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This research examined the relationship between the content of work, the work environment and job satisfaction among nurses working in a teaching hospital located in a remote area of Central Australia. Using the results of recent meta-analyses of job satisfaction, a conceptual framework was developed that predicted that work content (variety, autonomy, task identity and feedback) and work environment (ward facilities, collaboration with medical staff, cohesion amongst nurses, staffing, pooling and respected by others) would influence job satisfaction. A descriptive survey of 135 nurses employed in a 170 bed hospital was undertaken. Strongest predictors of job satisfaction were job variety, feedback and collaboration with medical staff. Other moderate correlates were cohesion amongst nurses and task identity. This study demonstrated that feedback from colleagues and supervisors should never be trivialised as a strategy to improve job satisfaction. Furthermore, the need to be considered as part of the health care team by the medical profession can be influenced by proactive workplace strategies and policies.

The aim of this study was to examine the effects and feasibility of an ergonomic intervention on the work content and load of home care workers. The subjects were female home care workers aged 42±5 yr. They were divided into the intervention group ( n =34) and control group ( n =36). The 1 yr work-site intervention included various ergonomic measures utilizing the developmental participatory approach based on teamwork and training within the work units. According to the OWAS method the proportion of straight back postures and normal or acceptable work posture combinations increased significantly ( p p Relevance to industry In the near future, the number of elderly clients within the realm of home care services will increase sharply due to the rapid ageing of the population in industrialised countries. The numbers of difficult and multi-disabled clients needing more intensive and diversified care will also grow. The good work ability and health of home care workers is a basic prerequisite for high productivity and quality in their work. This study focuses on the participatory ergonomic intervention with various work-site measures which were found to be effective and feasible for preventing disability among ageing female home care workers performing physically demanding tasks.

Aim This study examines self-reported stress and job satisfaction of health visitors (n = 68), district nurses (n = 56) and community psychiatric nurses (n = 19) in one health authority in the UK. The levels and sources of stress and satisfaction were examined in relation to speciality. Method Stress levels were assessed using The General Health Questionnaire-12. Sources of stress and satisfaction were measured by a 47 item questionnaire compiled by the author. The analysis of data included analysis of variance, Pearson product moment correlation, factor analysis. Findings The results showed that levels of stress were a function of occupation with significant variation between groups. Health visitors yielded the highest stress scores and lowest job satisfaction scores. Sources of stress correlated significantly and positively with GHQ scores. Factor analysis identified four main factors concerned with sources of stress: emotional involvement, unpredictable events at work, change and instability at work, work content. Job satisfaction scores correlated significantly and negatively with GHQ scores; indications were that all three groups were dissatisfied with supervisory relationships. Conclusions Recommendations include more creative and supportive supervisory relationships, such as clinical supervision.

The requirements for increased responsiveness to market and the demands for shorter product introduction times underline the need for a coherent formal approach towards equipment selection to support the knowledge and experience of the engineers entrusted with this important task. With the increasing complexity of the decision making in manufacturing system design, the search for the right structure depends upon the capability of the designers to compare different solutions using common approaches in an integrated decision making environment. The paper presents an integrated framework for selection of machining equipment which utilises both 'product' and 'process' based principles of manufacturing system formation. The decision making is defined as a sequence of steps for transforming component design information into processing requirements which are mapped into physical machines organized in processing systems. The methodology includes a work content analysis module for selection and optimization of tec...

When we researched the impact of automation on workers’ qualifications, horizontal cooperation, hierarchies, and work content in the 1970s and 80s we were alerted to the way in which workers spoke about their work, about the loss of old qualifications, but also about gaining new qualifications within an automated system, where they were less immersed in specific parts of the immediate manufacturing process but had more responsibility for, and needed more knowledge of, the process as a whole. We called this relationship towards work ‘producer’s pride’ and found that it could work in different ways: it could put workers in conflict with the profit orientation of capitalist production, where the quality of the product is often sacrificed to cost-effectiveness; on the other hand, management was also able to use the workers’ interest in their work as a means of identifying with the company and alienating them from the trade unions, who were not expecting that workers would develop an interest in the content of their new work.

In this paper an n-job one-machine scheduling problem is considered, in which the machine capacity is time-dependent and jobs are characterized by their work content. The objective is to minimize the sum of weighted completion times. A necessary optimality condition is presented and we discuss some special cases where this condition is also sufficient. We prove that the problem is NP-complete. A branch-and-bound algorithm is developed for the case when the capacity function is a step function. Computational results for 1000 test problems are presented.

This article attempts to interpret the links between changes in employment, productive organisations and work content using the notion of the service relationship. Although this notion has been built on an analysis of service industries, it is a useful means of studying the various changes (and their links) that are occurring in both the manufacturing and service industries. Important shifts in employment relationships (job insecurity, externalisation etc.) are characteristics of the deep changes taking place both in the nature of both productive organisations and work, and of the difficulty of fitting these changes into the social and legal frameworks which currently govern employment relationships.

Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) have the flexibility to meet the material handling requirements of asynchronous assembly lines. Furthermore, AGVs can select from among alternative paths in accordance with a prescribed lane selection rule, thereby facilitating the use of parallel server workstations. In this paper, motivated by our work in the automotive industry, several new lane selection rules are proposed. One of these, First Available Server/First Available Buffer/Balanced Work Content (FAS/FAB/BWC), is compared to two existing rules: Alternating Server, and First Available Server/First Available Buffer/Expected Completion Time (FAS/FAB/EC). Three performance measures — job throughput, workload balance among servers, and alteration of input job sequence — are employed. A SIMAN simulation model of a small, asynchronous parallel assembly line is used to study the impact on system performance of both the lane selection rule and the number of parallel servers. Interaction between these two factors is studied through ANOVA. A number of interesting findings are reported for results of the lane selection rules with respect to the three performance measures. Their interpretation is used to motivate further research.

We examined relations between the environmental dimensions underlying Holland's theory of vocational choice and skill requirements, context characteristics, and task frequency ratings for managerial jobs. The Holland environmental constructs were measured by the recently developed Position Classification Inventory (PCI). The task, skill requirement, and context variables were measured using traditional job analysis surveys. Ten judges provided estimates of the expected correlations between the job analysis variables and the Holland constructs. The profile of observed correlations was generally consistent with the judges’ expectations based on Holland's theory, providing support for both that framework and the construct validity of the PCI. The one Holland dimension for which the data were least consistent with predictions was “Realistic.” Results provide a detailed picture of the work content, skills, and context variables within managerial work that are likely to be associated with the RIASEC dimensions. Implications for management development are discussed.

The critical path technique has had a great impact on all sectors of the economy since it came into existence in the late 1950s. The assumption of unlimited resource availability associated with it has, however, cast a shadow over its suitability in resource-constrained situations. Over the years, several solution techniques, both analytical and heuristic, have appeared to deal with minimization problem. However, the difficulty of deciding the level of each type of resource to keep has become even more problematic. Solution to this aspect was readily found in the use of priority rules; work content being one of them. This study shows that resource levels based on work content have failed to produce the project duration as dictated by the critical path technique and that estimates derived thereof are unnecessarily high for some resources. This research is primarily aimed at providing a suitable heuristic for finding an optimum resource level which ought to be kept over the project execution period, and a s...

One aim of multimodal learning analytics is to analyze rich natural communication modalities to identify domain expertise and learning rapidly and reliably. In this research, written and multimodal representations are analyzed from the Math Data Corpus, which involves multimodal data (digital pen, speech, images) on collaborating students as they solve math problems. Findings reveal that in 96-97% of cases the correctness of a group's solution was predictable in advance based on students' written work content. In addition, a linear regression revealed that 65% of the variance in individual students' domain expertise rankings could be accounted for based on their written work content. A multimodal content analysis based on both written and spoken input correctly predicted the dominant domain expert in a group 100% of the time, exceeding unimodal prediction rates. Further analysis revealed a reversal between experts and non-experts in the percentage of time that a match versus mismatch was present between their oral and written answer contributions, with non-experts demonstrating higher mismatches. Implications are discussed for developing reliable multimodal learning analytics systems that incorporate digital pen input to automatically track consolidation of domain expertise.

In this article we discuss the results of a study within the project Language work as care work. The study focuses on the documentation practices of carers and assistant nurses within three elder care facilities in Sweden. The aim is to explore how representations of work and work content are remediated and recontextualised in some of the key written genres in the nursing home. In this process different discourses, and thus different versions of the practice of caring, are promoted and restrained. In order to show how the literacy practices and written text genres of elder care construe different meanings of caring we closely examine four key genres in the communicative chain and analyse them in terms of genre and discourse. The data discussed here was collected in an ethnographic study lasting eighteen months, using participant observation, qualitative interviews and collection of key texts as the main tools.

Les préoccupations en santé publique révèlent le peu Notre étude vise à comparer les effets sur la santé de trois formes d’organisation temporelle (horaires traditionnels, factions de 6 heures et de 12 heures) au sein d’établissements pénitentiaires français, et plus particulièrement auprès des personnels de surveillance. Des moyens d’investigation complémentaires (questionnaire, observations du travail, traitement statistique) ont été mis en œuvre pour tenter de faire la part entre le poids des horaires et le poids du travail sur l’état de santé des agents. Si les personnels en factions de 12 heures présentent des résultats meilleurs que les personnels en 6 heures, c’est en particulier dû à des avantages dans la vie extra-professionnelle, bien que des signes certains de fatigue ne permettent pas de conclure significativement en faveur de telles modalités. Au-delà de l’alternance des horaires, le contenu du travail pèse de manière importante sur la santé des agents. The aim of our study is to compare the effects of three different forms of time organization (traditional 9 to 5 schedule, 6-hour shifts, and 12-hour shifts) inside French prisons, and particularly on prison guard staff. Complementary means of investigation (questionnaire, work observations, statistical treatment) were used to attempt to evaluate the difference between the effect of working hours and of the actual work on the guards’ health. Staff who worked 12-hour shifts had more positive results than staff who worked 6-hour shifts. This was mainly due to the advantages in their private lives. At the same time, some signs of fatigue prevent us from conclusively favouring this type of working rhythm. Beyond the alternation of schedules, the actual work content also has an important impact on the workers’ health. Nuestro estudio pretende comparar los efectos sobre la salud de tres formas de organización temporal (horarios tradicionales, turnos de seis horas y de doce horas) en establecimientos penitenciarios franceses, y particularmente en el personal de guardia. Se emplearon métodos de investigación complementarios (cuestionarios, observaciones del trabajo, análisis estadístico) para intentar diferenciar qué peso tienen respectivamente los horarios y el trabajo propiamente dicho, sobre el estado de salud de los guardianes de cárceles. El personal que trabaja en turnos de 12 horas presenta mejores resultados que el personal que trabaja en turnos de 6 horas. Este resultado se debe particularmente a las ventajas de este horario en la vida extra-profesional. Sin embargo, los signos claros de fatiga nos impiden estar a favor de tal modalidad. Más allá de la alternancia de turnos, el contenido del trabajo pesa de manera significativa sobre la salud de los guardianes de cárceles.

It is predicted that institutions in Dutch intramural health care will be increasingly confronted with problems in personnel supply. Instead of making great efforts to keep the inflow of new personnel on the desired level, control of turnover is an alternative solution. In this paper, an explanatory model is constructed, based on previous theories and research findings. It is hypothesized that the more employees have positive attitudes concerning their work and work situation, the greater their satisfaction and commitment and hence the less their intention to leave and the lower actual turnover. This model was tested using a large scale employee questionnaire. The instrument turned out to be reliable (internal consistencies above .70). The questionnaire was administered in eight institutions in four health care sectors (n = 1456). Results indicate that attitudes about work content and personnel management are relevant in predicting intention to leave. All in all, 8 work-related aspects predicted ...

This article discusses the creation of an improvement committee (IC) to implement policies aimed at improving working conditions in a public health institution in the city of Sao Paulo. Suggestions were proposed for future implementations of this organizational mechanism, pursuant to the presentation of the process of its formation and the main results achieved. The findings led to the conclusion that good outcomes require autonomy and support from management, and the adoption of effective measures to improve and legitimize the improvement committee's existence. Another important issue is facilitating worker involvement and creating a locus for dialog among people with different visions within the organization. Thus, two approaches converge: a top-down approach in which policies are defined and improvement actions are actually implemented based on a general outlook of the production and work system, and a bottom-up approach specific to employees who are also engaged in improvement policies and in putting them into practice. It is also possible to point out problems and opportunities arising from actual work situations to the higher levels of management. This kind of approach fits with macroergonomics, because it integrates strategy, organization and work issues. It is possible to discuss the benefits of this approach for companies and provide conditions for workers to engage effectively in these processes. In conclusion, these proposals can be considered from an emancipatory perspective, given that different actors should be able to codetermine working conditions and work content, thus directly influencing their individual and collective experiences. The support and commitment of upper management are essential elements of success in maximizing the effectiveness of this organizational approach.

Understanding psychological teachers' current work situation is a prerequisite of improving the level of mental health education in primary and secondary school. Using questionnaires developed by Institute of Educational Psychology and School Counseling of Beijing Normal University, the study surveyed 103 psychological teachers and 16954 students from 72 primary and secondary schools of eight provinces/cities in China. It focused on four aspects referring to psychological teachers' work situation: the basic information of psychological teachers, their work content and time distribution, the professional training system, and the student feedback for mental health education. Based on the survey results, recommendations were put forward, including increasing the number of full-time psychological teachers, strengthening the in-service professional training, as well as expanding the influence of school mental health education. Index Terms - psychological teachers, primary and secondary school, current work situation, student feedback

Society’s attempts to respond to the glacier effects of the evolving fourth wave in the global economy have been disappointing (Maree, 2010a; Maree & Pollard, 2009). This wave is accompanied by changes in society, communities, and the workplace, and with regard to work content, technology, values, and perceptions of work. The world of work has changed markedly in recent years, necessitating another major paradigm shift in career counselling in terms of theory and practice. In the past, the practice of career counselling was based on a predominantly quantitative (test-and-tell or person-environment fit) approach, but a gradual shift has occurred over time, especial ly in the United States, England, and Australia. During the past few decades, qualitative approaches have come to the fore which have been based largely on the elicitation of life stories and personal narratives (Cochran, 1997). The consensus now is that a combined qualitative–quantitative approach—based on a sense of respect for clients, an emphasis on the meaning clients need to find in their lives, the difference they need to make in society, and their personal stories—can be used by practitioners to address previous shortcomings in the profession and to help clients design their lives.

In a time of global nursing shortages an alarming number of young registered nurses have expressed a willingness to leave the profession. In this qualitative case study we investigate in depth why young nurses leave nursing profession and reeducate themselves for a new career. The study is based on longitudinal interviews of three young registered nurses in Finland. These nurses were first interviewed between December 2006 and May 2007, when they were 29–32 years old and having an intention to leave the profession. The second interview took place four years later, from January 2011 to March 2011 when all of them had made the transition to a new career. Data were analyzed in two stages. In the first stage, comprehensive career story narratives were formed on the basis of the interviews. In the second stage, emerging themes in these stories were compared, contrasted, and interpreted in the context of the overall career histories. Nursing as a second career choice and demanding work content as well as poor practice environment and the inability to identify with the stereotypical images of nurses were main themes that emerged from these career stories. The results of this interpretative qualitative study reflect a shift toward insights into understanding professional turnover as a complex and long-lasting process.

The production of large-dimensioned, customer specific goods like machinery, investment goods, and special vehicles is a demanding challenge because of the integration of numerous customer specific features and the need for short delivery times. In addition, complex assembly operations require highly skilled workers to ensure the flexibility of production, which is needed to cope with varying workloads and assembly procedures. The presented paper introduces a concept for planning and controlling the production of those products, with a focus on personal allocation and assembly order development. After giving a brief problem statement, which highlights the major aspects to be considered, an overview of the literature, which copes with comparable problems, is given. The following sections introduce three means of control used in the concept and present a computational investigation of these under varying settings concerning hindering effects in assembly operations. The paper is closed by a discussion of the achieved results and a brief summary.

Strategic decisions in early production planning phases have a high impact on various production aspects. Decision making is often based on vague expert knowledge due to lack of a reliable knowledge base. Implications of this problem are especially observable in the field of assembly planning, which integrates results from various planning disciplines. The proposed paper introduces a new concept and the corresponding data model for application of Data Mining (DM) methods in the field of production assembly planning and product design. The concept presents assistance potentials for development of new products variants along the product emergence process (PEP).

While conventional search engines demonstrate the power of delivering information to ones’ fingertips, the complexity of enterprise information raises a number of challenges to enterprise search engines in the nature of unstructured contents, task-relevance, result presentation and multiple languages. We show how we tackle the challenges in aviation field through the development of an enterprise search engine for English-Chinese MRO (Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul) task cards, called TaskCardFinder. It enables technicians and planners to quickly find out bilingual task cards related to a specific service request coming from airlines. Several context-awareness features is demonstrated, including context-aware preference search and recommendation, recall search by context, keywords suggestion, navigational and analysis-oriented search, bilingual search support and dynamic result presentation. A user study is done at an international aviation MRO company. The system is demonstrated in the video, www.youtube.com/watch?v=vj7u_VfRFZw .

Managers’ psychosocial working conditions are important for managerial sustainability in the public sector. The job demands-resources (JD-R) model is a widely applied and well-recognized framework for measuring psychosocial working conditions. However, there is still a need for methodological contributions including more objective as well as qualitative ways to assess these conditions. In this study, job demands and job resources as well as the balance between them was qualitatively and externally assessed for first-line human service managers using a work content analysis method. Conditions and actions were focused upon with an external perspective. Special attention was paid to concrete examples and consequences of work characteristics with predefined criteria and cut-off points to guide the assessments. The results reveal an imbalance for human service managers between high levels of job demands and the lack of job resources available to meet these demands. Work overload, conflicting and unclear goals and tasks, emotional demands, restricted control, and lack of supervisory and organizational support generally characterized the managerial assignment. The analysis provided concrete explanations of the current work strain in this group of employees, thereby giving both short-term and long-term possibilities for improvement of managerial work and sustainability.

The goal of new organizational forms is to give the worker more work content, various cognitive demands and complete activities. In highly automated systems the realisation of these prententious demands is a problem. Especially in the steel processing industry a lot of such projects have been done. However, an analyse of these workplaces shows that there is a lack of work content. The paper shows the main facts of an existing form of group work in a train of rolling mills and participative models for its realization.

To control a project means to compare its original plan with its present status and to initiate corrective actions when needed. A major impediment to control is in estimating the status or progress of the project. Dividing a project into work packages is one way to simplify the planning and control process. During the project life cycle, many work packages are in progress at every single moment. Therefore, evaluating the portion of work completed in the in-progress work packages becomes a crucial issue. This article presents two approaches to evaluating in-progress work packages. The first is based on the concept of equivalent number of units (ENU). ENU is a physical measure of the completed amount of work content. This approach may be used when it is possible to identify a pattern of repetition within the project (such as in a batch project or a project with similar components). Projects like these contain repetitive elements. Therefore, a learning curve model is introduced as a tool for establis...

Materials and methods: Non-experimental, cross-sectional quantitative study of 188 employees in different business sectors, State of Hidalgo, Mexico. Instrument: a battery for the study of psychosocial work conditions “CTCPS-MAC”. A bivariate and multivariable logistic regression analysis was made with IBM SPSS Statistics 21 of psychological wear and psychosocial factors. Results: Work Context (p=0.000 Exp (B) = 5.565) infers a greater risk of cognitive-emotional psychological wear. Behavioral level: individual factors (p=0.000 Exp (B) = 8.531) and work context (p=0.000 Exp (B) = 4.759). Physiological level: work content (p=0.000 Exp (B) = 8.765) Conclusions: Probability of psychological wear at the behavioral level: 94.87% in employees with a negative perception of their personal traits and the work/family interrelation. Physiological level: 97.70% for employees in the morning or morning/afternoon shift, good perception of individual factors regarding their personal traits and psychological risk buffers and a bad perception of company characteristics, equipment and physical agents.

Self organization in ecosystems has been postulated to be directed by a number of seemingly unrelated goal functions or extremal principles. These include exergy , the useful work content of energy, which measures distance from thermodynamic ground; emergy , which increases in proportion to the number of steps energy has taken away from its point of input to a system; power , which is work per unit time, and can be measured as the total energy flow in an ecosystem; ascendency , which combines a mutual information measure of the distribution of flows in a system network with the total flow; and indirect effects , which concern relationships at a distance in energy networks. S.E. Jorgensen recently obtained high correlations between exergy, emergy, ascendency, and the ratio of indirect to direct effects, in a set of ecosystem models. These results suggest that these optimality criteria may be formally related. This paper shows, for systems at macroscopic steady states, that they are. Exergy, emergy, power, ascendency, and indirect effects all have common origins in the path structure and associated microscopic dynamics of energy and matter flows and storages in ecosystem networks. Thus, these organizational measures, originally derived from different perspectives on ecosystems, are in fact related through a common basis.

In aviation, Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul (MRO) refers to the actions of fixing an air craft when it becomes out of order, or performing routine actions to keep the air craft in working order. MRO services are carried out strictly under the instruction of corresponding MRO task cards, which detail all the information including work content, procedure, equipment, etc. needed for MRO technicians to complete a MRO service. A task card is usually prepared in a word document. It may contain over a hundred pages, and possibly in multi-languages for international MRO service providers. While English task cards are assumed to be available along with air planes, their multilanguage translation remains a tedious and time-consuming problem. In this paper, we demonstrate an English-Chinese bilingual MRO task card generator system called TaskCardGeneratore2c. Given the work content input by the user, TaskCardGeneratore2c examines the existence of similar bilingual MRO task cards in the local repository, and returns the one to the user directly if it exists, or otherwise, does the English-to-Chinese translation over the corresponding monolingual English task card. The translated bilingual task card will be sent back to the user for final proof. With TaskCardGeneratore2c, human's repetitive time-consuming efforts on bilingual task cards preparation can be greatly reduced, improving the working efficiency and quality of MRO services. A field study was conducted at an international MRO service company to further evaluate TaskCardGenerator.

The impact of Preventive Maintenance (PM) activity on the cycle time of a specific toolset or even the entire fab can be detrimental. Hence, there is strong incentive to determining the best way to carry out the required PM work content so as to optimize cycle time. In this paper, a model is proposed that optimizes the execution of PM's for a pre-determined PM work content, with the consideration of attached setups.

Based on the ERP system implementation process, the heavy data preparation work load, many participators in the personnel, complex work content, difficulty in control and other characteristics, this article proposed the principles, requests and specification of the setting up material code system, introducing the Xianyang petroleum steel pipe steel cable Limited liability company's CIMS project as the case to exemplify.

After-retirement work profiles: how do employees want to continue working after retirement? After-retirement work profiles: how do employees want to continue working after retirement? This paper investigates employees’ preferences for working after their retirement age and the (personal and organizational) factors that are related to those preferences. The study was conducted among 474 employees of three elderly care organizations. The results demonstrated that there are four after retirement work-profiles, namely: a work-profile in which the employee prefers to (1) work less; (2) keep the existing work-profile more or less the same, (3) modify the content of their work, (4) change the work context. Further analyses demonstrated that with increasing age, preferences to change the content of the work or the context of the work decrease. Contrarily, employees with a higher education have the preference for a work-profile with modified work content and have higher preference to work in another work context after their retirement. Further, the results displayed that employees who experience an accommodative organizational climate want to modify their job tasks and prefer to work somewhere else. Contrastingly, employees that experience a development organizational climate and psychological contract fulfillment want to modify their work involvement as little as possible.

To meet the information demand of community health management, health management meaning and its requirement is analyzed, main work content of community health management is provided, medical information education platform (MIEP) is set up by network technology and medical information education method to share disease information for community citizen, disease cure record, physical examination result and health condition record are covered in this information platform, application of community chronic disease management is discussed, several advantages of MIEP application in community health management are summarized.

In addition to Backlog Control there are other methods for controlling capacity. These methods can be used as an alternative to Backlog Control but also can almost always be implemented as a supplement to the Backlog Control.

Among all of the manufacturing control methods there are, probably only a few have triggered as much scholarly debate as the Load Oriented Order Release (LOOR). Since it was introduced by Bechte in his dissertation at the Leibniz Universitat Hannover’s Institute of Production Systems and Logistics in 1980 [Bert-81* (reprint)], the discussion surrounding this method has not stopped. LOOR is the subject of numerous publications both in German language journals as well as international ones. In German speaking countries it is also taught at many universities and polytechnics. Due to the scholarly debate about supposed and actual strengths and weaknesses (see for example [Knol-91*]) it can be easily forgotten that LOOR has proven itself in industrial applications [Wien-91].

According to a well-known and perhaps already worn out saying from publications on management, one can only control what one can measure. This prerequisite holds true for the targeted control of logistic objectives, however, it alone is not enough. Due to the numerous interactions and conflicts between the logistic objectives and factors which influence them, it is also necessary to understand the intricacies of the system in order to ensure that targets are satisfactorily attained.

Decentralized WIP Oriented Manufacturing Control (DEWIP) is based on decentralized WIP control loops between the production’s workstations. It thus allows the production’s workforce being integrated in the responsibility of attaining logistic targets. The method was developed by Lodding at the Leibniz University of Hanover’s Institute of Production Systems and Logistics in a project sponsored by the German Research Foundation [Lodd-01, Wien-01].

American academics seem no more likely now than they were 15 years ago to bring international perspectives into their teaching and research or to collaborate with international colleagues in research and publication. In both 1992 and 2007, American professors emerged near the bottom of the distribution of professors from 19 nations in both of these areas—in 1992 sharing the bottom with Russia and Brazil and in 2007 sharing the bottom with China, Brazil, and Japan. Beyond their continued overall insularity, our analyses suggest that internationalization is more likely a multidimensional than a unidimensional construct. Integrating an international perspective in one’s teaching seems to be largely independent of doing so in one’s research. Moreover, the attitudinal integration of an international perspective seems independent of its behavioral expression, that is, faculty may collaborate with foreign colleagues in research and publication, but may not report that they integrate international perspectives into their teaching and/or research.

Estimating the man-hours required to construct a ship's block is not a straightforward process; often, it can be highly speculative. Blocks, by their very nature, differ from each other in many aspects of construction and design. The different parts that compose a block usually require different methods of construction and will have different work content. Using work measurement methods for all aspects of a block's construction, together with data gathered for several projects, a probabilistic model for the construction man-hours can be built. This model may be used to give better estimates of the man-hour content of a block and, hence, a project. Such information is very valuable for a good look-ahead planning and scheduling.

Orientation: Retaining employees, especially Generation Xers, is imperative to ensure the high performance of organisations. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore the factors that affect the retention of Generation X public servants. Motivation for the study: Given their unique characteristics, it is a challenge to retain Generation X employees. This problem may be worse in the public sector than in the private sector, as there are fewer financial rewards in the public service than in the private sector. Research design: The interpretivist paradigm is appropriate for this study. It used a qualitative, empirical approach. The researchers obtained the data through purposive sampling and interviews. Main findings: The study showed that the factors affecting the retention of Generation X public servants include work content, utilisation of skills, career advancement, work–life balance, compensation, security needs, leadership and drive. Practical/managerial implications: Employers, like the civil service, can be proactive in retaining Generation X employees because of the factors that affect their retention. Managers can prevent further pressure on service delivery that the skills shortage has caused if they use the skills the employees already have. Contribution: The article fills a gap, as there has been little research on staff retention. This is particularly true of Generation X employees in South Africa. This article adds information that will improve retention strategies for Generation X employees, particularly in the public service.

summary Purpose: The purposes of this study are to examine differences in job satisfaction among professional groups including nurses, allied hospital professionals, social workers, and elementary school teachers, and to identify specific characteristics of job satisfaction of nurses. Methods: The study design was a cross-sectional exploratory study using secondary data analysis with the 2009 Graduates Occupational Mobility Survey. The sample was female new graduates. The differences in job satisfaction among professional groups were analyzed using logistic regression (satisfied vs. not satisfied). Results: Overall, 41.5% of nurses, 50.1% of allied hospital professionals, 58.2% of social workers, and 89% of elementary school teachers were satisfied with their job. Nurses were significantly less satisfied than the other professionals in 5 of the 11 job characteristics and had the lowest odds ratio (OR) when compared with elementary school teachers: work content (OR ¼ 0.197, 95% CI [0.128, 0.304]), physical work environment (OR ¼ 0.353, 95% CI [0.236, 0.529]), working hours (OR ¼ 0.054, 95% CI [0.033, 0.088]), personal growth (OR ¼ 0.242, 95% CI [0.160, 0.366]), and autonomy (OR ¼ 0.188, 95% CI [0.123, 0.288]). Work content, physical work environment, interpersonal relationship, advancement system, and autonomy were significantly associated with the overall job satisfaction of nurses. Conclusion: Relatively dissatisfying job characteristics in nursing work environment that were significant predictors for nurses’ job satisfaction should be improved. Newly graduated nurses are at risk for job dissatisfaction. This can result in high turnover rates and can exacerbate the nursing shortage. Efforts to improve the work environment are needed.

Industrial work design is defined as a specification of work content, method and relationships to satisfy the requirement of the worker and the system. Industrial work design must be developed as an integrated whole, taking into consideration the interdependencies among skills, organization and technology. On the other hand, the concept of job satisfaction is typically defined as an individual’s attitude about work roles and the relationship to worker motivation. There can be no job satisfaction where there is no motivation. The most important evidence that indicates the worsening conditions of an organization is the low rate of job satisfaction. Thus job satisfaction is the key to establishing a healthy organizational environment in an organization. Nonetheless, factors related to job satisfaction are relevant in the prevention of employee frustration and low job satisfaction because employees will work harder and perform better if they are satisfied with their jobs. Many factors affect job satisfaction according to Bowen et al, 1994, DeSantis and Durst, 1996 and Gaesser and Whitbourne, 1985. Although numerous studies on the effect of job satisfaction in industries exist, findings were often specific to the particular investigation, and to date mainly consider individual components of the physical environment (Clegg et al, 1997). Nadin et al, 2001 stated that many researchers have suggested a number of workplace design strategies to improve the quality of the workplace. In contrast, Oldham, 1996 stated that little attention is given to the actual process of workplace design. Clegg, 1995 suggested that methods should be developed to facilitate this process; and to do so, a more thorough understanding is needed about how various factors affect industrial job satisfaction. Workplace design research can make progress by applying what is already known and by asking a more comprehensive set of research questions (Holman et al, 2002). An approach to the design of workplaces that is human centered is needed. This approach should adequately incorporate factors that contribute to the effectiveness of workplace design.

Empirical research in vocational education and training 3 (2011) 1, S. 55-70, This paper contains an overview of conceptual and measurement issues related to the vertical differentiation of work tasks. The main conclusions – based on a synthetic literature review and measurement examples from the Swedish Level of Living Survey (LNU) and the European Social Survey (ESS) – are as follows. First, job complexity is the main dimension of the vertical variation in work content. A large number of empirical studies in several disciplines converge on this conclusion. Productivity appears to be the driving mechanism of the tight link between job complexity and rewards. Second, time-based measures of job complexity (skill requirements) work well. By now there are well-established indicators of educational requirements and initial on-the-job learning, with good measurement properties. However, more work is needed on indicators of continuing on-the-job learning (both formal and informal). Finally, horizontal – as opposed to vertical – variation in work content is well captured by the distinction between working with people, data and things (PDT). Broad task indicators of PDT are now included in the LNU and ESS surveys. Relations between vertical (job complexity) and horizontal (task variation within complexity levels) dimensions of work content are important issues to be examined in future research based on these and other data. (DIPF/Orig.)

The current developments in the knowledge economic accelerate new paths for innovations in businesses. Their speed requires an increasing knowledge intensity of work content and changing work forms. These work processes increasingly incorporate a type of learning which is frequently informal, uncontrolled and without professional (pedagogical) supervision. New stakeholder groups, far removed from the traditional professions of human resource development, increasingly gain influence and shape these processes. Two operational case studies refer to these new developments and are presented in their role and significance for job learning. In the article an analysis of the amalgamation process of working and learning and the tasks and roles of the stakeholder groups acting for this is advocated. The objective is the competence development of selected stakeholder groups in these work processes and thereby the increase of operational innovative capability.

Experts estimate that 65% of all manufacturing firms employ fifty or less employees, and many of these small manufacturing firms operate as job shop environments. This paper will focus on a methodology for the development of an expert systems approach to job shop scheduling. Specifically, the concept of prototyping and life cycle development will be discussed. Prototyping combines the steps of knowledge acquisition, knowledge representation, knowledge implementation, and verification and validation into a repetitive cycle, rather than having the steps in a sequential fashion. By using a prototyping cycle, a small expert system is developed first and then gradually enlarged as exception cases are identified, instead of attempting to complete each step entirely before continuing with the next.

Line balancing and manpower assign ment is a particularly complicated task in a mixed model assembly line and especially in the final assembly tracks of the automobile industry because of factors peculiar to such tracks. The major problem is the very large difference in work content between the different derivatives flowing through the track. This paper describes a computer simulation system developed to evaluate a man assignment against the criteria of maximising operator utilisation, cateringfor flexibility in derivative mix/sequence and keeping operator drift to permitted levels. A discussion on development of computerised line balancing techniques for the industry is also included.

Developing advanced manufacturing systems involves a number of specialists. Due to the numerous parts of the system, both software and hardware, the system is, however, likely to deviate considerably from ideal behaviour with frequent stops. Handling unexpected events is the key function in machine tool operation. Due to the complexity of the task, it is a job for the human operator given proper training. The theory of Maslow's human needs formed the basis for a Swedish study on the job content of flexible manufacturing systems, FMS. The supervisory control model, designed by Sheridan of MIT, used for automated production with the five operator roles planning, programming, monitoring, intervening and learning will be dealt with in the paper. The paper concludes thai it is essential for the operator to be able to use his creativity, which he can do in tasks like planning, programming and disturbance handling

This paper describes a case assignment (calendaring) algorithm for a multi-judge appellate court system. In the algorithm, cases of unequal work content are selected for assignment to one of m panels (or clusters) from a set of N available cases. Each panel of cases is heard by a team of three judges. Each appellate case has an estimated work load and a priority ranking based on the type of appeal and filing date with the court. The algorithm balances both the total work load and the number of cases assigned to each panel while insuring that the highest priority cases are assigned to those available. The assignment problem is normally capacity constrained in that not all of the N cases can be assigned to one of the m panels on the monthly calendar. The algorithm is based on a neighborhood search and bounding principle that continually improves upon an initial feasible solution. Empirical results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the algorithm.

The stress-oriented job analysis instrument ISTA was applied to a sample of 232 office jobs to analyse the impact of new technologies on the stressor-strain relationship. Scales measuring work content (complexity of work, variety), stressors (time pressure, organizational problems, interruptions, concentration necessities, social stressors), and resources (control at work, control over time) were developed and demonstrated desirable scale characteristics. The results showed positive correlations between stressors and psychological dysfunctioning (psychosomatic complaints, irritation). Computer work was associated with a decrease of work stressors, but also with decreased job content. Work places using different software systems (word processing, specialist, spreadsheet, and graphic programs) manifested different characteristics regarding work content, stressors, and resources. For example, when working with word processors, most stressors occurred at a medium daily computer work time. This indica...

To the Editor, Baxter et al. provide a helpful review on the impact of work-related challenges that may be associated with elderly anesthesiologists. The authors also offer proposed assessments and possible solutions to ensure patient care is not compromised. This paper reflects broader concerns over a lack of preparedness among professional bodies associated with a range of liberal professions where their members may continue practice into later life without support from formal occupational health services. This is particularly important for medical specialities where there is a heavy reliance on psychomotor skills and rapid responses to emergent situations and where senior specialists are frequently required to attend out of hours to deal with complex clinical cases. For this reason, it is essential that professional and regulatory bodies draw on emerging developments in research on older workers from the field of occupational health. The concept of ‘‘promotion of work ability’’ pioneered by Ilmarinen is particularly noteworthy. The basic premise is a lifespan approach with attention to work content, the work environment, as well as the individual. In addition to the input from regulatory bodies – informed by the sciences of gerontology and occupational health – we also recommend optimization of the medical care of older physicians by due consultation with specialists in geriatric medicine or old age psychiatry so that any medical conditions are treated appropriately. Where deficits are identified, we suggest use of occupational health services to facilitate assistance for older professionals who wish to continue working into later life. Such assistance may involve restrictions on their work practice so far as is possible without compromising patient care. Finally, the form and content of continuous medical education needs to account for changing practice, habits, and educational needs of all physicians as they age.

Chapter 5 follows the principle that you follow different ways than you did in the past. Different approaches find different solutions for productivity. How much improvement do you need as the target? Theoretical classification of productivity methodology based on industrial engineering is required. With an effective engineeering approach, it is possible to guarantee the achievement of a reasonable level of results. To reach a higher level of productivity improvement, there are two keys to success. One is to separate productivity contents into M, P, and U, which depend on industrial engineering techniques. Another is to adopt new approaches to each dimension of productivity. M, P, and U encompass total productivity improvement.