, we developed research to compare the turnover intentions from the organization among Human Resource Management (HRM) teachers and building construction workers. We applied the Behavioral Intentions to Stay in the Organization Scale (BISOS) and a sociodemographic form in 154 workers in Belo Horizonte, 77 teachers and 77 construction workers. We also applied semi-structured interviews to a small number of participants, exploring the participants’ arguments about these intentions. Among the teachers, there was a predominance of the intention to leave, whilst among the construction workers, the intention to stay. The difference between the distributions was statistically significant. We identified, however, a fragility of bonds with the organization for both occupational groups. On the one hand, the turnover intentions and the justifying arguments in their similarities and differences did not corroborate the expected polarization between intellectual and manual work. On the other hand, we can understand them as simultaneously reflecting the country’s current economic scenario and the educational profile of the two groups, in which construction workers have fewer options for reinsertion into the market, while teachers’ training enables other insertions into the market and/or having more than one job.

The new spacetime of telework: A challenge for the quality of worklife

Spatiotemporal coordinates are crucial for understanding work experience. The combined effect of the confinement in the face of Covid-19 andthe intense and accelerated development of digital technology changed the nature, forms, conditions, and working relationships. This transformation has been radical with regard to what has been modernly thought of as space and as working time. The objective of the study was to analyze psychosocial aspects of this new reality, visualizing its antecedents and reflecting on its implications. The information was collected from various types of sources: for the study of the antecedents, a selection of classic studies on work space-time was used, which provided a historiographic description of the paradigm inherited from modernity. For the perspective of the psychosocial implications of the new work environment, mainstream literature and secondary sources provided by the abundant multi-color literature available on Google were used. The collected material was subjected to a treatment inspired by thematic content analysis. In an initial phase, the core of the change was identified as a basically spatial phenomenon of distancing from the workplace. From this perspective, the focus of attention was the comparison of the advantages and disadvantages of face-to-face activity and interactions with virtual work, mediated by gadgets, clouds, networks, and virtual platforms. Later, this dynamic was recognized as a reconfiguration of work space- time, passing the temporal dimension to be the center of the new field of experience. The psychosocial impact attributed to the combined digitization, internalization, teleworking from home, and virtualization of processes has been described as a dilution of the boundaries between work and non-work, as colonization and work contamination of domestic, family, private and personal space-time and, ultimately, as a threat, but also as an opportunity, for the quality of working life. The observed panorama leads to suspect that the virtualization of work processes, which is advancing unstoppably hand in hand with digitization -with or without a pandemic-, represents a hybrid of a black hole, which puts the quality of working life at risk, and a wormhole, which provides new opportunities for human development.

Nature, Significance and Implications of Telework

This article presents a conceptual discussion of telework. For the synthetic treatment of the subject through a general vision, we want to place this innovation in its macroeconomic context, highlighting the logic of production and accumulation of the dominant mode of production, which explains the conditions that allowed its emergence half a century ago. After analyzing the characteristics of this new work process and presenting the opinions of teleworkers and employers who employ them, we will see the main characteristics of the Legislation that has just been approved in Argentina inquiring about the risks to physical and mental health and mental it generates. Due to the scarcity of space, we will not reflect on the impact of the teleworking pandemic.

From the errors and horrors of psychology at work to the geopolitics of its discourses and practices

In light of the proposals to examine psychology beyond its disciplinary limits, this article considers the relationship psychology establishes with the world ofwork. First of all, this article describes some central elements of these ways of conducting critical analysis. Common objections that are formulated to industrial/organizational psychology are put into perspective. Additionally, proposals that are constituted in counter-psychologies are analyzed. Finally, some alternatives are suggested that should continue to be developed as possibilities that psychological criticism allows for when academic issues are framed internationally and countries assumed as producers and consumers of psychological objects.

Coaching in organizations: what is the scientific evidence about its effectiveness?

The individual coaching process is a growing intervention used in work organizations. The investment in this tool is justified by the belief that a worker can develop skills, change behaviors, and achieve goals with the help of a professional coach. This would result in better individual and organizational performance. However, little is known about the scientific basis of its effectiveness. This study sought to search, in the scientific literature, about what is known with respect to the effectiveness of individual coaching processes in the work context. From the analysis of nineteen scientific papers published, using a method of rapid systematic review, the results suggested little scientific evidence on the effectiveness of coaching. There is a need to conduct more empirical studies with high quality and scientific methodological rigor, which may bring more scientific evidence and greater robustness and reliability for research results in this field.