Designing for Humans (Psychology at Work) by Jan Noyes

Author:Jan Noyes [Noyes, Jan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2002-09-26T04:00:00+00:00

Performance-shaping factors

Several factors are known to affect worker performance. These range from intrinsic to external variables and are summarised in Table 5.2. Several of the environmental stressors were discussed in Chapter 4; the interest here is on those internal factors that shape performance and how jobs can be designed and work organised to accommodate them. Of particular interest are fatigue, vigilance and workload.

Fatigue

Fatigue has a strong subjective component—we may be feeling tired until invited to do something exciting, when our fatigue will suddenly disappear! Further, we all react differently when tired. For example, in studies of pilot fatigue, Bartlett (1943) noted that some individuals when tired became aggressive and irritable while others responded by withdrawal and inertia. However, recent progress has been made in the measurement of fatigue with the Fatigue Component Analysis Spreadsheet (Miller, 1999) and the Swedish Occupational Fatigue Inventory (SOFI; Ahsberg et al., (2000)). Prior to these, there were few reliable measures of fatigue and early results from testing SOFI look promising. Although little is known about fatigue in terms of its exact nature and causes (Åstrand and Rodahl, 1986; Kroemar et al., 1994), it can affect performance in the workplace. It is thought that fatigue results from the costs of effort and performance as indicated by the perceptions of the workers, reduced task performance and behaviours associated with sleepiness. Miller (1999) divided fatigue into three categories according to cause: circadian, acute and cumulative. Circadian fatigue results from diurnal effects, acute fatigue results from a single work period while cumulative effects develop over time when inadequate rest is taken. Consequently, fatigue and its effects are often confounded with feeling tired because of a lack of sleep. Because fatigue can also lead to injury, it is important that the work environment is designed to take this into account. A person who appears to be suffering from fatigue may in fact be bored by the work, poorly motivated to do the job well and, hence, easily distracted.

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