The effects of organizational factors and scheduling on fatigue, health and social well-being of locomotive crews.

摘要

The On-call system, the most common locomotive crewmen scheduling system, has been considered the reason causing crewmen fatigue, which might lead to railroad accidents. However, in addition to scheduling and fatigue, no study has been conducted to evaluate the effects of the on-call system on crewmen's physiological, psychological, and social well-being while the relationship among these factors and shift schedule has been addressed in many shiftwork studies. Moreover, studies have found that numerous organizational factors can be the causes of workers' stress and fatigue, but these organizational factors have never been assessed in the railway industry. The purpose of this study is to examine the critical organizational factors and the scheduling system of a railway company and to understand the relationships between job-related factors and locomotive crewmen's responses on fatigue, health and social well-being.; A 148-item questionnaire was developed and distributed to a sample of 276 locomotive engineers and conductors based at the Portage depot, Wisconsin, and the Enderlin depot, North Dakota. One hundred and twenty-five questionnaires were answered and returned, the response rate was 45.3%. Structural equation modeling was performed to identify the relationships between the studied factors.; The results of this study indicated that organizational factors and the scheduling system could not be distinguished as two separate factors. The scheduling system is not just the practice of assigning locomotive crewmen to trains, but it is a function tightly connected with other organizational factors. The mediate role of Social Well-Being between Scheduling and Fatigue is another important finding. All of the Scheduling related variables, such as Length of Working Hours, Rest Window and Predictability, firstly affected Social Well-Being and secondly Fatigue. Finally, a strong relationship between fatigue and health complaints was found in the study.; This study identified the important role of social well-being on the fatigue issue in the railway industry. This study also pointed out that focusing only on the scheduling system and fatigue is insufficient to understand the difficulties encountered by the locomotive crew.