NetLogo User Community Models

(back to the NetLogo User Community Models)

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## WHAT IS IT?

This model shows how supportive and disruptive colleagues interact and change each other's supportive or disruptive behavior in the workplace, and how occupational stress together with the supportive or disruptive colleagues can affect one's job satisfaction.

## HOW IT WORKS

(what rules the agents use to create the overall behavior of the model)
Part 1: Supportive or disruptive behavior change
The Dynamic Social Impact formula used by Nowak is applied here. The supervisors and coworkers have different strengths of influence and over different locations in social space.
Part 2: Job satisfaction
I formulated an equation incorporating the overall effect of occupational stress and help from neighboring supportive agents and harm from disruptive agents, with supervisors having twice the influence on job satisfaction than coworkers, on a particular agent. And every agent's level of job satisfaction will be compared to a fixed midpoint level of job satisfaction using the same formulated equation. If the agent's level of job satisfaction is higher than the midpoint level, agent is satisfied. If the agent's level of job satisfaction is lower than the midpoint level, agent is dissatisfied.

## HOW TO USE IT

"setup" - to set up the agents accordingly
"go" - to stimulate behavior changes and rate job satisfaction
"occupationalstress" - level of work stress in the organizational setting (1 - low level of work stress; 101 - high level of work stress)
"percentsupportive" - percentage of total agents that are initially supportive (0% - no supportive agents; 100% - no disruptive agents)
"supportivesupervisor", "supportivecoworker", "disruptivesupervisor" and "disruptivecoworker" - report the number agents in each category
"steps" - report the number of agents who have changed their supportive/disruptive behavior
"clusteringdegree" - The density of overall clusters of supportive and disruptive agents
"supervisorstrength" and "coworkerstrength" - the strength of their influence

## THINGS TO NOTICE

Occupational stress does not have a significant impact on job satisfaction in this model. However, having "percentsupportive" adjusted to the extremes brings about an unexpected result. When there are no supportive agent ("percentsupportive" at 0), all the agents were dissatisfied with their jobs, regardless of the level occupational stress, this is as hypothesized. But when there are no disruptive agents ("percentsupportive" at 100), there is a considerable number of dissatisfied agents, although the number of dissatisfied agents is less when the occupational stress level is low ("occupationalstress" at 1) than when it is high ("occupationalstress" at 100).All agents should be satisfied when there the workforce is completely supportive, with low occupational stress, at least.

## THINGS TO TRY

To alternate between the extremes of "occupationalstress" and "percentsupportive".
You may change the "supervisorstrength" and "coworkerstrength", however, this would only affect the first part of the model which is the influencing of agents to become supportive or disruptive at work.

## EXTENDING THE MODEL

Research have found that extraversion, conscientiousness and neuroticism are significant predictors of job satisfaction. And agreeableness is significant for collectivistic-tight cultures. Personality of the agents can be incorporated to see the additional internal factors of agents, other than the external environment factors.
Comparing older worker and younger workers will be interesting as well. Old workers tend to be more satisfied with their jobs whereas younger workers are still striving hard for achievement. Interactions between old and young workers may result in new behavior changes.

## NETLOGO FEATURES

The model is set at 20 ticks to stop the ticks from looping without anymore changes. The model cannot be stopped after the behavioral changes as the job satisfaction still has to be calculated. So "steps" is monitored to take note of the number of agents who have changed behaviorally.

## RELATED MODELS

Nowak's model of social influence and cultural integration.

## CREDITS AND REFERENCES

Katherine T. M., Christyn L. D., Judith A. W., Mark W. M., Mary A. S. (2006). Hardiness and Support at Work as Predictors of Work Stress and Job Satisfaction. American Journal of Health Promotion, 20 (3), 183-191.
Lauren S. s., Timothy A. J., Marie D. K. H. (2010). In good company? A multi-study, multi-level investigation of the effects of coworker relationships on employee well-being. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 76, 534–546.
Lori J. D., Jack K. M. (2000). Unrewarding Work, Coworker Support, and Job Satisfaction: A Test of the Buffering Hypothesis. Work And Occupations, 27 (2), 223-243.
Nowak, A., Raad, W. D., Borkowski, W. (2011). Culture Change: The Perspective of Dynamical Minimalism.