Job demands, job resources and innovative work behaviour: a European Union study

Organizational compassion and employee adversarial growth under various job control

Introduction

Adversity can bring stress and challenges to an individual's life, but many people who experience adversity also have positive changes. The formative mechanisms of individual adversarial growth have received widespread attention.

Methods

A two-wave survey of 421 Chinese employees who experienced adversity during the COVID-19 epidemic was used to examine the influence mechanism of organizational compassion on adversarial growth and the moderating effect of job control.

Results

Through correlation analysis, hierarchical regression, and bootstrap test on the cross-sectional data, the study has verified organizational compassion, work passion, self-worth, and adversarial growth form a chain mediating relation. Job control negatively moderates the indirect effect of organizational compassion on adversarial growth through work passion and self-worth, that is, the positive effect of organizational compassion on employee adversarial growth through work passion and self-worth is more pronounced under lower job control.

Discussion

Organizational compassion can increase employee adversarial growth by enhancing their work passion and self-worth. Organizations should also pay more attention to those employees with lower job control who are in adversity, they are more likely to benefit from the organization's care and compassion.

I feel the need – the need for speed! Unreasonable tasks, work pace, psychological detachment and emotional exhaustion

Purpose

At the dawn of a new decade, as ever more corporations are pursuing sustainable working conditions and advocating employee well-being, employees are increasingly tending to feel fatigued and drained by their work, which compromises their performance. Drawing on the job demands–resources model and social acceleration debate, the authors test a moderated mediation model. Specifically, the authors hypothesise that unreasonable tasks raise perceptions of emotional exhaustion when the pace of work is increased and investigate the moderating role of psychological detachment.

Design/methodology/approach

This study used a sample of 245 employees from Europe, all knowledge workers, to test the hypotheses.

Findings

Apart from unreasonable tasks being directly related with emotional exhaustion, this relationship was mediated by the perceived work pace. In addition, the authors establish psychological detachment as a relevant moderator for the mediating effect.

Practical implications

Managers and HR practitioners are equipped with a better understanding of the effects of an increasing speed of work, the conditions leading to it and the individual and organizational resources that may help to create healthy and meaningful job positions, which facilitate employee efficiency.

Originality/value

Our study expands the literature on contemporary stressors and adds to what is known about the ‘dark side’ of job demands that affect the organizational bottom-line, as well as the resource-based mechanism that can buffer the negative effects.

The effect of employee mindfulness in the new media industry on innovative behavior: The chain mediating role of positive emotion and work engagement

Mindfulness has long been concerned and emphasized by scholars in the field of psychology, but there is still a lack of research on mindfulness in management in China. In this study, a questionnaire survey was conducted among 483 employees in the new media industry in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Hangzhou, China. After modeling and analysis, it was found that employee mindfulness has a positive influence on innovative behavior. Employee mindfulness and innovative behavior are mediated by positive emotions. Employee mindfulness and innovative behavior are mediated by work engagement. Employee mindfulness and innovative behavior are mediated by a chain of positive emotions and work engagement. Enterprise managers should improve the level of mindfulness of employees in the new media industry through mindfulness training and courses for mindfulness training, create an organizational environment that can arouse positive emotions and improve the positive emotions of employees, pay attention to arousing the enthusiasm of the staff, and promote the innovative behavior of staff while enhancing work engagement.

The impact of national legislation on psychosocial risks on organisational action plans, psychosocial working conditions, and employee work-related stress in Europe

Work-related psychosocial hazards are recognised as a key priority in the future of work. Even though European Union (EU) legislation requires employers to assess and manage all types of risks to workers' health and safety associated with all types of hazards in the work environment, it does not include clear reference to psychosocial risks and work-related stress. In several EU member states, there is now more specific legislation on psychosocial risks that clarifies employer responsibilities. The aim of this study is to explore whether the introduction of specific legislation on psychosocial risks and/or work-related stress is related to organisations implementing action plans to prevent work-related stress, and in turn, better psychosocial working conditions (job demands and resources), and less reported work-related stress in the workforce. It does so by comparing EU member states and candidate countries that have introduced more specific legislation to those that have not, conducting multilevel modelling analysis by linking two representative European-level datasets, the 2014 employer European Survey of Enterprises on New & Emerging Risks and the 2015 employee European Working Conditions Survey. Findings indicate that the presence of specific national stress legislation is associated with more enterprises having a work-related stress action plan. The existence of action plans was found to be associated with increased job resources but not decreased job demands. Furthermore, only in those countries with specific national legislation on stress, job resources were found to be associated with less reported stress through the existence of organisational action plans. Findings lend support to the argument for more specific legislation on psychosocial risks/work-related stress in the EU. However, they also raise questions on whether current interventions implemented at organisational level to deal with work-related stress may be geared more towards the development of individual resources and less towards better work organisation and job design.

Examining the relationship between work conditions and entrepreneurial behavior of employees: does employee well-being matter?

Do perceptions of work conditions prompt employees to adopt entrepreneurial behaviors? Does well-being play a role in this relationship? This paper proposes an integrated model of the associations between perceptions of work conditions (job resources and job demands) and the dimensions of entrepreneurial behaviors (innovative behavior, proactive behavior, and risk-taking behavior). Following the job demands-resources model, we also explore whether employees' well-being (work engagement and emotional exhaustion) mediates the association between work conditions and employees' behavior. Survey data of 257 R&D employees from the chemical sector in Spain were analyzed. The research concludes that different work conditions correlate with the dimensions of entrepreneurial behavior of employees (EBE) in different ways. Job demands are associated with innovative work behavior. Feelings of engagement are related to the dimensions of EBE and play a mediating role between job resources and EBE. Moreover, feelings of exhaustion and risk-taking behavior are connected.

Gain or loss: the double-edged effect of empowering leadership on employees’ innovative behaviours

Purpose

Empowering leadership is often considered unequivocally positive for employees, but recent studies have shown that this ostensibly straightforward effect is more complex. The dual facets of the effect of empowering leadership – especially on employees’ innovative behaviour – have received insufficient attention. Based on job demand-resource (JD-R) theory, this study aims to propose a theoretical framework for the relationship between empowering leadership and employees’ innovative behaviours with a dual process model of gain and loss.

Design/methodology/approach

This study is survey based, with 261 paired leader–employee data points collected in the People’s Republic of China.

Findings

The results show that empowering leadership has a “double-edged” effect on employees’ innovative behaviours: it affects innovative behaviours positively through employee job engagement and negatively through emotional exhaustion. Moreover, trust in leaders moderates the mediating roles of job engagement and emotional exhaustion.

Originality/value

This study contends that empowering leadership has a dual impact on employees and proposes a promising model of this double-edged effect to contrast with other complex models in the empowering leadership literature. Furthermore, this study uses JD-R theory to deeply explore the dual process whereby empowering leadership influences employees’ innovative behaviour and provides practical guidance for business management.

Improving classification based on physical surface tension-neural net for the prediction of psychosocial-risk level in public school teachers

BACKGROUND

Psychosocial risks, also present in educational processes, are stress factors particularly critical in state-schools, affecting the efficacy, stress, and job satisfaction of the teachers. This study proposes an intelligent algorithm to improve the prediction of psychosocial risk, as a tool for the generation of health and risk prevention assistance programs.

METHODS

The proposed approach, Physical Surface Tension-Neural Net (PST-NN), applied the theory of superficial tension in liquids to an artificial neural network (ANN), in order to model four risk levels (low, medium, high and very high psychosocial risk). The model was trained and tested using the results of tests for measurement of the psychosocial risk levels of 5,443 teachers. Psychosocial, and also physiological and musculoskeletal symptoms, factors were included as inputs of the model. The classification efficiency of the PST-NN approach was evaluated by using the sensitivity, specificity, accuracy and ROC curve metrics, and compared against other techniques as the Decision Tree model, Naïve Bayes, ANN, Support Vector Machines, Robust Linear Regression and the Logistic Regression Model.

RESULTS

The modification of the ANN model, by the adaptation of a layer that includes concepts related to the theory of physical surface tension, improved the separation of the subjects according to the risk level group, as a function of the mass and perimeter outputs. Indeed, the PST-NN model showed better performance to classify psychosocial risk level on state-school teachers than the linear, probabilistic and logistic models included in this study, obtaining an average accuracy value of 97.31%.

CONCLUSIONS

The introduction of physical models, such as the physical surface tension, can improve the classification performance of ANN. Particularly, the PST-NN model can be used to predict and classify psychosocial risk levels among state-school teachers at work. This model could help to early identification of psychosocial risk and to the development of programs to prevent it.

From Job Resources to Idea Implementation: A Moderated Sequential Mediation Model

Considering the motivational path of the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model, this study investigates a multistep process by which contextual job resources might have an indirect effect on idea implementation. Among 187 shop floor employees of a manufacturing company, we found support for a model whereby job control has an indirect effect, over a 5-month time frame, on idea implementation through employee work engagement and personal initiative. In addition, we found that the indirect effect of job control on idea implementation is stronger when employees have a higher conformity orientation. Support was not found for the hypothesized indirect effect of coworker social support on idea implementation. Our findings support the usefulness of the JD-R theory for understanding how increased idea implementation occurs at work, especially when the additional factors of personal initiative and employee conformity orientation are integrated into the model.

Ressourcen und Anforderungen (ReA) in der Arbeitswelt: Entwicklung und erste Validierung eines Fragebogens

Dieser Beitrag in der Zeitschrift Gruppe. Interaktion. Organisation (GIO) stellt mit dem ReA Fragebogen ein umfassendes und branchenunabhängiges Analysetool zur Erfassung von Anforderungen und Ressourcen in Organisationen vor. Um die Gesundheit von Mitarbeitenden zu fördern und somit stressbedingten Fehlzeiten entgegenzuwirken, benötigen Organisationen geeignete Instrumente, um Anforderungen und Ressourcen zu identifizieren, um anschließende geeignete Maßnahmen zur Reduktion der Anforderungen sowie zur Stärkung der Ressourcen von Mitarbeitenden ableiten zu können. Basierend auf dem Job Demands-Resources (JDR) Modell und einer umfassenden Literaturrecherche zu relevanten Anforderungen und Ressourcen wurde ein Fragebogen entwickelt und überprüft. Faktorenanalytische Auswertungen in zwei Studien mit insgesamt 1600 Teilnehmenden bestätigen die angenommene Struktur des Instruments. Zudem zeigen sich in Übereinstimmung mit dem JDR Modell positive Zusammenhänge zwischen Ressourcen und Arbeitsengagement sowie Anforderungen und emotionaler Erschöpfung und ein negativer Zusammenhang zwischen Ressourcen und emotionaler Erschöpfung. Der mögliche Einsatz des Fragebogens zur Gesundheits-Prävention und im Rahmen der Gefährdungsbeurteilung psychischer Belastungen in Organisationen wird diskutiert.