Whether integrating work into home benefits or harms an employee's family role is a critical issue that has met with mixed findings in the extant literature. Work-home integration can be manifested ...in different ways. Unfortunately, prior research has tended to use global assessments of integration that may mask relationships between different types of integration and work-family outcomes. In 2 studies, the present research takes a step toward a more fine-grained analysis by focusing on the work-family consequences of affective rumination and problem-solving pondering, both of which represent psychological integration of work into home. In Study 1, using a between-person design with a 6-week time lag (NTime1 = 519, NTime2 = 231), affective rumination was positively related to work-family conflict and negatively to work-family enrichment, whereas problem-solving pondering was unrelated to work-family conflict and positively related to work-family enrichment. In Study 2, a within-person daily diary study over 1 workweek (N = 103), affectively ruminating more than usual was related to more work-family conflict than usual and to less enrichment than usual. Moreover, average affective rumination over 1 workweek was negatively related to average work-family enrichment. Problem-solving pondering was unrelated to work-family conflict and enrichment within persons, but was positively related to work-family enrichment between persons. Neither study supported the hypothesis that trait self-control would buffer the negative consequences of affective rumination. Overall, these results emphasize the importance of investigating the consequences of specific types of integrating work into home rather than overall tendencies of doing so.
Based on the conservation of resources theory, we argue that work engagement involves resource investment, and therefore physiologically depletes resources. On this basis, we propose that work ...engagement accompanies high sympathetic arousal at the within- and the between-person levels, i.e. a negative objective health effect contrary to previous findings of beneficial effects on subjective psychological outcomes. To test our hypotheses, we examined heart rate variability via ambulatory assessment of 118 public office employees across five workdays. We measured daily work engagement at the end of each workday and calculated low frequency normalised and low to high frequency ratio (indicators of sympathetic activation) for work, leisure, and sleeping times of each day. As assumed, multilevel analyses showed a positive relationship between work engagement and sympathetic activation at work, during leisure, and sleeping time at the between-person level. Our hypotheses concerning the within-person associations were not supported. Thus, elevated work engagement over one workweek is associated with higher sympathetic activation, which is discussed to be a health risk.
Despite the increasing interest in leaders’ health‐promoting behavior, the employees’ role in the effectiveness of such behavior and the mechanisms underlying how such leadership behavior affects ...their well‐being have largely been ignored. Drawing on implicit leadership theories, we advance the health‐oriented leadership literature by examining employees’ ideals, that is, their expectations regarding such leader behavior, as a moderating factor. We propose that higher expectations increase the association between actual health‐oriented leader behavior and employee‐rated leader‐member relationships (LMX) and health‐oriented behaviors by employees, which, in turn, positively relate to their well‐being (here: exhaustion and work engagement). We tested our theoretical model in three studies, using a cross‐sectional design (Study 1, N = 307), a two‐wave time‐lagged design (Study 2, N = 144) and an experimental design (Study 3, N = 173). We found that the effect of actual health‐oriented leader behavior on LMX is contingent on employees’ ideal health‐oriented leader behavior. Yet, for employees’ self‐care behavior, the proposed moderation was only significant in Study 1. High expectations strengthened the relationship between actual health‐oriented leader behavior with LMX and self‐care behavior, which, in turn, were associated with less exhaustion and more work engagement (only LMX), supporting most of our mediation hypotheses. Our results highlight the pivotal role of employees’ expectations regarding leaders’ health support and help in building practical interventions with regard to leaders’ health promotion.
There is strong and consistent evidence that identification with social groups is an important predictor of (ill‐)health‐related outcomes. However, the mediating mechanisms of the social ...identification–health link remain unclear. We present results from two studies, which aimed to test how perceived social support and collective self‐efficacy mediate the effect of social identification on emotional exhaustion, chronic stress, and depressive symptoms. Study 1 (N = 180) employed a longitudinal two‐wave design, whereas Study 2 (N = 100) used a field‐experimental design with a manipulation of participants’ social identity. Both studies consistently show that social identification was positively related to perceived social support, which, in turn, was positively associated with collective self‐efficacy. Collective self‐efficacy, finally, was negatively related to ill‐health outcomes.
In this article, we aim at theoretical specification and integration of mechanisms proposed within the Social Identity Approach to Health and Well‐being. We differentiate group‐level and ...individual‐level effects of shared social identity by distinguishing three different aspects: individual identification, group identification, and individually perceived group identification. We discuss specific group‐level mechanisms (i.e., mutual social support and collective self‐efficacy) and individual level‐mechanisms (i.e., attribution and appraisal processes regarding stressors and resources) for each of the three aspects. A core conclusion is that the positive effects of shared social identity on health and well‐being crucially depend on its close relationship with social support, and that although social support is an interindividual phenomenon, it is intraindividual mechanisms—attribution and appraisal—that shape the psychological partnership between social identity and social support. Therefore, we put special emphasis on cross‐level interactions between group‐ and individual‐level mechanisms, which have been widely neglected in earlier research.
Because of the overlap between the social roles of women and followers, we predicted that people would show a bias, that is, favor female followers over male followers. To support this hypothesis, we ...conducted two studies: An explicit test of the bias using a scenario design and an implicit association test (IAT)‐based study. Both studies show that the role of an ideal follower is more strongly associated with the female gender role, which seems to be caused partly by a more communal connotation of the follower role. This effect might contribute to the underrepresentation of women in leadership positions as they are perceived to be an ideal fit for followership positions; but it may also push men away from being followers and into leadership positions.
PurposeHealth-oriented leadership is an emerging concept that is promising for better understanding how leaders can support employee well-being. However, there is uncertainty about the process ...through which health-oriented leadership relates to employee well-being. Advancing health-oriented leadership research, this study aims to examine employee self-care and the perceived team health climate as mediating mechanisms.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted a time-lagged study with three measurement points (NT1 = 335, NT2 = 134, NT2 = 113) to test these mechanisms.FindingsThe results show that health-oriented leadership at Time 1 positively relates to employee self-care and perceived team health climate at Time 2, which, in turn, are negatively associated with employee exhaustion at Time 3.Originality/valueThe indirect associations suggest that health-oriented leadership relates to employee well-being via the perceived team health climate and the individuals' self-care. By revealing an important mediating mechanism, this study contributes to the health-oriented leadership literature and can help organizations and leaders improve health promotion in organizations.
Workaholism and overcommitment are often used as interchangeable constructs describing an individual’s over-involvement toward their own job. Employees with high levels in both constructs are ...characterized by an excessive effort and attachment to their job, with the incapability to detach from it and negative consequences in terms of poor health and job burnout. However, few studies have simultaneously measured both constructs, and their relationships are still not clear. In this study, we try to disentangle workaholism and overcommitment by comparing them with theoretically related contextual and personal antecedents, as well as their health consequences. We conducted a nonprobability mixed mode research design on 133 employees from different organizations in Italy using both self- and other-reported measures. To test our hypothesis that workaholism and overcommitment are related yet different constructs, we used partial correlations and regression analyses. The results confirm that these two constructs are related to each other, but also outline that overcommitment (and not workaholism) is uniquely related to job burnout, so that overcommitment rather than workaholism could represent the true negative aspect of work drive. Additionally, workaholism is more related to conscientiousness than overcommitment, while overcommitment shows a stronger relationship with neuroticism than workaholism. The theoretical implications are discussed.
The social identity approach to stress proposes that the beneficial effects of social identification develop through individual and group processes, but few studies have addressed both levels ...simultaneously. Using a multilevel person–environment fit framework, we investigate the group-level relationship between team identification (TI) and exhaustion, the individual-level relationship for people within a group, and the cross-level moderation effect to test whether individual-level exhaustion depends on the level of (in)congruence in TI between individuals and their group as a whole. We test our hypotheses in a sample of 525 employees from 82 teams. Multilevel polynomial regression analysis revealed a negative linear relationship between individual-level identification and exhaustion. Surprisingly, the relation between group-level identification and exhaustion was curvilinear, indicating that group-level identification was more beneficial at low and high levels compared with medium levels. As predicted, the cross-level moderation of the individual-level relationship by group-level identification was also significant, showing that as individuals became more incongruent in a positive direction (i.e., they identified more strongly than the average team member), they reported less exhaustion, but only if the group-level identification was average or high. These results emphasize the benefits of analyzing TI in a multilevel framework, with both theoretical and practical implications.
Working in academia entails many challenges including rejections by journals, competition for funding or jobs, and uncertain job outlooks (for non-tenure staff), which can result in poor mental ...health and well-being. Previous studies have suggested self-compassion as a resource for mental health and well-being, but to date no study has been published that has tested interventions targeting self-compassion in academia. In this weekly diary study, 317 academics from Germany, Switzerland, and the US were asked to recall a negative event and were then randomly assigned to either a self-compassionate writing intervention, a three good things intervention, or an active control intervention, respectively. They also completed two surveys on four consecutive Thursdays measuring state positive and negative affect and job-related well-being (i.e., job satisfaction and work engagement). Using multi-level regression modelling, results showed that participants in the self-compassion condition reported more job satisfaction and work engagement due to experiencing less negative affect. Academics in the three good things condition showed no such effects. Results indicated that self-compassion in academia is a resource that enables emotion-oriented coping during difficult times or in challenging situations that may benefit academics’ job-related well-being. The study highlights both the importance of discussing well-being in academia and ways to strengthen it.
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