Psychosocial Hazards in the Northern Territory Building and Construction Industry: A Profile of Job Demands and Job Resources in a Jurisdiction and Industry with High Rates of Suicide.

The work environment for building workers in Australia's Northern Territory (NT) is characterised by concerningly high rates of distress and suicide at both a jurisdictional and an industry level. Work-related psychosocial hazards are known antecedents of work-related distress and suicide, and more research is required to understand how these hazards impact workers in this unique building context. This paper examines the unique work environment in the NT building industry by comparing psychosocial hazards in the NT with those in the broader Australian building and construction industry. When comparing 330 NT self-report survey responses about psychosocial hazards in the workplace to 773 broader Australian building industry responses, supervisor task conflict for NT workers was more concerning, at 10.9% higher than the broader Australian cohort. Within the NT sample, comparisons between fly-in and fly-out/drive-in and drive-out (FIFO/DIDO) workers and non-FIFO/DIDO workers were also performed to determine specific local psychosocial hazards. When comparing FIFO/DIDO workers' responses to their NT peers, role overload and supervisor task conflict were significantly higher, and co-worker and supervisor support were lower. In FIFO/DIDO environments, praise and recognition, procedural justice, and change consultation were at concerningly lower averages than the broader NT building and construction industry. These results suggest that the NT building and construction industry, and particularly FIFO/DIDO operations, require greater resourcing, investment, and focus on workplace mental health initiatives to improve the work environment and wellbeing of this workforce and mitigate hazards that can lead to distress and the high rates of occupational suicide found in this jurisdiction and industry.

Job support, coping, and control: Assessment of simultaneous impacts within the occupational stress process.

The assessment of occupational stress is marred by an overwhelming adoption of simplistic research designs that generally fail to represent the complex reality of the occupational stress process. Informed by the theoretical tenants of both the transactional stress model and the job-demands-control-support model, this paper presents a rare simultaneous assessment of how two types of job demands (cognitive and emotional) are both moderated by job control and social support and mediated by coping for the prediction of work engagement and psychological strain over time. Self-report surveys were administered twice over 12 months to a sample of police-service workers and moderated mediation analyses were conducted on the matched sample of N = 2,481 respondents. The results offer support for the process of occupational stress by demonstrating how both accommodation and avoidance coping mediate the job-demands-outcome relationship over time. The results also demonstrate that this stressor-coping-strain process is simultaneously moderated by job support or job control. We found it interesting that this research also demonstrated that the estimation of work engagement was not unduly influenced by the type of job demands these police employees were exposed to. (PsycINFO Database Record

Work Engagement: Investigating the Role of Transformational Leadership, Job Resources, and Recovery.

While the relationship between job resources and engagement has been well established, a greater understanding of the upstream factors that shape job resources is required to develop strategies to promote work engagement. The current study addresses this need by exploring transformational leadership as an upstream job resource, and the moderating role of recovery experiences. It was hypothesized that job resources would mediate the relationship between transformational leadership and engagement. Recovery experiences were expected to moderate the relationship between resources and engagement. A sample of 277 employees from a variety of organizations and industries was obtained. Analysis showed direct relationships between: transformational leadership and engagement, and transformational leadership and job resources. Mediation analysis using bootstrapping found a significant indirect path between transformational leadership and engagement via job resources. Recovery experiences did not significantly moderate the relationship between job resources and engagement. To date, the majority of published literature on recovery has focused on job demands; hence the nonsignificant result offers insight of a potentially more complex relationship for recovery with resources and engagement. Overall, the current study extends the JD-R model and provides evidence for broadening the model to include upstream organizational variables such as transformational leadership.

Job demands × job control interaction effects: do occupation-specific job demands increase their occurrence?

Despite evidence that the accurate assessment of occupational health should include measures of both generic job demands and occupation-specific job demands, most research includes only generic job demands. The inclusion of more focused occupation-specific job demands is suggested to explain a larger proportion of variance for both direct effects and job demands × job control/support interaction effects, as compared with the inclusion of generic job demands. This research tested these two propositions via a self-report survey assessing key psychological job characteristics administered twice to a sample of correctional workers (N = 746). The research clearly identified that the assessment of correctional-specific job demands (CJD) was more strongly associated with job satisfaction, work engagement, turnover intentions and psychological strain, as compared with an assessment of generic job demands. However, the CJD did not produce a greater proportion of significant job demands × job control/support interaction effects, as compared with the generic job demands measure. The results thereby provide further support for the acknowledged 'elusiveness' of these theoretical interactions. Overall, however, the results did support the inclusion of occupation-specific measures of job demands for the accurate assessment of the health and job performance of high-risk workers. The implications for theoretical discussions that describe how high job demands are moderated by job resources are discussed.