Environmental, social, and corporate governance activities with employee psychological well-being improvement

The Association Between Intimate Partner Violence and Work Thriving/Work Alienation Among Chinese Female Nurses: The Mediating Impact of Resilience

Objective

The primary objective of this cross-sectional study was to examine the prevalence of different types of intimate partner violence (IPV) among female nurses employed in public hospitals across China. Additionally, the study sought to investigate the relationship between nurses' psychological resilience and their experiences of work thriving and work alienation in the aftermath of IPV.

Methods

This cross-sectional study utilized an online self-report survey to collect data from a sample of 522 female nurses working in public healthcare facilities across several major cities in China. The survey instrument collected information on participants' sociodemographic characteristics, experiences of intimate partner violence (IPV), psychological resilience, work thriving, and work alienation. The Kruskal-Wallis one-way ANOVA test was used to compare outcome variables across IPV exposure groups, and multiple linear regression modeling was subsequently performed to examine the associations between the dependent variables (work thriving and work alienation) and the independent variables, including IPV exposure and resilience.

Results

The overall prevalence of IPV reported by the female nurse participants was 74.26%. Specifically, the rates of emotional IPV, physical IPV, and sexual IPV were 74.06%, 24.27%, and 7.53%, respectively. The results indicated that total IPV exposure, the three IPV subtypes, psychological resilience, work thriving, and work alienation were all significantly and positively interrelated. IPV scores demonstrated a negative association with psychological resilience and work thriving, but a positive association with work alienation. Importantly, psychological resilience was found to be positively correlated with work thriving and negatively correlated with work alienation.

Conclusion

The findings suggest that psychological resilience plays a pivotal role, both directly and indirectly, in influencing the work-related outcomes of female nurses who have experienced IPV. Specifically, resilience was positively associated with thriving at work and directly negatively associated with work alienation, though a partial mediating effect of resilience was also observed.

Understanding the Evolution of Environment, Social and Governance Research: Novel Implications From Bibliometric and Network Analysis

Given the scarcity of comprehensive review studies in the literature, this bibliometric analysis thrives on taking a scientific approach to delivering quantitative and qualitative information on the ever-evolving field of ESG. Utilizing the performance analysis and science mapping techniques which includes citation analysis, co-word analysis, the study reports a holistic overview of 693 (ESG) papers from 1991 to 2020. The paper aims to provide a unified perspective on the evolution and further identify future research directions in this field. The findings point to the most important countries, authors, studies, and top journals in this field. Results show that published articles on ESG gained momentum after 2006; however, an exponential rise is being observed in the past 5 years, with research focusing on sustainable finance, sustainable development, ESG, and CSR with themes extending to risk management, stakeholder engagement, and portfolio construction, among others. Furthermore, the research identifies how the practice of ESG reporting affects many variables such as financial performance, social performance, environmental performance, and sustainability score. The findings also indicate that the field of ESG is still evolving, with numerous unexplored themes. The work is novel and relevant on the pretext that it uses the Scopus and Web of Science databases for bibliometric mapping, whereas previous studies have used the Scopus database but have lacked a robust methodology, so the findings of this study provided strong support for identifying emerging paradigms in the ESG literature.

Studying the Interrelationship between Telecommuting during COVID-19, residential local accessibility, and active travel: a panel study in Montréal, Canada

The COVID-19 pandemic led to a substantial increase in the number of people working from home (telecommuting), in turn leading to unprecedented changes in mobility patterns worldwide. Due to the changing context of the pandemic, there is still a significant gap in knowledge regarding the effects of working from home on workers' travel patterns. The main goal of this work is to unravel the interrelationship between telecommuting during the COVID-19 pandemic, the frequency of active travel for non-work utilitarian purposes, and local accessibility levels around workers' homes. This study uses a longitudinal approach by analyzing travel and telecommuting behavior data from a two-wave survey administered in Montreal in 2019, pre-pandemic, and 2021, during COVID-19 (n = 452). Through a set of weighted multi-level linear regressions, we study the effects of telecommuting on the frequency of active travel for non-work utilitarian purposes, mediated by local accessibility around the household. Results show that the effect of telecommuting on non-work active travel for utilitarian purposes is highly dependent on local accessibility levels around the person's household. For workers living in high local accessibility areas, an increase in telecommuting during the pandemic has induced an increase in active trips for non-work utilitarian purposes. On the other hand, for workers residing in low local accessibility neighborhoods, the effect is the opposite. This research provides insights into the effects of telecommuting on non-work active travel, an area that is currently of interest to policy-makers and practitioners working towards increasing the level of physical activity among individuals through travel.

Effects of ESG Activity Recognition Factors on Innovative Organization Culture, Job Crafting, and Job Performance

This study aims to verify the effects of organizational members’ ESG activity recognition on job performance with the mediation of innovative organizational culture and job crafting. To this end, a questionnaire survey was carried out based on previous studies, and 237 questionnaire response copies were analyzed. An empirical study was conducted on the effects of each ESG activity recognition factor on job performance with the mediation of innovative organizational culture and job crafting. According to the analysis result, the society factor had a positive (+) effect on innovation-oriented culture among the ESG activity recognition factors, the environment factor had a negative (−) effect, and the governance factor did not have any effect. In contrast, governance had a positive (+) effect on relationship-oriented culture in innovative organizational culture. However, the environment and societal factors did not have any effect. The innovation-oriented culture and relationship-oriented culture directly affected job crafting, but they were confirmed not to have a direct effect on job performance. Hence, the result shows that the ESG activity recognition’s society factor reinforces innovative organizational culture, and the governance factor can consolidate organizational relationships.

The Effects of ESG Activity Recognition of Corporate Employees on Job Performance: The Case of South Korea

Corporate environment, society, and governance (ESG) management activities have recently been consolidated in the business ecosystem, and many firms are considering their employees’ recognition and job changes according to organizational ESG strategy. This study aims to verify the effects of ESG activity recognition of corporate employees on job performance by mediating change support behavior, innovative organization culture, and job crafting. This study designs a structural equation model with a hypotheses based on previous studies. A questionnaire survey was carried out targeting large Korean manufacturing companies, and an analysis of 329 response copies was performed. As a result, ESG activity recognition did not directly affect job crafting, but it affected job crafting with the mediation of innovative organizational culture and change support behavior. ESG activity recognition also positively affected job crafting and job performance by mediating change support behavior and an innovative organization culture. Hence, the research shows that an innovative culture and change support behavior within an organization should be considered to improve ESG management performance.

Occupational stress: evidence from industries affected by COVID-19 in Japan

BACKGROUND

This study provides objective evidence on the impact of COVID-19 based on employee occupational stress reported from 13 different industries, and examines the determinants of employee psychological well-being. As the economic and social impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic continue, governments should consider industry-level differences when making support decisions concerning public resource allocation to corporations. However, little evidence exists regarding the differences in occupational stress across industries.

METHODS

Employee occupational stress data (N = 673,071) was derived from workers in Japan from 2018 to 2020. The sample comprises workers from 13 industries, including civil services, service industry (other), real estate, medical/welfare, wholesale/retail, academic research, and accommodation/restaurant business. A logit model is employed to investigate the differences in employees' psychological well-being before and during the pandemic.

RESULTS

In 2020, 11 out of 12 industries had significantly worse occupational stress compared to employees engaged in civil services. Over 23% of employees from the wholesale/retail and accommodation/restaurant industries were observed as high-stress employees. Improved compensation policies supporting these industries are suggested. In contrast, reduced occupational stress was found among employees in the transportation/postal and information/communication industries. Among the 13 industries, aside from high job demands, tough inter-person relationships in the workplace became the most significant stressors during the pandemic.

CONCLUSIONS

The results confirm that the pandemic has had a heterogeneous effect on employee occupational stress across industries, thus suggesting that the level of compensation given to different industries during the COVID-19 pandemic should be discussed and approved by the Japanese government. Additionally, support for the wholesale/retail and accommodation/restaurant industries during the pandemic should be improved.

Acculturation, trust to health care system, and attitudes to COVID-19 vaccination: A comparative study between Polish immigrants in Norway, Polish in Poland, and Norwegians in Norway

Fast deployment of safe and efficient COVID-19 vaccines has changed the course of the pandemic in many countries reducing COVID-19 death rates and allowing countries to abandon strict measures such as social distancing and restrictions to public events. The vaccination strategy, however, is based on the expected high vaccination rate in the population. Several studies have indicated vaccination hesitancy to be higher in ethnic minority communities, which can lead to unnecessary suffering and loss of lives, worsening pre-existing health inequalities and marginalization of ethnic minority groups. The aim of the present study was to investigate the relationships between acculturation to Norwegian culture, trust in health authorities, and attitude to COVID-19 vaccine among Polish immigrants in Norway. An internet-based survey including questions about attitude to COVID-19 vaccination and trust in the health care system was filled by 150 Polish immigrants in Norway, 256 Polish living in Poland, and 264 Norwegians living in Norway. In addition, the Polish immigrants also answered questions about acculturation to Norway. The results showed that the Polish immigrants in Norway had less positive attitudes to COVID-19 vaccination than the Norwegians, while they did not differ from Polish living in Poland. The Polish immigrants also indicated lower trust in the Norwegian health care system than the Norwegians. In regression analysis, the trust in the values of the health care system was the most important predictor of COVID-19 vaccination attitudes in all three samples. A path model showed that trust in the values of the health care system mediated the effects of acculturation to Norway on COVID-19 vaccination attitudes among Polish immigrants. These results underline the importance of taking ethnic minorities and immigrants into account in the health care system to reduce COVID-19 vaccination hesitancy.

Long-term improvement of psychological well-being in the workplace: What and how

OBJECTIVE

The World Health Organization states that by 2030, mental illness will become the leading global disease burden. Thus, investigations of job stress might require more heterogeneous and innovative solutions. Existing literature demonstrates that good workplace environments have favorable effects on employees' psychological well-being. However, studies on long-term effects are scarce. This study examined the long-term impact of comprehensive workplace characteristics and employee responses to stress (coping strategies) on job stress in Japan.

METHODS

Under a large-scale 3-year longitudinal study, 1,021,178 observations collected from employees in 390 companies from 2017 to 2019 were used. Employee job stress trends were confirmed based on company-fixed-effects linear regression. The relationship between one-year or two-year lagged comprehensive workplace characteristics or coping strategies, and employee job stress was estimated using linear regression. Favorable effects of the work environment and coping strategy improvement were illustrated based on the regression results simulation.

RESULTS

First, job stress appeared to be steadily worsening among the employees of Japanese companies from 2017 to 2019. Second, low job and psychological demand, high job control, a high level of support from the people around, balanced effort-reward, strong job security, and strong interpersonal relationship have favorable long-term effects on employee job stress. Third, employees' coping strategies, such as positive thinking, changing mood, requiring help from other people, reduced negative thinking, and avoiding inappropriate emotional divergence have long-term effects on mitigating job stress. Particularly, thinking positively, changing mood, and avoiding directing feelings of anger and frustration toward others reduce high stress in 46% of respondent employees.

CONCLUSIONS

A comprehensive well-organized workplace environment and appropriate responses to stress have a long-term favorable effect on employee job stress. These results provide policy measures for improving the workplace environment and for employees to adopt coping strategies to enhance their psychological well-being in the long term.