• Tests whether employees in similar jobs rate psychosocial hazards consistently. • 7 of 9 psychosocial hazards show adequate cross-site consistency (ICC ≥ 0.75) • Multigroup CFA suggests blue-collar jobs more suitable for aggregation. • Job satisfaction and exhaustion driven by individual rather than job factors. • Hazard-specific applicability replaces blanket JEM endorsement. In psychosocial risk assessment, averaging employee self-reports into job-level indicators of psychosocial hazard exposure is common practice; however, it remains unclear whether such indicators reliably generalize across similar jobs. This study applies a comparative approach to examine consistency in psychosocial hazard ratings among employees with comparable job roles at three locations of a European manufacturing company. A total of N = 2,065 employees in six groups of similar blue- and white-collar jobs completed self-report measures of nine key psychosocial hazards. Descriptive statistics and intraclass correlations (ICCs) were used to assess the consistency of hazard ratings, and a linear mixed-effects model examined the proportion of variance in job satisfaction, general health, and emotional exhaustion attributable to job-level versus individual-level differences. Results revealed moderate to high consistency (ICC3, k ≥ 0.75) for several psychosocial hazards (e.g., leadership quality, environmental conditions), although social relations and degrees of freedom exhibited lower consistency (0.38-0.62). Multigroup confirmatory factor analysis indicated stronger measurement equivalence among blue-collar jobs (7/8 scales metric invariant) than white-collar jobs (3/8 scales), though rating consistency remained adequate in both contexts for practical job-level characterization. Mixed-effects analyses indicated that job-level factors accounted for up to 40% of the variance in general health but explained little variance in job satisfaction and emotional exhaustion, suggesting these outcomes are driven primarily by individual-level factors. From a public policy and legal perspective, these findings underscore the utility of job exposure matrices for guiding organizational interventions and informing compliance with emerging standards for workplace mental health. Policy measures should recognize that not all psychosocial outcomes can be effectively captured by aggregated indicators, reinforcing the need for nuanced assessment strategies tailored to individual differences. While job exposure matrices provide valuable job-level characterizations of psychosocial hazards, they cannot offer the precise threshold values comparable to the logic of occupational exposure limits, necessitating their use as screening tools rather than definitive risk determinants.
Metzler et al. (Tue,) studied this question.