Hanneke Van der Hoek-Snieders

Chapter 1 50 be associated with higher NFR. This finding must, however, be interpreted with caution, because we used a single question, rather than a validatedquestionnaire. The question may also reflect other constructs, such as the awareness or acceptance of functional hearing difficulties at the workplace. Although a firm conclusion can thus not yet been drawn, this finding underlines the importance to measure employees’ frustration level in future research concerning NFR using a validated questionnaire. In line with the previous studies (Gommans et al., 2015; Van der Starre et al., 2013), general health condition was found to be significantly associated with NFR, independently from the other factors. Age, gender, and educational level were considered to be potential confounders, but the correlation analysis showed that these factors were neither significantly associated with NFR, nor with hearingrelated or personal factors. A similar independent position was found for the factor auditoryworkdemands.This factor wasmoderately associatedwithLE. In contrast to the literature describing that auditory demands are significantly related to hearing handicap and sick leave (Kramer et al., 1998; Kramer et al., 2006), we did not find a significant association between auditoryworkdemands andNFR.Thismay suggest that although high auditory demands increase the LE, the degree of feeling fatigued after work depends on other factors. The use of PA or being in good health may be protective for developing occupational problems. Future research is required to further assess these mechanisms. Other work characteristics did neither influence NFRnor LE. First, we expected a positive association between the number of working hours and NFR ( Jansen et al., 2002; Verdonk et al., 2010), but this was not the case. The lack of association could be explained if patients with high NFR had chosen to work fewer hours to prevent health problems. Since this study uses health administrative data, we cannot confirm this hypothesis. The directed acyclic graph showed that men had a higher number of working hours than women, which is a typical finding for the Dutch working population (Gjerdingen et al., 2001). Employees that reported a higher number of working hours, more often reported fulfilling managerial tasks and those fulfilling managerial tasks reported being more able to participate in work decisions. Second, in contrast to what was observed earlier (Van Veldhoven & Broersen, 2003), work participation was not associated with NFR. In other words, the feeling of job control did not directly influence NFR. Literature presents mixed results on the association between job control and NFR (Kraaijeveld et al., 2014; Sonnentag

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