Supervisors subject to increasing work demands

According to the Finnish Quality of Work Life Survey, expectations of supervisory work have grown and diversified. The increasing demands in working life have put the greatest pressure on supervisors and, the more subordinates a supervisor has, the heavier is their workload. Meanwhile, the organisation of supervisory work has changed considerably. While the number of employees in a supervisory position has increased, more supervisors have been assigned operational supervisory duties but without administrative subordinates.

In June 2006, Statistics Finland published research results concerning the working conditions of supervisors in Finland and the structural changes in supervisory work over the past 20 years. The study used data from the Finnish Quality of Work Life Surveys 1984–2003 (FI0410SR01) and was carried out by researcher Noora Kontiainen at Statistics Finland.

Growth in work demands and expectations

According to the Finnish Quality of Work Life Survey, the demands of work have grown and diversified most in supervisory work. Supervisors have experienced an increase and expansion in tasks more often than other employees. They also reported more frequently than others that work tasks have grown more difficult over the past few years and that demands for learning new things have multiplied.

Supervisors are considerably affected by the danger of overlap between work and free time, as well as by information overflow, and fragmentation and lengthening of working days. Scheduling deadlines also impose a considerable amount of pressure: one fifth of supervisors felt that they cannot influence their work schedules at all. The study suggests that this also impacts on the subordinates as it weakens the supervisor’s capacity to ensure that their subordinates can cope with their workloads.

The more subordinates a supervisor has, the more likely he or she is to view the work as mentally demanding. Nevertheless, supervisors did not show more symptoms of psychological strain than average. Supervisors’ ability to cope seems to be improved by diverse factors dependent on resources, the most important of which includes the possibility to influence one’s job tasks and working conditions. However, from the organisation’s perspective, supervisors’ time pressure hampers long-term planning and may cause operational problems.

New group of supervisors

The study results show that an increasing number of employees are in supervisory positions, despite the efforts made in general to dismantle hierarchical structures. However, some supervisory tasks have ended up outside the official supervisory hierarchy, although the work involves supervision of others or delegation of tasks to other employees. The study also highlights that a new group of operational supervisors has emerged, who have supervisory duties but no administrative subordinates.

According to the latest Finnish Quality of Work Life Survey in 2003, some 13% of all employees hold this kind of operational supervisory position (see Figure). These positions have increased substantially since the late 1990s and involve employees in all sectors and from diverse occupational backgrounds. At the same time, the number of administrative supervisors has decreased and the size of supervisory units has also been reduced in most sectors.

Work involving supervisory tasks, % of employees

Source: Finnish Quality of Work Life Surveys 1984, 1990, 1997 and 2003

The number of women in supervisory positions is still lower than that of men, despite the increasing proportion of women in such positions since 1984. Moreover, the shift from conventional supervisory positions towards operational supervisory tasks, marked with less defined organisational status and resources, is more noticeable among women than men. In relative terms, women have lost a greater proportion of conventional supervisory positions than men. In 2003, some 42% of female supervisors were without administrative subordinates while the proportion for men was 33%.

According to the study, the emergence of new, operational supervisors indicates that the structure and organisation of supervisory work has grown more complex in recent years. Behind this new trend lie widespread changes in organisational strategies and practices: teamwork has become common practice in all type of organisations, and work is increasingly organised within and between networks, in projects and according to matrix rather than line organisation.

In general, work demands of operational supervisors were found to be similar to those of administrative superiors and clearly different from other employees. In the context of well-being and coping at work, operational supervisors therefore form a risk group because they are under increased work pressures in the same manner as other supervisors are, but they do not have the same back-up resources at their disposal.

Reference

The study was originally published in Statistics Finland’s article collection ‘With full trimmings. Articles based on findings of the Quality of Work Life Survey’ (in Finnish).

Noora Kontiainen, Statistics Finland