Abstract
The Type A personality trait is characterized by time urgency and competitiveness and has been shown to have an impact on human performance in a variety of settings. A laboratory study was conducted to assess the effect of personality type on the break-taking behavior of participants asked to perform a fatiguing overhead work task. Sixteen subjects (eight classified as Type A individuals and eight classified as Type B individuals) performed 40 repetitions of a simple assembly task in an overhead position and were allowed to take breaks as needed. The dependent measures included the time to complete the experiment, the average cycle time, the number of breaks taken, the total amount of break time, and the average pain level experienced during the whole experiment. The results of this study showed a wide range in the work–rest strategies employed by the participants. Some chose regularly scheduled breaks, others seemed to identify a specific pain threshold at which they would take a break, while still others adopted a strategy of taking a small number of longer breaks. Interestingly, personality type did not have a significant effect on the break-taking behavior of the participants as defined by our dependent measures. Further, an analysis of a cadre of additional potential covariates (upper extremity anthropometric characteristics, pain level at break time, etc.) did not provide any additional predictive ability in the analysis of the break-taking behavior. The results do show that these intra-individual “strategies” that the participants employed in performing this fatiguing task appear to be stable over the duration of the experiment, indicating that there are probably additional individual characteristics that may be driving the response, providing an interesting direction for future research.
Work-related musculoskeletal disorders continue to be a considerable problem in many industries. Personal characteristics of the worker may influence their exposures to recognized risk factors, and the evaluation of personality type relative to one component of work style (break-taking behaviors) is the focus of this work.