Working overtime hours: relations with fatigue, work motivation, and the quality of work.
OBJECTIVE
We sought to better understand the relationship between overtime and mental fatigue by taking into account work motivation and the quality of overtime work and studying theoretically derived subgroups.


METHODS
We conducted a survey-study among a representative sample of the Dutch full-time workforce (n = 1807). The prevalence of overtime work and the associations between overtime and job demands, job variety, decision latitude, fatigue, and work motivation was studied through descriptive statistics. We used MANCOVA (covariates: age, gender, salary level) to compare six overtime-fatigue subgroups with respect to work motivation and job characteristics.


RESULTS
A total of 67% of the respondents worked overtime (mean, 3.5 hours). Overtime workers appeared to be nonfatigued, motivated workers with favorable work characteristics. MANCOVA revealed no significant overtime-fatigue interaction.


CONCLUSIONS
Moderate overtime is common among Dutch workers, who seem to be happy workers with attractive jobs rather than fatigued employees.
Beckers
Debby G J
DG
Department of Work and Organizational Psychology, Radboud University Nijmegen, PO Box 9104, 6500 HE Nijmegen, The Netherlands. d.beckers@psych.ru.nl
van der Linden
Dimitri
D
Smulders
Peter G W
PG
Kompier
Michiel A J
MA
van Veldhoven
Marc J P M
MJ
van Yperen
Nico W
NW
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D005221:Fatigue / Q000453:epidemiology*; D005260:Female; D006306:Health Surveys; D006801:Humans; D007588:Job Satisfaction; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009042:Motivation; D015999:Multivariate Analysis; D009426:Netherlands / Q000453:epidemiology; D015995:Prevalence; D012016:Reference Values; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis; D014940:Work Schedule Tolerance; D016526:Workload / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*