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The VOW/QFT: Psychosocial risk factors, pleasure at work and work abilities among older workers

par Hellemans, Catherine
Référence (May 25 – 28 May 2011: Maastricht), Abstracts Book of the 15th Conference of the European Association of Work and Organizational Psychology, page (38)
Publication Publié, 2011

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Résumé :

Maintaining older workers in the labour raises many questions: which are the work abilities of the older workers? Did these abilities evolve favorably these last years? What is the older workers health condition? What are their job constraints ? Tuomi and its colleagues developed the Work Ability Index (WAI), a very simple questionnaire to measure the work abilities of oldest (Tuomi, Ilmarinen, Jahkola, Katajarinne and Tulkki, 1994). The WAI validity and utility were shown in great international epidemiologic research (Radkiewich and Widerszal-Bazyl, 2005; de Zwart and Frings-Dresen, 2002). However, to understand and to make prevention, the tool is rather fragmented: it does not make it possible to analyze the contents of work requirements, nor the detail of worker mental resources; it does not tackle the question of psychosocial workload. In Belgium, Work Humanization Management of the Federal Public Service Employment, Labour and Social Dialogue started a series of studies in order to look further into the concept and to create a more complete questionnaire, in French and in Dutch: the VOW/QFT (Vragenlijst Over Werkbaarheid / Questionnaire sur les Facultés de Travail). The VOW/QFT analyzes how the worker perceives and lives balance between its own characteristics (perceived health condition, personal resources, effectiveness, intention to remain, knowledge and capacities) and the requirements he is confronted (job requirements, psychosocial workload, physical workload, safety) (Hellemans, Piette and Himpens, 2010). The VOW/QFT was completed by 45-plus workers (n = 1767) during the medical examinations by the occupational medicine. Churchill paradigm (Churchill, 1979; Roussel, 2005) was used to test the validity of the two VOW/QFT principal modules: psychosocial aspects and work abilities. The exploratory (N = 598) and confirmatory (N = 631) phases have highlighted a stable factorial structure and good internal consistencies (.74 to .90). Regression analysis (N = 538) proposed that psychosocial aspects, and especially, pleasure at work, are better predictors of the work abilities than the perceived health condition.