Organizational psychology and technology: ethical, legal and practical issues related to active listening and work-related stress monitoring in Italy and Europe

La escucha activa es una herramienta poderosa para la prevención y reducción de enfermedades laborales y estrés, así como para mejorar el desempeño e incluso el desarrollo de la responsabilidad social corporativa. La escucha activa y el monitoreo más amplio del estrés relacionado con el trabajo, como se ha demostrado en la literatura y en varias experiencias de investigación en curso, se pueden hacer particularmente efectivos si se implementan en organizaciones a través de métodos tradicionales y tecnológicos, como chats telefónicos y web, síncronos y herramientas de comunicación y mensajería de video asíncronas, buzones electrónicos anónimos y soluciones de denuncia de irregularidades, cuestionarios electrónicos y tecnologías de monitoreo activo, por nombrar sólo algunos. Si bien estas tecnologías pueden tener un impacto positivo en la intervención psicológica en las organizaciones y, por lo tanto, en la vida de los trabajadores, plantean una serie de problemas éticos y legales. Algunos de ellos aún son objeto de arduos debates y están bajo el escrutinio de juntas profesionales y organismos gubernamentales. En Italia, la Junta Nacional de Psicólogos ha publicado recientemente directrices para la práctica psicológica basada en la web. Los parlamentos europeos e italianos también han producido varias normas nuevas que afectan la posibilidad de intervenciones psicológicas. La tecnología no sólo implica la dificultad de los sistemas legales para seguir el ritmo de su evolución, sino que también plantea dificultades concretas en las aplicaciones psicológicas profesionales, a menudo relacionadas con la brecha tecnológica entre las posibilidades teóricas y las capacidades e instrumentos de las organizaciones. Este trabajo tiene como objetivo analizar algunos de estos problemas legales y prácticos, y proponer, sobre la base de un amplio análisis legal y debates reales de estudios de casos, soluciones concretas para aumentar la eficacia de las intervenciones psicológicas.Active listening is a powerful tool for the prevention and reduction of organizational disease and stress as well as for performance enhancement and even corporate social responsibility development. Active listening and wider work-related stress monitoring, as proven in literature and by several ongoing action-research experiences, can be made particularly effective if implemented in organizations through both traditional and technological methods, such as telephone and web-based chats, synchronous and asynchronous video-messaging and communicating tools, anonymous e-dropboxes and whistleblowing solutions, electronic questionnaires, and active monitoring technologies, just to name a few. While these technologies can have a positive impact on psychological intervention in organizations and, therefore, on the life of workers, they pose a series of ethical and legal issues. Some of them are still strongly debated and are under scrutiny of professional boards and governmental bodies. In Italy, the National Board of Psychologists has recently published guidelines for the web-based psychological practice. The European and Italian Parliaments have also produced several new norms that impact on the possibility of psychological interventions. Technology does not only involve the difficulty of the legal systems to follow the pace of its evolution, but also poses concrete difficulties in professional psychological applications, often related with the technological gap between the theoretical possibilities and the capabilities and instruments of the target organizations. This work aims to analyze some of these legal and applied issues and to propose, on the basis of a wide legal analysis and real case-study discussions, concrete solutions for incrementing the efficacy of the psychological interventions.peerReviewe

Work addiction among bank employees in Italy: A contribution to validation of the Bergen Work Addiction Scale with a focus on measurement invariance across gender and managerial status

This study contributes to the validation of the Bergen Work Addiction Scale (BWAS) in the Italian context, with a focus on measurement invariance across gender and managerial status. The BWAS is a consolidated measure of work addiction (WA) anchored in general addiction theory that comprises seven items representing the core addiction components. Participants were 8419 bank workers (37.7% women, 12.9% managers) who completed a self-report questionnaire including the Italian version of the BWAS (BWAS-I) and the Dutch Work Addiction Scale, as well as measures of work engagement, perfectionism, workload, psycho-physical symptoms, work–family conflict, and job satisfaction. Results confirmed the single-factor structure of the BWAS-I. Partial scalar invariance held across gender and managerial status, meaning that most—but not all—item intercepts were equivalent across different populations. Furthermore, the BWAS-I showed adequate convergent, discriminant, criterion-related, and incremental validity. This study showed that the BWAS-I is a valuable instrument that can be used by researchers and practitioners to assess WA in the Italian context.publishedVersio

When Does Work Interfere With Teachers’ Private Life? An Application of the Job Demands-Resources Model

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between contextual work-related factors on the one hand, in terms of job demands (i.e., risk factors) and job resources (i.e., protective factors), and work-family conflict (WFC) in teachers on the other. Building on the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model, we hypothesized that job demands, namely qualitative, and quantitative workload, are positively associated with WFC in teachers. Moreover, in line with the buffer hypothesis of the JD-R, we expected job resources, in terms of support from supervisor (SS), job autonomy (JA), and participation in decision making (PDM), to affect this association, which is expected to be stronger when job resources are low. The study was conducted in an Italian secondary school. Overall, 122 teachers completed a self-report questionnaire aimed at determining WFC, as well as job demands and resources. The hypothesized relationships were tested using moderated multiple regression. The results of this study largely support our predictions. First, both aspects of workload were positively associated with WFC. Secondly, job resources, including SS and PDM, buffered this association, which was stronger when resources were low. On the contrary, JA did not buffer the association between workload and WFC. Overall, the results of this study are consistent with the JD-R model and contribute to the understanding of work–family conflict among teachers. More specifically, our study suggests that teachers with high levels of job resources, namely SS and PDM, can effectively cope with job demands, in terms of both qualitative and quantitative workload, thus preventing negative consequences such as conflict between work and family domains. Interventions aimed at preventing WFC among teachers should encourage organizations to optimize the balance between job demands and resources, as well as the identification and training of the workers at risk of WFC