Workforce Disengagement Stressors and Retiree Alcohol Misuse: The Mediating Effects of Sleep Problems and the Moderating Effects of Gender

Linking emotional intelligence to safety performance: The roles of situational awareness and safety training

INTRODUCTION

Safety outcomes in the workplace require individual employees to perform (behave) safely in everyday duties. While the literature suggests that emotional management capabilities or traits can be positively related to individual performance in certain conditions, it is not clear how they can influence safety-related performance in high-risk work contexts. Drawing upon trait activation theory, this paper aims to examine when emotional intelligence (EI) benefits employees' safety performance. We propose that when employees receive inadequate safety training, EI is more likely to trigger their situational awareness and consequently promote their safety performance.

METHOD

We collected time-lagged data from 133 full-time airplane pilots working in commercial aviation industry. Hierarchical moderated regression analysis was conducted to test the moderating effect of safety training inadequacy on the EI-situational awareness relationship. The moderated mediation model, which involves conditional indirect effects of EI on safety performance via situational awareness across different levels of safety training inadequacy, was tested using the PROCESS-based bootstrap confidence interval.

RESULTS

Safety training inadequacy negatively moderated the relationship between EI and situational awareness, such that EI was significantly related to situational awareness only when safety training inadequacy was more salient. The more inadequate safety training was, the greater the indirect effect of EI on safety performance via situational awareness was.

CONCLUSIONS

Inadequate safety training, as a negative situational cue, can activate individuals' EI to drive their safety-related cognitions (e.g., situational awareness) and behaviors. Effective safety training may be able to complement employees' low EI in shaping their situational awareness and safety behaviors. Practical Applications: Aviation managers should monitor the adequacy and effectiveness of safety training; this could make pilots' situational awareness and safety performance depend less on personal attributes (e.g., EI), which organizations are less able to control. When training capacity is temporarily limited, priority might be given to those with low EI.

The lingering effects of work context: Ambient work-unit characteristics and the impact of retirement on alcohol consumption

While it is well established that workplace demands and culture can affect employee well-being, to what degree might these same factors have lingering implications on individual wellbeing after employees retire? To begin to answer this question, in this paper we propose and test a model explaining how retiree alcohol consumption may depend on pre-retirement contextual conditions. Specifically, we propose and test a moderated-mediation model in which two ambient work unit characteristics-work-unit stress climate and work-unit drinking norms-moderate the indirect effects of retirement, via distress, on modal alcohol consumption (i.e., the typical quantity and frequency of alcohol consumed). Using a prospective study design and a multi-level, zero-inflated negative binomial model for predicting modal alcohol consumption, our findings lend partial support for the proposed model. We found retirement (vs. continued employment) to be associated with a heightened probability of being an abstainer after retirement eligibility (i.e., at Time 2), regardless of the hypothesized unit-level moderators. Still, retirement had mixed effects on the level of modal consumption among those not abstaining at Time 2, with these effects being partially mediated by distress and contingent upon unit-level stress climate and unit-level drinking norms.

Expatriation, alcohol and drugs: antecedents and consequences of substance use in expatriation

Purpose

Expatriation is known to be stressful. The purpose of this paper is to examine stress as an antecedent of substance use (SU) during expatriation and related effects on expatriates’ work adjustment. Moreover, the study sheds light on individual-level moderators (i.e. gender and prior international experience) and organizational-level moderators (i.e. organizational social support) that might condition the stress–SU link.

Design/methodology/approach

This work adopts a quantitative survey approach. It is based on two studies, one of 205 expatriates and one of 96 expatriate–supervisor dyads. The data were collected through personal networks and with the help of multinational companies.

Findings

This research shows that stress at a medium- to high-level increases SU among male expatriates, but not among female expatriates. Expatriates with substantial prior international experience were identified as being more prone to react to stress by resorting to SU. It also provides evidence that SU to aid coping harms professional adjustment. Moreover, some implications relating to professional adjustment are discussed.

Research limitations/implications

SU was self-reported; this may have deterred users from accurately reporting their consumption levels. Moreover, convenience samples have been used. Preventive actions limiting SU, such as well-being programs, could be sponsored by local human resource managers in order to limit this phenomenon.

Originality/value

This work is one of the first to analyze SU among expatriates. It shows that some expatriates are more at risk than others of resorting to such use to cope with the hardships of expatriation.

An Index and Test of Linear Moderated Mediation

I describe a test of linear moderated mediation in path analysis based on an interval estimate of the parameter of a function linking the indirect effect to values of a moderator-a parameter that I call the index of moderated mediation. This test can be used for models that integrate moderation and mediation in which the relationship between the indirect effect and the moderator is estimated as linear, including many of the models described by Edwards and Lambert ( 2007 ) and Preacher, Rucker, and Hayes ( 2007 ) as well as extensions of these models to processes involving multiple mediators operating in parallel or in serial. Generalization of the method to latent variable models is straightforward. Three empirical examples describe the computation of the index and the test, and its implementation is illustrated using Mplus and the PROCESS macro for SPSS and SAS.