Opening the Black Box: Examining the Nomological Network of Work Ability and Its Role in Organizational Research

Details

• Personal Author:
  Bodner T ; Brady GM ; Cadiz DM ; Caughlin DE ; Rineer JR ; Truxillo DM
• Description:
  The aging of the industrialized workforce has spurred research on how to support people working later in life. Within this context, the concept of work ability, or an employee's ability to continue working in their job, has been introduced as an explanatory mechanism for understanding employee disability, wellbeing, attitudes, and behavior. However, the work ability concept has evolved across disparate literatures with multiple, content-diverse measures and often with little consideration of theory or examination of its nomological network. Using the job demands-resources model as a framework, we present a meta-analytic summary (k = 247; N = 312,987) of work ability's correlates and potential moderators of these relationships. Taken together, we found consistent negative relationships between job demands and work ability, and consistent positive relationships between job and personal resources and work ability. Work ability was also associated with important job outcomes including job attitudes and behaviors such as absenteeism and retirement. Measures of work ability that include both perceived and objective components generally showed stronger relationships than did exclusively perceptual measures, and occupation type was a significant moderator of certain relations between work ability and its correlates. We supplemented this meta-analysis with a primary data collection to examine differences between perceived work ability and the conceptually similar variables of self-efficacy and perceived fit, demonstrating that perceived work ability can explain incremental variance in job- and health-related variables. Our discussion focuses on the value of the work ability construct for both research and practice and future directions for work ability research. [Description provided by NIOSH]
• Subjects:
  Absenteeism Aging Behavior Occupational Health Safety
• Keywords:
  Aging Workforce Attitude Author Keywords: Aging Workforce Job Analysis Job Demands Job Resources Mental Processes Models Occupations Psychological Factors Retirement Total Worker Health TWH Work Ability Work Analysis Work Capability Worker Health Workers Work Organization

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• ISSN:
  0021-9010
• Document Type:
  Text
• Funding:
  Grant
• Genre:
  Journal Article
• Place as Subject:
  North Carolina ; Oregon ; OSHA Region 10 ; OSHA Region 4
• CIO:
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH)
• Topic:
  Workplace Safety & Health
• Location:
  North America
• Volume:
  105
• Issue:
  6
• NIOSHTIC Number:
  nn:20057596
• Citation:
  J Appl Psychol 2020 Jun; 105(6):637-670
• Contact Point Address:
  Grant M. Brady, Department of Psychology and School of Business, Portland State University, 615 South West Harrison Street, Portland, OR 97201
• Email:
  brady5@pdx.edu
• Federal Fiscal Year:
  2020
• NORA Priority Area:
  Transportation, Warehousing and Utilities ; Services
• Performing Organization:
  Portland State University
• Peer Reviewed:
  True
• Start Date:
  20050701
• Source Full Name:
  Journal of Applied Psychology
• End Date:
  20250630
• Collection(s):
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha-512:1fb8b7fe6033e5699537ee6a303f25acbe876f3b7b80f8ca43a80f2da3857db6f731757df3488804aaf2fac5017224a92acb94503091937fbb6ba370bad35df0
• Download URL:
  https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/214878/cdc_214878_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 519.47 KB ]