Impaired work functioning due to common mental disorders in nurses and allied health professionals: the Nurses Work Functioning Questionnaire

Common mental disorders (CMD) negatively affect work functioning. In the health service sector not only the prevalence of CMDs is high, but work functioning problems are associated with a risk of serious consequences for patients and healthcare providers. If work functioning problems due to CMDs are detected early, timely help can be provided. Therefore, the aim of this study is to develop a detection questionnaire for impaired work functioning due to CMDs in nurses and allied health professionals working in hospitals. First, an item pool was developed by a systematic literature study and five focus group interviews with employees and experts. To evaluate the content validity, additional interviews were held. Second, a cross-sectional assessment of the item pool in 314 nurses and allied health professionals was used for item selection and for identification and corroboration of subscales by explorative and confirmatory factor analysis. The study results in the Nurses Work Functioning Questionnaire (NWFQ), a 50-item self-report questionnaire consisting of seven subscales: cognitive aspects of task execution, impaired decision making, causing incidents at work, avoidance behavior, conflicts and irritations with colleagues, impaired contact with patients and their family, and lack of energy and motivation. The questionnaire has a proven high content validity. All subscales have good or acceptable internal consistency. The Nurses Work Functioning Questionnaire gives insight into precise and concrete aspects of impaired work functioning of nurses and allied health professionals. The scores can be used as a starting point for purposeful intervention

Workplace Creativity, Innovation, and Age

Creativity is the generation of ideas that are both novel and appropriate. Innovation is the subsequent intentional implementation of those ideas.While work performance is a complex and multifaceted construct (Viswevaran 2001), one of the most coveted and elusive dimensions of work performance is creative and innovative performance. Organizations look for ways to stimulate (or at least not hinder) their employees’ creative and innovative performance, because this will – it is believed – contribute to individual, team, and organizational success (Gilson 2008). Since the workforce is aging and will continue to do so over the next decades, organizations need to know what ramifications – if any – this demographic change will have for their innovative potential. The goal of this entry, therefore, is to examine relationships between employee age and workplace creativity and innovation