Job satisfaction and mental health of temporary agency workers in Europe: a systematic review and research agenda

The current systematic literature review aimed to analyse the associations between temporary agency work (TAW), job satisfaction, and mental health in Europe, as well as to outline a future research agenda. Twenty-eight scientific articles were identified by searching different data bases (i.e. PSYNDEX, PsycINFO, PubMed, and Web of Science) for the time span from January 2000 to December 2016. Our review reveals first that TAW is not consistently negatively related to job satisfaction. However, job insecurity and working conditions are important mediators in the relation of TAW and lowered job satisfaction. Second, TAW is not consistently related to all investigated types of mental health impairments. However, when focusing on specific outcomes and comparing temporary agency workers to permanent employees, we still find consistent evidence regarding higher levels of depression and fatigue among temporary agency workers. Inconsistent associations between TAW, job satisfaction and mental health can partly be attributed to unfavourable methodological aspects of the included primary studies. To address these aspects, future research should consider applying a standard measurement of TAW, including a minimum of meaningful confounding variables, improving the operationalisation of outcome variables and the study design.

This article is published in the Journal "Work & Stress" (2020).

First Online: 17 January 2019

Bibliographic information

Title:  Job satisfaction and mental health of temporary agency workers in Europe: a systematic review and research agenda. 

Written by:  L. Hünefeld, S. Gerstenberg, J. Hüffmeier

in: Work & Stress, Volume 34, Ausgabe 1, 2020.  pages: 82-110, Project number: F 2353, DOI: 10.1080/02678373.2019.1567619

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Further Information

Research Project

Project numberF 2353 StatusCompleted Project Mental health in the working world - determining the current state of scientific evidence

To the Project

Research completed