The Effects of a Change in Work Status Congruence on the Attitudes of Community Health Nurses

Work status congruence is the extent to which employees’ current work status (full time or part time) is congruent with their desired work status (Maynard, Thorsteinson & Parfyonova, 2006). Work status incongruence occurs when employees’ work status is inconsistent with their preferred work status, i.e., they are working full time but prefer to work part time or they are working part time but prefer to work full time. Although there is substantial research comparing full-time and part-time workers, only a few studies have examined work status congruence (Barling & Gallagher, 1996; Thorsteinson, 2003; van Emmerik & Sanders, 2005). The present study makes a unique contribution to the limited research in this area by examining the impact of change in a person’s work status congruence. The research to date has been cross-sectional. We found no studies that have investigated work status congruence over time. Moreover, no researchers to our knowledge have previously examined what effect a change in work status congruence may have on employees’ attitudes. Our longitudinal panel study was conducted over a two-year period with a sample of community health nurses. Thus, we were able to examine not only the relationship of work status congruence with nurses’ attitudes at two time periods but also compare those nurses whose work status congruence remained the same to those whose work status congruence changed during this time.