Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
JOURNAL OF OCCUPATIONAL BEHAVIOUR, Vol. 7, 25-38 (1986)
Protestant work ethic, work involvement and the psychological impact of unemployment
BOAS SHAMIR Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem
91 905. Israel
SUMMARY
This study is an attempt to replicate and extend recent findings concerning the moderating effect of employment commitment on the psychological impact of unemployment. It was carried out in a highly educated population and employed Protestant work ethic endorsement (PWE) and work involvement (WINV) as indicators of commitment to work. Evidence was collected by questionnaires from 432 individuals who had been unemployed and again, six months later, from most of the same individuals. Cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis shows that individuals with high WINV were likely to suffer more from unemployment and to gain more from finding employment than low work-involved individuals. PWE, on the other hand, did not moderate the relationship between employment status and psychological state.
Recent psychological literature on unemployment has shifted its attention from the description of general effects to the examination of several moderators of those effects (Hartley and Fryer, 1983; Warr, 1984a, b). One of the moderators that currently draws attention is employment commitment. Several recent studies from the University of Sheffield looked at the relationship between general work commitment (as distinct from involvement in a particular job or commitment to a particular organization) and the impact of unemployment. In the first study, Warr (1978) found that ‘work orientation’-defined as the desire to find a job rather than remain unemployed-moderated the relationships between employment position and positive and negative affect: employment position was related to these aspects of psychological well-being only for the high work orientation group. In the second study, Stafford, Jackson and Banks (1980) found that ‘employment commitment’ defined as the degree to which a person wants to be engaged in paid employment, moderated the relationship between employment status of school leavers and a self reported measure of general mental health. For the employed school leavers there was a negative correlation between employment commitment and the existence of minor psychiatric morbidity, while for the unempioyed the correlation was positive: higher employment Commitment was associated with higher rates of psychiatric symptoms.
The study on which this paper is based was supported by a grant from the Ford Foundation through the Israel Foundation Trustees (Ford Grant No. 11). The writing of the paper was supported by the Bertelsmann Foundation. The assistance of Daniel Bentley and Rivka Rozman to this study is gratefully acknowledged.
0142-2774/86/01002S-14$01.40 Received I 9 March I985 01986 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Revised I0 June 1985
26 B. Shamir
The most sophisticated of the Sheffield studies concerning this issue was reported by Jackson, Stafford, Banks and Warr (1983). This study not only replicated the cross-sectional results of Stafford et al. (1 980), but demonstrated through longitudinal analysis that the psychological effect of moving between work and unemployment and vice versa is greatest for those whose employment commitment is high. More recent studies of other samples (Payne, Warr and Hartley, 1984; Jackson and Warr, 1984; Warr, Banks and Ullah, 1985), confirmed that greater employment commitment is associated with significantly greater psychological ill-health among the unemployed.
The problem with the Sheffield studies is their conceptualization of employment commitment as the extent to which a person wants to be engaged in paid work. Defined as such, there is no justification for the assertion by Jackson et al. (1983) that employment commitment can be viewed as a stable personality characteristic. The desire to be engaged in paid work may stem among the unemployed from their temporary conditions, rather than from their stable personality or value orientation. In particular, it may reflect current financial pressures. The positive correlation between employment commitment and psychological distress may therefore be a spurious correlation reflecting the effect of economic hardship on both variables. Furthermore, if you define employment commitment as the desire to get a job, it is conceivable that this desire may stem, among the unemployed, from psychological distress rather than vice versa. The higher the psychological hardship caused by unemployment the greater the individual’s desire to redress the situation by finding a job.
This problem is shared by recent Australian studies by Feather and his colleagues (Feather, 1983; Feather and Barber, 1983; Feather and Bond, 1983). It is best demonstrated by the first study (Feather, 1983) in which a correlation was found among high school students between the valence of employment and their anticipated level of depression in the hypothetical case of not getting a job. The author interprets this finding as further evidence regarding the relationship between employment commitment and psychological distress, but it can be claimed that the anticipated depression about not getting a job is simply another indicator of employment commitment among those children. The Australian studies also suffer from measures of doubtful reliability. Feather and Barber (1983) employed only single items to measure depressive affect and employment importance (defined as concern about being unemployed) and Feather and Bond (1983), who attempted to measure a more general construct than the desire to work, employed a 3-item measure of questionable internal consistency. Its coefficient alpha among their employed subjects ( N = 255) was only 0.34 in comparison with an acceptable 0.73 among the small (N = 43) sample of unemployed subjects.
In order to confirm the moderating effect of work commitment on the psychological impact of unemployment several improvements are needed in comparison with most previous studies: First, we need an improved measurement of work commitment which would reflect stable personality characteristics and not temporary concerns about not having a job. Second, we have to control for the effect of financial pressures before examining the relationship between work commitment and psychological distress. Third, we should employ a longitudinal design in order to show that work commitment moderates the relationship between changes in employment status and psychological well-being. The present study is an attempt to achieve such improvements.
Psychological Impact of Unemployment 27
The general commitment to work is represented in this study by two related, but not identical, concepts: Work involvement and the Protestant work ethic. Work involvement (WINV) is defined here, following Kanungo (1 982) as a normative belief in the value of work in one’s life. It is relatively insensitive to employment status or employment conditions. Protestant work ethic (PWE), is conceptualized here, following Mirels and Garrett (1971), as a dispositional variable characterized by a belief in the importance of hard work and frugality which acts as a defence against sloth, sensuality, sexual temptation and religious doubt. It reflects a belief that hard work is good as an end in itself and that personal worth and one’s morale stature are to be gauged on willingness to work hard (Morrow, 1983). Work involvement, may result from Protestant-ethic type socialization but may also result from other types of socialization involving different emphases on the value of work (Kanungo, 1982). Therefore the two constructs should be distinguished from each other.
While both WINV and PWE are expected to have similar effects on the relationship between unemployment and psychological distress, the theoretical rationale for expecting such effects is somewhat different. Work involvement reflects the extent to which a person finds work attractive and fulfilling in a personal sense, and therefore, the higher the work involvement the more we would expect to find negative consequences when he or she is deprived of employment. Protestant work ethic may also reflect the personal importance of work but has other implications as well. It has been found that PWE is related to blaming the poor for their condition, to blaming the unemployed for their predicament and to negative attitudes to welfare payments and to recipients of welfare (McDonald, 1972; Furnham, 1982). Individuals high on PWE may therefore be more likely to feel ashamed by their situation, to find it stigmatic and perhaps to blame themselves for their condition. These feelings should increase their psychological distress.
Psychological well-being will be represented here by three variables indicative of the emotional and affective state of the individual: Depression, anxiety and morale. Results concerning the main effects of employment status on psychological well-being will not be presented in detail here. It was found in cross-sectional comparisons that unemployed individuals differ significantly from re-employed individuals on all three indicators of psychological well-being. It was also found in longitudinal analysis that there was no change in the psychological well-being of individuals whose state of employment remained unchanged for six months, while there was significant improvement on all three indicators of psychological well-being among individuals whose employment status changed from unemployed to employed (Shamir, 1984, Reference Note 1). We shall focus in this article only on the moderating effects of PWE and WINV.
The following hypotheses will be examined: 1. PWE and WINV would be related to greater psychological distress (higher
depression, higher anxiety, lower morale) among the unemployed. For the employed, there would either be opposite correlations or no correlations at all.
2. Employment status would have stronger effects on the psychological state of individuals with high WINV or PWE.
3. The higher the WINV or PWE of the individual the greater would be the improvement in psychological state when he or she finds a job.
28 B. Shamir
Sample and data collection
METHOD
ifications M The population studied inL.Jded individuals wit.. academic que I 0
registered as unemployed with the Employment Service of the Israeli Ministry of Labour and Welfare over a period of eight months. Questionnaires were mailed to the population in two waves, six months apart. Four hundred and thirty two usable questionnaires were returned in the first wave (after two reminders) representing a response rate of 38.5 per cent. This response rate (which is low by American standards, but quite high in comparison with mail surveys in Israel), can be partly explained by the many inaccuracies in the register, by the unreliability of postal services and by the fact that, being unemployed, some of the subjects were probably geographically mobile at the time of the study. Self selection biases cannot be ruled out, but comparisons between returnees and non-returnees on background characteristics established that the returnees were highly representative of the population in terms of age, profession and family status. There was some over-representation of females among returnees (54 per cent in comparison with 47 per cent among non-returnees) and a slight under-representation of individuals with Master degrees and Doctorates among them (16 per cent in comparison with 19 per cent). At the time of the first data collection 65 per cent of the subjects were already re-employed while 35 per cent (152) were still unemployed. Their mean unemployment duration was between 5 and 6 months.
Questionnaires were mailed to all 432 participants of the first stage six months later. Two hundred and ninety eight questionnaires were received back, representing a response rate of 68.5 per cent. There was no difference in response rate between those unemployed at the first stage and those already employed at the first stage. Ninety two per cent of those employed at the first stage were also employed at the second stage. Of those unemployed at the first stage 65 per cent have found a job and 35 per cent remained unemployed. Comparisons between respondents and non-respondents revealed that the respondents of the second stage are highly representative of all the subjects that were included in the first stage in terms of their background characteristics. The sex, age, level of education, area of academic studies and occupational experience distributions of the respondents were almost identical to those of the non-respondents.
Measures
The Protestant ethic (PWE)
PWE was measured with a shortened version of the Mirels and Garret (1971) scale. The original scale contains 19 items and has respectable validity and reliability (Cook, Wall and Warr, 1982; Morrow, 1983). The shortened scale was constructed by Goitein and Rothenberg (1977) and comprised only those items with a part-whole correlation of 0.40 and above. The internal consistency of this version in Goitein and Rothenberg’s study using the Spearman-Brown formulation was 0.69. In the present study the alpha coefficient for this scale was 0.64 and the test-retest correlation 0.71.
Psychological Impact of Unemployment 29
There may be some concern about the applicability of the Protestant work ethic construct to the population studied here. It should therefore be mentioned that a recent review of the psychological literature on PWE (Furnham, 1984a) reports evidence for the existence of PWE in Eastern cultures, and a study by Furnham and Muhiudeen (1984), which employed the Mirels and Garrett scale, found PWE beliefs in a group of Malysian adults to be stronger than in a matched group of British adults. It may therefore be assumed that beliefs similar to the PWE are part of other value systems as well or that the Protestant work ethic is no longer Protestant (Beit Hallahmi, 1979).
Work involvement (WINV)
WINV was measured by a six-item scale constructed by Kanungo (1982), who reports results concerning the validity and reliability of the scale. The alpha coefficient for the scale in his study was 0.75 and the test-retest correlation was 0.67. In the present study the alpha coefficient for work involvement was 0.81 and the test-retest correlation 0.74. The correlation between work involvement and PWE was 0.53.
Depression
We employed a widely used self-report measure of depressive state which is supported by a great deal of research, (Levitt and Lubin, 1975) and furthermore was carefully translated to Hebrew. The instrument is the Depression Adjective Check List (DACL, Lubin, 1967), and its Hebrew translation was accompanied by several studies to establish the reliability and validity of the Hebrew version and to construct norms for the Israeli population (Lomranz, Lubin, Eyal and Medini, 1981; Lomranz, Lubin, Medini and Eyal, 1982).
The DACL is a brief self-administered instrument including 34 adjectives, 22 connoting depression and 12 free of depressive connotations. The subject is asked to indicate all the adjectives that describe his current feelings. The respondents get one point for each adjective of depression he or she circles and one point foi each non-depressive adjective he/she does not circle. The instrument has various parallel forms. Form N was used in this study. The authors of this scale report (Lomranz et al., 1982) a split-half reliability of 0.83 for this form of the Hebrew version. The respective figure in the present study was 0.79.
Anxiety
We selected five items from a study by Warr (1978) to construct an anxiety scale for our study. The question subjects were requested to respond to was: how much would you say you worry these days about . . .? And the items were: Not having enough money for everyday living; Your health; Your job situation; The world situation; and In general. Subjects responded to each item on a 5-point scale and their responses to the items were averaged. The internal consistency of this scale (alpha) was 0.67. Warr, Cook and Wall (1979) report alpha coefficients of 0.68 and 0.74 and a test-retest corelation of 0.49 for a 6-item scale of a similar format.
30 B. Shamir
General morale
We used one item for the measurement of general morale. The item used was: On the whole, how is your general mood these days? to which the subjects were asked to respond on a 5-point scale ranging from ‘Good almost all the time’ to ‘Bad almost all the time’. This item was selected because it is standardly included in the periodical survey of the Israel Institute of Applied Social Research, and it was hoped that including it would provide some basis for comparison between our sample and the general population.
Financial stress
The study included two subjective evaluations of financial state: an evaluation by the individual of his/her current financial state (on a 7-point scale ranging from very bad to excellent) and a scale of the perceived change in financial state in comparison with the period prior to job departure. The scale ranged from ‘my financial situation prior to the unemployment period was much better’ to ‘my current financial situation is much better’. The first evaluation turned out to be more strongly related to the psychological state of the unemployed and will therefore be used as the control variable here.
RESULTS
Before testing the hypotheses it should be demonstrated that PWE and WINV are stable characteristics and do not reflect a temporary desire to have a job. There were no differences in PWE or WINV between the employed and unemployed individuals either at the first stage or at the second stage of the study. The mean PWE score for the unemployed at the first stage was 3.60 and for the employed 3.68 (t = 1.43, ns). At the second stage the respective scores were 3.61 and 3.74 (r = 0.99 ns). For WINV the first stage mean scores were 3.96 and 3.88 (t = 1.14, ns) and for the second stage 3.99 and 3.94 (t = 0.47, ns). There was no significant change in PWE or WINV between time 1 and time 2 among individuals whose employment status has changed between the two measurement occasions. The test-retest correlations over a period of 6-7 months were quite high: 0.71 for PWE and 0.74 for WINV.
Results relevant to the first hypothesis are presented in Table 1, where the correlations of PWE and WINV with indicators of psychological state are presented for the unemployed subsample in comparison with the employed. Since the financial state of the individual could affect his/her employment commitment and be related to his or her psychological state, the correlations presented in Table 1 are partial correlations controlling for the effect of financial state, and since the relevant variables were measured on two occasions the correlations are presented for both occasions (no significant differences were revealed between men and women in PWE or WINV and the results are presented for men and women together).
The table provides partial support for our hypothesis. Work involvement is significantly correlated with the three indicators of psychological state among
Tab
le 1
. Pa
rtia
l co
rrel
atio
ns o
f PW
E a
nd W
INV
with
ind
icat
ors
of P
sych
olog
ical
wel
l-bei
ng c
ontro
lling
for
fin
anci
al s
tate
acc
ordi
ng t
o em
ploy
men
t st
atus
at
each
sta
ge
Tim
e 1
Tim
e 2
Em
ploy
men
t st
atus
N
Mor
ale
Dep
ress
ion
Anx
iety
PWE
E
mpl
oyed
28
0 0.
06
-0.2
1*
-0.0
7 U
nem
ploy
ed
152
-0.0
6 -0
.00
-0.1
5 Z
1.18
2.
10*
0.80
W
INV
E
mpl
oyed
28
0 -0
.03
-0.1
8'
-0.0
3 U
nem
ploy
ed
152
-0.3
1t
0.24
t 0.
16*
Z 2.
86t
4.20
t 1.
88
N M
oral
e D
epre
ssio
n A
nxie
ty
b
0,
242
- 0.
04
-0.0
9 -0
.02
0 k
3 g 55
-0
.01
-0.0
5 -0
.01
0.20
0.
92
0.06
3.
2 2.
46*
r? 'r
55
0.25
-0
.14
-0.1
1 24
2 -0
.27t
0.
20
0.26
t 3.
48*
2.25
*
*p <
0.05
. fp
10.
01.
s $ b
32 B. Shamir
unemployed individuals, in the expected direction on both measurement occasions. The higher their work involvement the lower their morale, and the higher their levels of depression and anxiety. No such correlations can be found among the employed individuals. In fact, the only significant correlations among the employed are in the opposite direction. On the first measurement occasion, the higher their work involvement the lower their level of depression, and on the second measurement occasion, the higher the WINV the higher the morale of employed individuals. The differences between the correlations of WINV with indicators of psychological state among employed individuals and the same correlations among unemployed individuals are significant in five of the six comparisons. The Protestant work ethic, on the other hand, appears to be unrelated to psychological state either among employed or among unemployed individuals.
In order to test the second hypothesis, we divided our sample into three groups roughly equal in size, first according to their PWE scores and secondly according to their WINV scores. We designated them ‘high’, ‘medium’ and ‘low’ on the relevant dimension, and in order to find the net effect of employment status on psychological state we performed a series of analyses of covariance in which the effect of employment status is adjusted for the effects of sex and financial state, separately in each group. We predicted that the net effects of employment status would be larger in the groups high on WINV and PWE. The results of these analyses are presented in Table 2. The table presents the sum of squares of
Table 2. Effects of employment status on psychological well-being after adjusting for sex and financial state according to level of Protestant ethic and work involvement
PWE
Low Medium High Protestant ethic Protestant ethic Protestant ethic
( N = 154) ( N = 137) (N = 130)
Sum of Sum of Sum of squares* F squares* F squares* F
Morale 1.791 1.303 6.052 4.074t 3.744 2.568
Anxiety 6.445 8.4579 2.188 3.202t 1.253 1.429 Depression 48.92 0.815 226.258 4.960t 222.90 5.933t
WINV
Low Medium High work involvement work involvement work involvement
( N = 146) ( N = 142) (N = 142)
Morale 3.197 2.279 1.755 1.347 11.911 8.6159 Depression 4.543 0.080 176.880 5.2783 585.410 11.8329 Anxiety 1.160 1 SO4 3.600 5.516f 7.081 7.742s
*df = 2 in all cases. f p <0.05. s p <0.01. § p <0.001.
Psychological Impact of Unemployment 33
employment status for each indicator of psychological well-being and the corresponding F tests.
The results concerning PWE do not support the hypothesis but the results concerning WINV do. Employment status has a significant effect on morale only at the medium level of PWE, a significant effect on depression at both the medium and the high levels of PWE, and its effect on anxiety seems to decrease as PWE increases. In regard to WINV, on the other hand, employment status affects the morale only at the high level of WINV and its effects on depression and anxiety increase with increasing WINV as expected. Thus people with high work involvement are clearly more sensitive to their employment status than people who have low work involvement.
We now turn to the third hypothesis and to longitudinal analysis. Following Jackson et al . (1983) we shall focus on the change in psychological state between the two stages of the study as the dependent variable and examine whether this change (in any of the three indicators of psychological state) is related to PWE or WINV. It was expected that the higher the PWE or WINV of the individual, the more he or she would ‘gain’ psychologically from a change in the employment status from unemployed to employed. No such relationships were expected for the individuals whose employment status had not changed. Table 3 presents the correlations between PWE and WINV and the three indicators of psychological state for four groups according to their employment status at each stage (the groups are designated UE, EE, UU and EU. UE denotes unemployed at the first stage and employed at the second stage, and so forth). It is important in such comparisons to take account of possible differences in the initial psychological state between the compared groups and therefore the correlations presented in Table 3 are partial correlations, controlling for the effect of the initial psychological state scores.
The table indicates that, in general, changes in psychological state were not related to Protestant work ethic in any of the groups. The picture is different in regard to work involvement. It can be seen that in the U E group there were, as expected, a larger increase in morale and a larger decrease in depression and anxiety among the highly work-involved individuals. The table also indicates that for those who lost their jobs between the two stages there was a larger decrease in morale among people high on WINV. There is also some indication that for the group continually unemployed, higher WINV is associated with a larger decrease in morale and a larger increase in depression. As expected, in the group of continuously employed individuals no correlations were revealed between WINV and changes in any of the psychological state variables.
DISCUSSION
Both the cross-sectional analysis and the longitudinal anaiysis confirm the hypotheses regarding the moderating role of work involvement on the relationship between employment status and psychological well-being and do not confirm the hypotheses concerning the moderating role of Protestant work ethic endorsement.
The results concerning WINV support and extend the findings of previous studies in several ways: The concept and measure of WINV employed in the present study has the advantage of not measuring directly the unemployed
w
P
Tabl
e 3.
Par
tial
corr
elat
ions
of
PWE
and
WIN
V w
ith c
hang
e sc
ores
in
psyc
holo
gica
l w
ell-b
eing
ind
icat
ors
cont
rolli
ng f
or i
nitia
l ps
ycho
logi
cal
wel
l-bei
ng
PWE
W
INV
Cha
nge
in
Cha
nge
in
Cha
nge
in
Cha
nge
in
Cha
nge
in
Cha
nge
in
mor
ale
depr
essi
on
anxi
ety
mor
ale
depr
essi
on
anxi
ety
Empl
oym
ent s
tatu
s N
r r
r r
r r
U-E
E-
E u-
u E-
U
55
0.07
-0
.08
0.04
0.
38
-0.2
4 -0
.21
186
-0.0
3 0.
10
-0.0
6 -0
.12
0.13
0.
04
36
0.02
0.
02
0.05
-0
.19
0.27
0.
14
19
-0.0
3 -0
.19
-0.1
3 -0
.31
0.07
0.
03
U-E
den
otes
une
mpl
oyed
(U
) at t
he fi
rst
stag
e an
d em
ploy
ed (
E)
at th
e se
cond
sta
ge, a
nd S
O fo
rth
Psychological Impact of Unemployment 35
individual’s desire to find employment, which may be a less stable variable than work involvement, may be affected by the current state of the individual, and may therefore be a dependent variable rather than a moderator. The present study also demonstrates that the moderating role of work involvement is retained when the financial state of the individual is held constant, and is therefore not an artifact resulting from the effect of financial pressures on both WINV and psychological distress. It should be noted that other confounding variables were also dealt with, either by including them in the analysis (sex) or by the selection of a relatively homogeneous population (in terms of age, education and socio-economic status). In contrast with most previous studies (with the exception of Payne et al. (1984) and Jackson and Warr (1984)) which studied samples of entrants to the labour market, the present study focused on older individuals with work experience, and in this sense also contributed to the extension of previous studies’ findings.
It is surprising that Protestant work ethic endorsement does not fulfill a similar role. We assumed not only that work has a stronger positive valence for people with strong Protestant ethic but that such individuals tend to feel more ashamed when unemployed and to attribute more self-blame for their situation, and reasoned that on both grounds they should suffer more when unemployed. There are certain differences between Protestant work ethic and work involvement as defined and measured in this study which may help explain the different findings concerning PWE and WINV. The Protestant ethic scale measures the importance of work in a more abstract and remote way than the work involvement scale. Its items contain reference to ‘society’ and to moral judgement in comparison with the work involvement scale items, some of which refer to the respondent himself, and tend to focus (though indirectly) on potential satisfactions to be derived from the work role. It would seem that commitment to the work role, which is based on the individual meaning of work and on its potential satisfactions, has a stronger influence on the phenomenon studied here than commitment based on moral values or on the good of society. In other words, there may be different levels of commitment to work with different effects on work-related behaviour and attitudes. This possibility requires further study.
In addition, it is possible that, at least in the population studied, unemployment is not associated with social stigma and does not lead to a feeling of shame even among people with high PWE. Alternatively, it is possible that such people employ ‘double standards’: They express negative attitudes toward other unemployed individuals (Furnham, 1982), but when becoming unemployed themselves do not apply the same moral standards. It is known that employment status affects the sort of explanations people give for unemployment (Furnham, 1984b). It may also affect rheir judgements of the unemployed. In addition, it may be recalled that the internal consistency of the shortened version of the PWE scale used here was lower than that of the WINV scale, and this may have contributed to the negative results concerning PWE.
Other shortcomings of the study should also be acknowledged. The low response rate to the first questionnaire casts some doubt on the validity and generalizability of the results. While there were no significant differences between respondents and non-respondents on background characteristics, the sample may be biased in terms of other variables, not known to the author, which could influence the studied relationships. In addition, while this study, in contrast with most other studies and
36 B. Shamir
in common with the study by Jackson et al . (1983), included longitudinal comparisons in its design, it contained only evidence regarding the transition from unemployment to employment and almost no evidence regarding the critical transition from employment to unemployment. This problem is shared by virtually all studies of the effects of unemployment. We can only assume that since work involvement moderates the reiationship between employment status and psychological distress in cross-sectional comparisons and since it moderates the degree of improvement in psychological state associated with re-employment it would also moderate the impact of job loss. But we have no direct evidence to corroborate this assumption.
A few words of caution are in place here. Our findings are relevant to arguments concerning the future of unemployment. According to some participants in these arguments (Jenkins and Sherman, 1979; Kelvin, 1980; Macarov, 1980), unemployment in the future should not necessarily be an undesirable or harmful experience provided that two conditions are met: the unemployed individuals receive transfer payments to guarantee their subsistence level, and they are not highly committed to the work role. It may therefore be advisable according to these writers (assuming that high rates of unemployment are inevitable due to technological and world market considerations) to reduce the Protestant work ethic and the level of commitment to the work-role in order to enable individuals to better cope with unemployment. Promoters of such claims could take the findings of this and previous studies regarding the moderating role of work involvement on the relationship between unemployment and psychological state as supporting their claims. It should therefore be emphasized that while there can be considerable confidence regarding the existence of the moderating role of work involvement, this role is not particularly strong. Work involvement accounts for only a small portion of the variance in the psychological distress of unemployed individuals in all the relevant studies including the one reported here. Low work involvement in no way guarantees that the experience of unemployment would carry no psychological price. The price would still be considerable though somewhat lower. There is also no evidence in our study that the Protestant ethic hinders the processes of coping with unemployment in any way or that individuals who ‘free’ themselves of this ethic find unemployment easier to bear.
It should be noted, in conclusion, that both Protestant work ethic and work involvement emerged as stable characteristics from this study. There is, therefore, no support in the study for Kaufman’s (1982) claim that unemployed professionals become ‘work-inhibited’. At least for the duration of unemployment covered by the present study, the basic commitment to work has remained stable. Other recent studies (Warr and Jackson, 1984; Warr et a[ . , 1985) have also shown that employment duration is not associated with reduced commitment to the labour market.
REFERENCE NOTE
1. Shamir R . with Bentley D. (1984). ‘The psychological impact of unemployment in a welfare state: Psychological processes accompanying unemployment and re-employment among professionals’. Research Report submitted to the Ford Foundation, February.
Psychological Impact of Unemployment 37
REFERENCES
Beit Hallahmi, B. (1979). ‘Personal and social components of the Protestant ethic’, Journal of Social Psychology, 109, 263-267.
Cook, J. D., Wall, T. and Warr, P. (1982). The Experience of Work: A Compendium and Review of 249 Measures and Their Use, Academic Press, London.
Feather, N. T. (1983). ‘Causal attributions and beliefs about work and unemployment among adolescents in state and independent secondary schools’, Australian Journal of
Feather, N. T. and Barber, J. G. (1983). ‘Depressive reactions and unemployment’, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 92, 185-195.
Feather, N. T. and Bond, M. J. (1983). ‘Time structure and purposeful activity among employed and unemployed university graduates’, Journal of Occupational Psychology, 56, 241-254.
Furnham, A. (1982). ‘The protestant work ethic and attitudes towards unemployment’, Journal of Occupational Psychology, 55, 277-285.
Furnham, A. (1984a). ‘The Protestant work ethic: a review of the psychological literature’, European Journal of Social Psychology, 14, 87-104.
Furnham, A. (1984b). ‘Unemployment, attribution theory and mental health: A review of the British literature’, International Journal of Mental Health, 13( 1-2), 5 1-67.
Furnham, A. and Muhiudeen, C, (1984). ‘The Protestant work ethic in Britain and Malaysia’, Journal of Social Psychology, 122, 157-161.
Goitein, B. and Rothenberg, M. (1977). ‘Protestantism and retrospective labelling: a cross-cultural study in person perception’, Human Relations, 30(6), 487-497.
Hartley, J. F. and Fryer, D. M. (1983). ‘The psychology of unemployment: A critical appraisal’. In: Stephenson, G. M. and Davis, J. (Eds) Progress in Applied Social Psychology, Vol. 2, Wiley, London.
Jackson, P. R., Stafford, E. M., Banks, M. H. and Warr, P. B. (1983). ‘Unemployment and psychological distress in young people: the moderating effect of employment commitment’, Journal of Applied Psychology, 68(3), 525-535.
Jackson, P. R. and Warr, P. B. (1984). ‘Unemployment and psychological ill health: The moderating role of durationa and age’, Psychological Medicine, 14, 605-614.
Jenkins, C. and Sherman, B. (1979). The Collapse of Work, Eyre Methuen, London. Kanungo, R. N. (1982). ‘Measurement of job and work involvement’, Journal of Applied
Psychology, 67(3), 341-343. Kaufman, H. G. (1982). Professionals in Search of Work: Coping with the Stress ofJob Loss
and Underemployment, Wiley, New York. Kelvin, P. (1980). ‘Social psychology 2001: the social bases and implications of structural
unemployment. In: Gilmour, R. and Duck, S. (Eds) The Development of Social Psychology, Academic Press, London.
Levitt, E. E. and Lubin, B. (1975). Depression: Concepts, Controversies and Some New Facts, Springer Publishing Company, New York.
Lomranz, J., Lubin, B., Eyal, N. and Medini, G. (1981). ‘Hebrew version of the depression adjective check list: reliability and validity’, Journal of Personaliy Assessment, 45(4), 380-384.
Lomranz, J., Lubin, B., Medini, G. and Eyal, N. (1982). Depression Adjective List: A Tool for Measurement of Depressive Mood, Tel-Aviv University, (Hebrew).
Lubin, B. (1967). Depression Adjective List Manual, California Educational and Industrial Service, San Diego.
Macarov, D. (1980). Work and Welfare: The Unholy Alliance, Sage Publications. McDonald, A. (1972). ‘More on the Protestant ethic’, Journal of Consulting and Clinical
Mirels, H. L. and Garrett, J. B. (1971). ‘The Protestant ethic as a personality variable’,
Morrow, P. C. (1983). ‘Concept redundancy in organizational research: the case of work
Payne, R., Warr, P. and Hartley, J. (1984). ‘Social class and psychological ill health during
Psychology, 35(2), 21 1-232.
Psychology, 39, 116-122.
Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 36( l ) , 40-44.
commitment, Academy of Management Review, 8(3), 486-500.
unemployment’, Sociology of Health and Illness, 6(2), 154-174.
38 B. Shamir
Stafford, E. M., Jackson, P. R. and Banks, M. H. (1980). ‘Unemployment, work involvement and mental health in less qualified young people’, Journal of Occupational Psychology, 17, 204-217.
Warr, P. B. (1978). ‘A study of psychological well-being’, British Journal of Psychology, 69, 111-121.
Warr, P. B. (1984a). ‘Work and unemployment’. In: Drenth, P. J. D., Thierry, M., Williams, P. J. and de Wolff, C. J. (Eds) Handbook of Work and Organizational Psychology, Wiley, London.
Wan, P. B. (1984b). ‘Job loss, unemployment and psychological well-being’. In: Allen, V. and Van de Vliert, E. (Eds) Role Transitions, Plenum, New York.
Warr, P., Cook, J. and Wall, T. (1979). ‘Scales for the measurement of some work attitudes and aspects of psychological well-being’, Journal of Occupational Psychology, 52,
Warr, P., Banks, M. and Ullah, P. (1985). ‘The experience of unemployment among black
Warr, P. and Jackson, P. (1984). ‘Men without jobs: Some correlates of age and length of
1 29- 148.
and white urban teenagers’, The British Journal of Psychology, 76( l), 75-88.
unemployment’, Journal of Occupational Psychology, 57, 77-85.
