Interstate separation takes toll on families

Published in Geraldton Guardian on 4 September 2020

“Will you be home for Father’s Day?” — A question often on the lips of FIFO partners in the lead-up to the big occasion. Working in the mining industry can mean missing out on big days, especially in the age of COVID-19. Curtin University Researcher Sharon Parker says the extra time away from home caused by quarantine and border closures has been difficult for FIFO families

If Petra Avery does not move to Western Australia, her young children will only get three weeks with their dad this year.

Her son Oliver was six months old when her husband Bruce Avery left their home in Toowoomba, Queensland, and travelled to a mine site in Western Australia for work.

“When he came back, the baby had no idea who he was,” she said.

Although Mr Avery was able to come home for a short period, he had to leave three weeks later, and she said it was unlikely he could return for another six months.

Mrs Avery said this arrangement had been hard for her young family, and she was afraid the time away had damaged her children’s relationship with their father.

“All the kids at their school are making Father’s Day gifts, and my kids won’t have that in the same way. Bruce just buries himself in his work,” she said.

Their daughter Harper, 3, used to have a very close relationship with Mr Avery when he lived in Queensland. “He doesn’t get the boundaries I have put in place with her while he was away,” she said. “Their personalities are clashing.” The family have considered moving to Perth to be closer together, but the decision has been difficult for Mrs Avery, as she is hesitant to leave her entire support network with two young children. The Averys are not been the only ones struggling.

Curtin University’s Sharon Parker has researched the impact of COVID-19 border closures on fly-in, fly-out workers’ mental health. “Preliminary analyses show that more than 40 per cent of workers are experiencing high or very high psychological distress,” she said.

“Events like Father’s Day are very difficult for FIFO fathers who are away, especially for those interstate workers who might be uncertain about when they will get home.”

She has called for employers to do more for their workers during this challenging time.

“We need companies to do the right thing by caring for their employees and do whatever they can to support them at this time,” she said. “The way companies treat people during times of crisis is a great indicator of the real values of a company.”

Proactive career planning mitigates job insecurity

Published on HR Daily

Workers who proactively engage in career planning and skill development can reduce the stress and career dissatisfaction that comes with job insecurity, new research shows.

It is becoming increasingly common for workers to experience uncertainty about their current and future jobs, with the number of temporary contracts increasing and more and more jobs being replaced by machines, the Curtin University and University of Amsterdam researchers say.

These perceptions can lead to more stress, poorer health and poorer career prospects, and policymakers have noted insecurity as one of the most rapidly accelerating psychosocial hazards in the workplace.

In their study of 432 current and former workers of a European staffing organisation, the researchers found engaging in proactive career behaviour, including career planning, skill development, career consultation and networking, can mitigate the lack of control that arises from insecure work situations.

They say, however, that different types of insecure work might call for different proactive coping efforts. For example, the above career behaviour didn't mitigate feelings of insecurity for those experiencing chronic insecure work – such as a high probability of a type of job being digitalised – as opposed to acute insecure work – such as a temporary contract expiring.

"Chronic insecure work situations might require longer-term strategies executed over considerable periods of time (e.g., transitioning to a new occupation; obtaining a new educational degree), whereas acute insecure work situations might require more immediate proactive behaviour."

In the eye of the beholder: How proactive coping alters perceptions of insecurity, Koen, J. and Parker, S. K., June 2020

COVID-19 insecurity is "less threatening"

Curtin University professor Sharon Parker tells HR Daily the feelings of job insecurity arising from automation and digitisation are distinct to those caused by pandemic-related job losses and uncertainty.

"The fact that many people are unemployed for reasons that are out of their control, probably makes it feel a bit less threatening," she says.

"There are more people unemployed, and people understand that it's not your fault... maybe right now, it's not as challenging as it can be for people during non-COVID times, where perhaps they were in the minority."

During this period of greater unemployment, Parker still encourages individuals to be proactive in improving their career opportunities. In doing so, unemployed members of the labour force will not only be better prepared to re-enter the workforce, but remaining productive will ease the stress of job insecurity, she says.

"Even though it might not necessarily lead to a job, it's going to help you into the future if you are thinking about these things and building the network, getting the skills that you might need," she says.

It's not going to do employees any harm, she notes. "It's probably going to help, and it's going to help [them] feel better as well."

Sharon Parker

Jessie Koen

CTWD Researchers win 2019 JOB Best Paper Award

The Organisational Behaviour Division of the Academy of Management has announced the winner of the Best Paper for 2019. Congratulations Fangfang and Sharon for publishing the Best Paper of 2019 in the field of Organisational Behaviour!

The Best Paper of 2019 was selected by a Committee (chaired by Jin Nam Choi) who read each of the papers published in 2019, and then identified the top papers through a rating and ranking process. A special thank you to Jin Nam and the Committee members for their service: Frederik Anseel, Frank Belschak, William Bommer, Jeewon Cho, Kevin Cruz, Travis Grosser, Thomas Ng, Christian Vandenberghe, Le (Betty) Zhou.

The second runner up paper was also authored by Sharon with colleagues from UWA, Francesco Cangiano (now at Bond University) and Gillian Yeo.

The achievements of Fangfang and Sharon reflect their dedication and also the contribution of everyone at CTWD in creating a culture that supports meaningful and impactful research.

Best Paper of 2019

Reorienting job crafting research: A hierarchical structure of job crafting concepts and integrative review

Fangfang Zhang & Sharon K. Parker

Summary

Two dominant perspectives of job crafting—the original theory from Wrzesniewski and Dutton (2001) and the job demands resources perspective from Tims, Bakker, and Derks (2014) —remain separate in research. To synthesize these perspectives, we propose a three‐level hierarchical structure of job crafting, and we identify the aggregate/superordinate nature of each major job crafting construct. The first level of the structure is job crafting orientation, or approach versus avoidance crafting, which we argue is an essential yet often neglected distinction in the literature. We address the debate surrounding cognitive crafting and identify crafting form (behavioral versus cognitive crafting) as the next hierarchical level of constructs. Finally, we concur that job resources and job demands, or crafting content, capture different ways that individuals craft their jobs. Using this integrated hierarchical structure, we were able to review antecedents and outcomes from both perspectives. We show, for example, that approach crafting in its behavioral form is very similar to other proactive behaviors in the way it functions, suggesting a need for closer synthesis with the broader proactive literature, whereas avoidance crafting appears to be less proactive and often dysfunctional. On the basis of our review, we develop a road map for future research.