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The Occupationally Injured Employee: Emotional and Behavioral Outcomes from Psychosocial Stressors

This research explores whether a firm's psychosocial stressors contribute to strains or outcomes important to the organization. The psychosocial stressors chosen for study include: role conflict and ambiguity, workload (qualitative and quantitative), participative decision making, autonomy, and security. Independent variables were the emotional strains of job satisfaction and job commitment. The independent variables for behavioral strains included injury, lost days, workers' compensation claims, and absenteeism. Three moderators: age, gender, and social support were evaluated for interaction effects. The study sampled 77 occupationally injured and 81 non-injured employees from one medium sized Army community hospital. This study uses multivariate hierarchical multiple set regression as its principal analytical method. The hierarchial procedure orders the sets into an a priori hierarchy and enters each set sequentially from the hierarchy, evaluating the increase in $\rm R\sp2.$ The results suggest that psychosocial stressors are significant variables to consider when investigating workers' emotional and behavioral strains. For example, age, participation, and satisfaction were found statistically significant in differentiating between the occupationally injured and the non-injured samples. The study also found that ambiguity, participation, and autonomy influenced emotional strains. Additionally, age and social support appear to moderate the relationship between some psychosocial factors and emotional and behavioral strains. Age moderated the relationship with only emotional strains, while social support moderated both emotional and behavioral strains. Further, social support was found to have a main effect on the emotional strains of satisfaction and commitment, but not on any behavioral ones. Age was found to have a direct effect on the behavioral strains of workers' compensation claims. Finally, although not statistically significant when entered as a set and evaluated using the statistical analysis techniques in this study, a relationship between age and workers' compensation claims and qualitative workload and absenteeism were suggested. The economic and human costs associated with occupational injury are staggering. These findings suggest that attention to psychosocial factors within control of the employer, can promote good management outcomes, improve employee quality of worklife, and contain costs.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:unt.edu/info:ark/67531/metadc277759
Date08 1900
CreatorsMosesman, Leonard
ContributorsJohnson, Joe Lynn, Boyd, Nancy, Watson, Warren E., Luker, William A.
PublisherUniversity of North Texas
Source SetsUniversity of North Texas
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis or Dissertation
Formatxi, 230 leaves : ill., Text
RightsPublic, Copyright, Copyright is held by the author, unless otherwise noted. All rights reserved., Mosesman, Leonard

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