Lead partner : Prof.Francis Green - University of Kent, Department of Economics - United Kingdom

Second : Prof. Csaba Mako - Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Sociology - Hungary

 

The overall aim of this package is to propose indicators for measuring work organisation as reported by job-holders, its evolution and the possible outcomes for workers. Based on the work on priorities and on definitions likely areas to be included are : 
 - direct measure of work organisation, such as the presence and nature of team-working (e.g. whether self-directed), the use of “quality circles” or “improvement groups”, sources of direction for workers (extent and nature of supervision, extent and nature of employees’ own influence on work tasks, and related aspects of personal autonomy for workers)

 - direct measures of generic technologies in use in the workplace: in practice, measures of the use and type of use of ICT in jobs

 - relevant employer HRM policies that are likely to affect what employees do, such as appraisal and training

 - forms of participation in decision-making about work organisation

 - skills that are associated with work organisation (e.g. planning skills)

With respect to worker outcomes, the intention is to look beyond the basic traditional measure of worker outcome – the rate of pay – and to consider also other important working conditions including non-financial aspects of well-being in the work-place, such as work intensification, job satisfaction, and psychological measures of well-being.

The related aim will be to consider ways and instruments for measuring changes in work organisation and in worker outcomes. There is a choice of means for indicating changes : one can either develop retrospective indicators of change, which involve survey respondents being able to recall changes and their timing reliably ; alternatively, one can derive change measures using repeated questions in longitudinal studies or successive representative cross-section samples of the same population. This package will consider the merits of each approach for measuring changes in work organisation and in worker outcomes.

A draft of the chapter on employee-level measures will be discussed with members from the consortium and presented to the stakeholders at the time of the third Meadow General Assembly meeting to be held in February 2009.

Reports