The psychometric properties of the Burnout Assessment Tool in Norway: A thorough investigation into construct-relevant multidimensionality.

OBJECTIVE: The World Health Organization recognizes burnout as an occupational issue. Nevertheless, accurately identifying employee burnout remains a challenging task. To complicate matters, current measures of burnout have demonstrated limitations, prompting the development of the Burnout Assessment Tool (BAT). Given these circumstances, conducting an in-depth examination of the BAT's construct-relevant multidimensionality is crucial. METHOD: This study focuses on both the original 23-item BAT and the short 12-item version, using modern factor analytic methods to investigate reliability, validity, and measurement invariance in a representative sample from Norway (n = 493; 49.54% women). RESULTS: Our findings revealed that the bifactor exploratory structural equation modeling solution (burnout global factor and four specific burnout component factors) best explained the data for both BAT versions. All factors demonstrated adequate omega coefficients, with the global factor showing exceptional strength. Both BAT versions correlated highly with each other and with another burnout measure, suggesting convergent validity. Furthermore, both BAT versions achieved full (strict) measurement invariance based on gender. Finally, our results showed that burnout acts as a mediator in our proposed job demands-resources model as preliminary evidence of predictive validity. CONCLUSIONS: The study validates the Burnout Assessment Tool in the Norwegian context. The study supports the reliability, validity, and unbiased nature of the tool across genders. The findings also reinforce the importance of job demands and resources, along with burnout as a key mediator, in understanding workplace dynamics in accordance with job demands-resources theory.

To Change or Not to Change: A Study of Workplace Change during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

After the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, many employees were suddenly required to work more from home. Previous literature on working from home may not be applicable to this mandatory and overall change. In this study, we drew on the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model to explore the relationships between job demands (workload and work-home conflict) as well as resources (support from leaders, coworkers, and the family) and wellbeing (burnout and work engagement) in employees who still went to the workplace (no-change group) and employees who transitioned into working from home (change group) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Data were analyzed with multivariate structural equation modeling. The results indicate that work-home conflict was detrimental for employee wellbeing in both groups. Interestingly, the workload seems to contribute to work engagement for employees who worked from home. Regarding the resources, the three different sources of social support, leaders, coworkers, and family, were all related to employee wellbeing, but in different ways. It seemed that family support was most important for employees' wellbeing in the change group. This study presents implications for the wellbeing of employees in both the change and no-change group during the COVID-19 pandemic, emphasizing the importance of family-friendly policies.

"We All Held Our Own": Job Demands and Resources at Individual, Leader, Group, and Organizational Levels During COVID-19 Outbreak in Health Care. A Multi-Source Qualitative Study.

BACKGROUND: Interventions tackling COVID-19 impact on health care workers' mental health would benefit from being informed by validated and integrated assessment frameworks. This study aimed to explore the fitness of integrating the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model and the Individual-Group-Leader-Organization (IGLO) framework to investigate the pandemic's impact on health care workers' mental health. METHODS: Qualitative data were collected via 21 semi-structured interviews with senior and middle managers and four focus groups with employees (doctors, nurses, health care assistants) from three areas (Department of Emergency, Department of Medicine, Research Institute of Neuroscience) of a large health care institution facing the first wave of COVID-19. NVivo deductive content analysis of text data was performed. FINDINGS: Several COVID-19-related job demands and resources were found at IGLO levels. Individual-level demands included emotional load, while resources included resilience and motivation. Group-level demands included social distancing, while resources included team support and cohesion. Leader-level demands included managers' workload, while resources included leader support. Organizational-level demands included work reorganization, while resources included mental health initiatives. CONCLUSIONS/APPLICATION TO PRACTICE: Integrating JD-R and IGLO proved feasible, as job demands and resources could be categorized according to the individual, group, leader, and organization framework. The findings expand previous studies by filling the lack of knowledge on how job demands and resources might unfold at different workplace levels during a pandemic. Results provide unit-level evidence for designing and implementing multilevel interventions to manage health care workers' mental health during COVID-19 and future pandemics. Our findings offer occupational health practitioners a suitable approach to perform workplace mental health assessment activities.

Within- and between-person changes in work practice and experiences due to COVID-19: Lessons learned from employees working from home, hybrid working, and working at the office.

Introduction: In response to the requirement of keeping social distance during the COVID-19 outbreak a lot of employees needed to change from a regular office to a home-office at short notice. The aim of the present study is to explore these employees' experiences and evaluate changes in their work situation during the pandemic. Method: A mixed-method design was used with panel data collected twice in an insurance company in Norway. The first dataset was collected in December 2020 (Time 1; N = 558), with a follow up in March 2021 (Time 2; N = 601). Results: Our study indicated that employees' main reasons for working from home were to keep social distance, avoid contagion and protect their loved ones. Flexibility, timesaving and more time with family and friends were also motivators. Most employees reported that they had the necessary technical equipment to work from home and wanted more opportunity to use their home office in the future. General Linear Models (GLM) indicated that work-family balance and workload were the same across age, gender, and worksites. Women and employees working from home reported more fear of being infected by COVID-19 at work. Younger employees reported experiencing less social contact with colleagues than normal during the pandemic, compared to the older employees. Overall, employees working at home were more positive toward digital solutions and digital meetings than those at the office. Repeated measures MANOVA showed that the work motivation and digital competence decreased over time for all worksites. Productivity increased for home-office employees but decreased for the hybrid and work-office employees. Discussion: This paper contributes to knowledge of employees' experiences with different worksite solutions, which will be useful for anticipating employees experience in the future with more hybrid work.

Positive Participatory Organizational Interventions: A Multilevel Approach for Creating Healthy Workplaces.

In the following perspective paper, we argue for the importance of conducting research on positive participatory organizational interventions. We propose that these types of interventions are important because they not only focus on eliminating or reducing adverse job demands but focus also on developing job resources. To achieve the best effects, actions should be taken to address demands and resources at the individual, group, leader and organizational levels. We furthermore suggest that the participatory intervention process itself may also build resources at these four levels.

The Role of Adequate Resources, Community and Supportive Leadership in Creating Engaged Academics.

The vast majority of research in academia focuses on the adverse working conditions and poor wellbeing. The present paper presents a positive view on the factors that may promote work engagement in academia. Based on conservation of resources theory, we suggest that academic resources may be related to a social community at work, which in turn creates work engagement among academics. Having positive leadership in the form of fair leadership may be an important contextual factor ensuring that resources are shared fairly and openly. In a study of 1499 academics in Norwegian universities, we found that sufficient administrative resources to support teaching duties were positively related with work engagement, and that a sense of community mediated the relationship between academic resources for teaching and work engagement. These results propose that building academics' social resources by providing them with the necessary resources to perform their jobs will buffer the impact of a leadership that is perceived to be unfair and help them to perform their work in a positive way. Our results carry important implications for how positive psychology may be used to support engaged workers in academia.

H-WORK Project: Multilevel Interventions to Promote Mental Health in SMEs and Public Workplaces.

The paper describes the study design, research questions and methods of a large, international intervention project aimed at improving employee mental health and well-being in SMEs and public organisations. The study is innovative in multiple ways. First, it goes beyond the current debate on whether individual- or organisational-level interventions are most effective in improving employee health and well-being and tests the cumulative effects of multilevel interventions, that is, interventions addressing individual, group, leader and organisational levels. Second, it tailors its interventions to address the aftermaths of the Covid-19 pandemic and develop suitable multilevel interventions for dealing with new ways of working. Third, it uses realist evaluation to explore and identify the working ingredients of and the conditions required for each level of intervention, and their outcomes. Finally, an economic evaluation will assess both the cost-effectiveness analysis and the affordability of the interventions from the employer perspective. The study integrates the training transfer and the organisational process evaluation literature to develop toolkits helping end-users to promote mental health and well-being in the workplace.

An Open Time Perspective and Social Support to Sustain in Healthcare Work: Results of a Two-Wave Complete Panel Study.

Based on lifespan developmental psychology and psychosocial work characteristics theory, we examined longitudinal relations between calendar age, occupational time perspective, different types of job demands and job resources in relation to sustainable employability (i.e., work ability, vitality and employability) among healthcare workers in Netherlands (N = 1478). Results of our two-wave complete panel study revealed satisfactory fit indices for the metric invariance of the included variables across the two waves (6-month time lag). Our results revealed a negative relation between calendar age and external employability of healthcare workers (limited support for hypothesis 1), and more consistent evidence for positive relations between an open future time perspective and across-time changes in vitality, work ability and external employability (supporting hypothesis 2). Few significant findings were found for relations between specific job demands or job resources and indicators of sustainable employability of healthcare workers (mixed results hypotheses 3 and 4). Our explorative tests of possible moderating effects of age or occupational time perspective in predicting relations between psychosocial work characteristics and indicators of sustainable employability revealed only a significant interaction effect of supervisor support and future time perspective in explaining across-time changes in external employability of healthcare workers (rejecting hypothesis 5 and confirming hypothesis 6). We discuss the practical as well as theoretical implications of these findings, and present recommendations for future research.

Healthy Universities. The development and implementation of a holistic health promotion intervention programme especially adapted for staff working in the higher educational sector: the ARK study.

Underpinned by the Healthy Universities settings concept, this paper presents a holistic intervention approach, called ARK, to improve the health and well-being of academic staff. ARK (a Norwegian acronym for work environment and climate study) has been conducted in 18 universities and university colleges in Norway. The survey has collected information on employees' perceptions of the psychosocial work environment, well-being, and health from over 15,000 respondents. Further, it has provided valuable information and experiences on organizational development processes on how to successfully implement a health-promoting intervention programme. The aim of this paper is to present the ARK project and provide suggestions on how to conduct a health-promoting intervention programme in a university setting based on the experience and knowledge acquired from ARK. This understanding can inform and inspire the planning of future Health Promoting University initiatives to meet the distinctive needs of its employees.

The Line Manager's Role in Implementing Successful Organizational Interventions.

The aim of the paper is to discuss the role of the line manager in implementing to plan, implement and evaluate successful organizational interventions using our experiences from the ARK-program. Earlier literature has shown that line managers have a major influence on an intervention's outcomes (Nielsen, 2017; Saksvik, Nytrø, Dahl-Jørgensen, & Mikkelsen, 2002), however, there is a lack of knowledge about the managements' role throughout the entire intervention process and how line managers are influenced by the context at different levels. We therefore discuss the line managers' role within the five phase cycle of an organizational intervention, including preparation, screening, action planning, implementation and evaluation. We also introduce a more in-depth understanding of the context by using of the IGLO-model (Individual, Group, Leadership and Organizational level). Based on our knowledge and experience from the ARK-program we make some recommendations for (a) what the line managers need throughout the five phases in order to contribute to a successful intervention, and (b) on what the line manager has to provide in order to develop and implement a successful intervention process.

The line manager's role in implementing successful organizational interventions

The aim of the paper is to discuss the role of the line manager in implementing to plan, implement and evaluate successful organizational interventions using our experiences from the ARK-program. Earlier literature has shown that line managers have a major influence on an intervention's outcomes (Nielsen, 2017; Saksvik, Nytrø, Dahl-Jørgensen, & Mikkelsen, 2002), however, there is a lack of knowledge about the managements' role throughout the entire intervention process and how line managers are influenced by the context at different levels. We therefore discuss the line managers' role within the five phase cycle of an organizational intervention, including preparation, screening, action planning, implementation and evaluation. We also introduce a more in-depth understanding of the context by using of the IGLO-model (Individual, Group, Leadership and Organizational level). Based on our knowledge and experience from the ARK-program we make some recommendations for (a) what the line managers need throughout the five phases in order to contribute to a successful intervention, and (b) on what the line manager has to provide in order to develop and implement a successful intervention process

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The presentation and preliminary validation of KIWEST using a large sample of Norwegian university staff.

AIMS: The aim of the present paper is to present and validate a Knowledge-Intensive Work Environment Survey Target (KIWEST), a questionnaire developed for assessing the psychosocial factors among people in knowledge-intensive work environments. METHODS: The construct validity and reliability of the measurement model where tested on a representative sample of 3066 academic and administrative staff working at one of the largest universities in Norway. RESULTS: Confirmatory factor analysis provided initial support for the convergent validity and internal consistency of the 30 construct KIWEST measurement model. However, discriminant validity tests indicated that some of the constructs might overlap to some degree. CONCLUSION: Overall, the KIWEST measure showed promising psychometric properties as a psychosocial work environment measure.