The Development and Validation of the Workplace Acceptance Scale:Evidence from a Sample of Workers with Disabilities

BACKGROUND: Recent trends in demographics and the labor market, such as an aging workforce, bring forth a significant societal transformation and force organizations to conform to new circumstances. Diversity management strategies may help to counteract negative outcomes of these developments. However, organizational diversity triggers various reactions among the established workforce, evoking positive as well as negative social dynamics. OBJECTIVE: In order to better understand the dynamics that arise from workplace diversity, specifically from workplace disability, the present paper outlines the development of an eleven-item measure of perceived workplace acceptance. METHODS: Three independent samples of employees with disabilities (including multisource data) were used to demonstrate the reliability and validity of the scale. RESULTS: The scale shows good psychometric properties and exploratory as well as confirmatory factor analyses indicate that workplace acceptance is a unidimensional construct. The study shows that the scale is significantly related to constructs such as health and productivity, self-esteem, intent to leave, motivation, organizational commitment, and attitudes of colleagues, providing evidence for criterion-related validity. CONCLUSIONS: Overall, the present study provides evidence for the validity of the Workplace Acceptance Scale and suggests that the workplace acceptance construct has important implications for both individuals with disabilities and groups of colleagues

Is Work-Related Rumination Associated with Deficits in Executive Functioning?

Work-related rumination, that is, perseverative thinking about work during leisure time, has been associated with a range of negative health and wellbeing issues. The present paper examined the association between work-related rumination and cognitive processes centred around the theoretical construct of executive functioning. Executive functioning is an umbrella term for high level cognitive processes such as planning, working memory, inhibition, mental flexibility; and it underlies how people manage and regulate their goal directed behaviour. Three studies are reported. Study I, reports the results of a cross-sectional study of 240 employees, and demonstrates significant correlations between work-related rumination and three proxy measures of executive functioning: cognitive failures (.33), cognitive flexibility (-.24) and situational awareness at work (-.28). Study II (n = 939), expands on the findings from study 1 and demonstrates that workers reporting medium and high work-related rumination were 2.8 and 5 times, respectively, more likely to report cognitive failures relative to low ruminators. High ruminators also demonstrated greater difficulties with ‘lapses of attention’ (OR = 4.8), ‘lack of focus of attention’ (OR = 3.4), and ‘absent mindedness’ (OR = 4.3). The final study, examined the association between work-related rumination and executive functioning using interview data from 2460 full time workers. Workers were divided into tertiles low, medium and high. The findings showed that high work-related rumination was associated with deficits in starting (OR = 2.3) and finishing projects (OR = 2.4), fidgeting (OR = 1.9), memory (OR = 2.2), pursuing tasks in order (OR = 1.8), and feeling compelled to do things (OR = 2.0). It was argued that work-related rumination may not be related to work demands per se, but appears to be an executive functioning/control issue. Such findings are important for the design and delivery of intervention programmes aimed at helping people to switch off and unwind from wor

Time equals money?: A randomized controlled field experiment on the effects of four types of training vouchers on training participation

Organizations aiming to help their employees in fostering their human capital offer training, but not all employees participate. Some organizations therefore experiment with training vouchers that typically offer financial means for training to motivate training participation. However, the effectiveness of such vouchers remains suboptimal, arguably due to lack of clarity on- and variation in the mechanisms of such vouchers. The present paper uniquely employs Conservation of Resources theory to compare the effectiveness of four types of vouchers with different combinations of money and time as well as different (i.e. firm internal and external) governance on training participation. To this end, 230 employees in a large Dutch insurance company were randomly assigned to one of the four voucher types or a control group. For eleven months, training participation was monitored and a concurrent questionnaire measured several personal characteristics as potential covariates and moderators. We find that the voucher type that allows employees to freely choose between a training budget and training days most strongly encourages training participation. Vouchers that provide employees with either working days or a training budget did not improve training participation significantly compared to the control group. Moreover, moderation analyses suggested that the training participation of employees provided with non-flexible vouchers appears to depend more strongly on personal characteristics, and particularly components from the Reasoned Action Approach. These findings suggest that to encourage training participation organizations should best offer flexible vouchers that provide employees a free choice between money and working time to spend on training. Moreover, the findings demonstrate the applicability of Conservation of Resource theory to training vouchers and address the need for recognizing subjectivity within this theoretical framework