Psychological and physiological stress reactions of male and female assembly workers: a comparison between two different forms of work organization
✍ Scribed by Bo Melin; Ulf Lundberg; Jens Söderlund; Marianne Granqvist
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1999
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 209 KB
- Volume
- 20
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0894-3796
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Psychological and physiological stress responses of 36 male and 29 female assembly workers were examined during and after work at a car engine factory. Two dierent ways of organizing assembly work were compared, (1) a more traditional assembly line with ®xed work stations organized as a chain and involving short repetitive work cycles and, (2) a new and more ¯exible work organization with small autonomous groups having greater opportunities to in¯uence the pace and content of their work. Each worker was examined during and after a normal day at work on 2 consecutive days and, in order to obtain endocrine baseline data, during a corresponding work-free period at home. As expected, both female and male workers in the ¯exible organization reported signi®cantly more variation, independence and abilities to learn new skills at work. Workers in both forms of work organization showed a signi®cant increase in urinary epinephrine and norepinephrine during work compared to the work-free day at home. Males had signi®cantly higher epinephrine and systolic blood pressure levels than females. Successive self-reports of tiredness increased signi®cantly more at the assembly line compared to the ¯exible work organization. In keeping with this, systolic blood pressure, heart rate and epinephrine increased signi®cantly during the work shift at the assembly line but not during work in the ¯exible organization. Catecholamine levels revealed that the subjects were able to unwind more rapidly after work in the ¯exible organization. This pattern was particularly pronounced for the female workers. In summary, the various stress indicators support the notion that the ¯exible work organization induces less stress than the assembly line and that the female workers were able to bene®t most from this new form of work organization.