Abstract
A perennial challenge in organisational studies is a plethora of constructs that do not always have agreed definitions and clear dimensions, often overlap and, subsequently, come with difficulties in measurement, predictive ability and evidence for what works best when planning interventions. An example is the well-known concept of employee engagement: years after it was first coined (Kahn, 1990) and reviewed under a UK government commission (MacLeod and Clarke, 2009), the clarity of the term is still not achieved (Gifford and Young, 2021). The MacLeod Review famously found over 50 definitions of engagement!
In the above vein, this study aimed to explore the constructs of work alienation, job crafting and job embeddedness, as they are experienced within a healthcare context. Specifically, the authors aimed at assessing the relationship of those work constructs among a group of Iranian nurses during the coronavirus pandemic and found work alienation to be negatively related with job crafting and job embeddedness and the constructs to have substantial overlap, with job crafting and job embeddedness accounting for 44% of the variance of work alienation.
What is work alienation and why choose it as the focus of a study? Work alienation has its historical roots in Karl Marx, who described what happens when industrial workers are faced with automation and division of labour (Marx, 1844; in Vanderstukken and Caniëls, 2021). Its core dimensions – powerlessness (helplessness, as the authors of this paper call it), meaninglessness and social isolation (friendlessness in the paper) – describe a negative and uncomfortable state of feeling disengaged from work (Seeman, 1991), whereby workers are prevented from determining how their work is designed and delivered, feel disconnected from the organisation’s goals and are not able to capitalise on co-workers’ emotional and practical support and remove themselves from any sense of the collective. Work alienation has been linked with organisational injustice (an outcome of the latter) (Ceylan and Seyfettin, 2011) and turnover intentions as antecedent (Du Plooy and Roodt, 2010).
The choice of context as healthcare is timely. Healthcare has been facing sustained global challenges in the education, employment, deployment, retention and performance of the workforce, with WHO estimating a projected shortfall of 10 million health workers by 2030. Pertinent among those challenges is discontent about nurses’ pay and working conditions and this is the case across countries (e.g. Ceylan and Seyfettin, 2011 in Turkey; Ravikumar and Thomas, 2023 in the UK). It has been reported that the difficult work conditions of nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic gradually caused many a problem such as work alienation (Raso et al., 2021).
While the present study found moderate levels of work alienation among its sample of Iranian nurses, the authors report in their literature review that elsewhere in the country and other countries high levels have been found. Moreover, the study found that nurses with longer working hours exhibited higher work alienation and cited other studies with similar findings. High workloads may deprive workers of opportunities to modify working conditions and tip negatively the balance between job demands and resources. This is consistent with the study’s main finding of a negative relationship between job crafting and work alienation.
While the academic literature has dealt with many a negative concept in the psychology of work, an example of which is work alienation, the professional literature tends to focus on positive aspects, such as the earlier mentioned employee engagement. While this may be a symptom of ever-increasing promotion of positivity at work (Kartal, 2018), which comes with its own problems (Traphagan, 2021), the two constructs (work alienation and employee engagement) have been studied together, for example as correlates of work performance (Kartal, 2018). Semantically one could expect that alienation, as disengagement, is the opposite of engagement. While Kartal (2018) found a moderate negative correlation between the two scales, each of the two had an independent relationship with performance, showing that they measured something unique and not just the opposite ends of the same construct. Consequently, one may not feel powerless at work, but may still not participate fully, and may not feel that organisational goals are meaningless, but may still not feel they are very important. Eliminating negativity does not lead automatically to positivity. This sounds akin to Herzberg’s ‘hygiene factors’ (Herzberg, 1966) that postulated that job satisfaction is not the opposite of job dissatisfaction.
The findings of this paper imply that if people feel capable and are willing to modify the work environment and available resources to achieve a better fit within the role and organisation, then they are less likely to feel work alienation. When this is not the case, nonetheless, more organisational investment is required to achieve that step and go even further, towards involvement, belonging and commitment.