Structure Please; Continuous Improvement and Employee Consequences in a Dynamic Task Environment
1
Department of Industrial Economics and Technology Management, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Alfred Getz vei 3, Gløshaugen, 7491 Trondheim, Norway
2
Centre for Sociological Research, KU Leuven, Parkstraat 45, 3000 Leuven, Belgium
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Sustainability 2019, 11(20), 5564; https://doi.org/10.3390/su11205564
Received: 8 August 2019 / Revised: 24 September 2019 / Accepted: 27 September 2019 / Published: 10 October 2019
(This article belongs to the Section Economic and Business Aspects of Sustainability)
Whilst continuous improvement (CI) programs have had an enduring appeal for several decades, their sustainability has been a concern for almost as long. Sustaining a CI program requires permanent support of all its stakeholders, particularly of the most important ones—employees. Some authors argue that continuous improvement programs are beneficial for employee wellbeing, while others contest this. We contribute to the small empirical basis for such claims by presenting results from research among care workers in Flemish nursing homes. Questionnaires from 553 care workers in a nursing home applying continuous improvement and in a reference group of nine comparable homes were analyzed to study differences in job demands, job resources, burnout risk, and work engagement. In addition, we have drawn on interviews, site visits, and other qualitative data to assess the extent to which the differences found may be attributed to the CI program used. Overall, the care workers in the nursing home with the CI program evaluated their jobs as better than their colleagues in the reference group. These differences are at least partly caused by the continuous improvement program. We argue that the main effect is that over time, daily work processes become more structured. The work pressure decreases as work becomes less hectic.
View Full-Text
Keywords:
continuous improvement; sustainability; job demands; job resources; work pressure; burnout; work engagement; lean; nursing home; task environment
▼
Show Figures
Figure 1
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
MDPI and ACS Style
Benders, J.; Bal, M.; Vermeerbergen, L. Structure Please; Continuous Improvement and Employee Consequences in a Dynamic Task Environment. Sustainability 2019, 11, 5564. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11205564
AMA Style
Benders J, Bal M, Vermeerbergen L. Structure Please; Continuous Improvement and Employee Consequences in a Dynamic Task Environment. Sustainability. 2019; 11(20):5564. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11205564
Chicago/Turabian StyleBenders, Jos, Michiel Bal, and Lander Vermeerbergen. 2019. "Structure Please; Continuous Improvement and Employee Consequences in a Dynamic Task Environment" Sustainability 11, no. 20: 5564. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11205564
Find Other Styles
Note that from the first issue of 2016, MDPI journals use article numbers instead of page numbers. See further details here.
