Attitudinal Differences Among Work Shifts: What do They Reflect?

Abstract

The issue of how attitudinal differences among work shifts should be interpreted is important from both pragmatic and research points of view. Managers would find it helpful to know whether negative staff attitudes on one shift—perhaps an 11 P.M. to 7 A.M. shift—are inevitable, or due to potentially changeable characteristics of a particular department or organization. Much previous research supports the idea that problematic attitudes are inevitably characteristic of night shifts. reviewed a considerable body of research concerning shift work that emphasizes difficulties associated with the life style of people whose work hours deviate from the 9 to 5 norm. Researchers have reported physiological and behavioral difficulties, as well as work and non-work attitudinal difficulties, to be associated with both rotating shifts and stable work hours other than 9-5 (; ). These difficulties have been variously attributed to disruptions in physical processes like circadian rhythms, or to isolation from society-at-large, oriented as it is to daylight work and business hours (). To find explanations of attitudinal differences among workers on various hospital shifts, the present study tries to ascertain the relative importance of (1) the effects of overall characteristics of time of day, and (2) the effects of particular social structures and processes associated with specific combinations of department and shift. Data comes from a sample of hospital emergency units. The issue of differences among shifts raises a broad research issue: what unit of analysis should be used to study organizations that operate 24 hours a day? Simultaneous consideration of variables at many levels of analysis makes for important problems in generalizing results, and inferring their conceptual meaning, as well as in determining the most appropriate statistical procedures for hypothesis testing (Dansereau, Alutto,…