Group work in a Dutch home care organization: Does it improve the quality of working life?

Abstract

Home care in the Netherlands is facing a trend towards increasing workloads, giving it the image of an unattractive sector to work in. To deal with increasing workloads and their effects, many solutions have been developed, including the concept of team or group work. This paper will address the possibilities, conditions and effects involved in the implementation of group work in home care as a means of improving the quality of working life (QWL) in this sector. To this end I have studied QWL in three jobs in two organizations for home care, one of which implemented group work. This comparison concludes that jobs in the team-based organization are more complete and challenging, bringing more job decision latitude, but also higher work pressure. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.