The Structure of Demand, Control, and Stability-Support Underlying the Job Content Questionnaire (JCQ) 2.0—An Innovative Tool for Assessing Multilevel Work Characteristics

Dominant theories in the field of occupational stress have so far mainly focused only on job task level psychosocial factors. Our novelty was to move the field forward by testing a new multilevel conceptualization of workplace health-related psychosocial factors, captured in the new JCQ 2.0 tool. The JCQ 2.0 tool assesses the theoretical constructs Demand (D), Control (C) and Stability-Support (S-S) at the task and the organizational level in accordance with the Associationalist Demand/Control (ADC) Model. We aimed for a first step to assess the generalizability of the framework by collecting data in four different countries (Korea, China, Australia, and Germany). Using structural equation modeling, the task level three-factor DCS structure was largely confirmed across all four countries (with one exception: skill discretion was an indicator of both control and demand). The organizational level, three-factor DCS-S structure was tested and confirmed in the German data only (only data with sufficient scales). Similarly, the multilevel DCS-S model could only be tested with the German data only and was largely confirmed with the three organizational level factors (D, C, and S-S) as antecedents to their task level analogues (with one exception: supervisor support was an indicator of organizational rather than task level support). The findings provide a first step to advancing existing knowledge by providing preliminary support for a multilevel DCS model. Further multilevel longitudinal research is required to verify the main findings and explain some of the nuances uncovered here.