Employees' Death Awareness and Organizational Citizenship Behavior: A Moderated Mediation Model.

The purpose of this study is to develop and test a theoretical model that distinguishes how death anxiety and death reflection influence organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) directed towards the organization (OCB-O) and individuals within it (OCB-I). We draw from terror management and posttraumatic growth (PTG) theories to argue for prosocial motivation as a mediator for these relationships. We also examine organizational identification (OI) as a potential moderator. Data were collected from 241 employees every month for 3 months. Our findings support the mediating role of prosocial motivation. Death anxiety was negatively related to prosocial motivation, whereas death reflection was positively related to prosocial motivation. In turn, prosocial motivation was positively related to OCB-I and OCB-O. Regarding moderation, lower levels of OI strengthened the indirect effects of death anxiety on OCB-I and OCB-O through prosocial motivation. However, OI did not moderate the indirect effects of death reflection on OCB-I or OCB-O. These results highlight the conceptual differences between death anxiety and death reflection. In addition, these results emphasize the need to explore death anxiety and death reflection in organizational research.

News from the front: A monthly study on stress and social support during a military deployment to a war zone.

Soldiers deployed to combat zones are likely to experience some stressful situations that can result in individual strains or ill health. In addition to the stressors originating in situ, problems at home can also affect soldiers' strains and attitudes about deployment. However, they may also possess resources in the form of social support from both their comrades and family that, based on resources theories of occupational stress, can lessen strains or enhance attitudes. A serious problem in examining this issue is the difficulty of studying their occupational stress, because collecting data in their work situation-a combat zone-is inherently complicated. Most studies rely on past recollection of the deployment situation in post-deployment data collections, with some studies including a pre-deployment measure or one data collection during deployment. The present study was the first to collect data from soldiers periodically (monthly) over the course of their entire deployment to a combat zone, which has the advantage of providing more accurate tracking of stressor and resource effects on both their strains and positive deployment attitudes closer to real time. This monthly diary study found that, consistent with resource theories of occupational stress, the previous month's combat stressors had a detrimental effect on many outcomes, and the resource of social support from work and home during the previous month improved physical health and depression, respectively. Future research should not only replicate this approach to data collection but also extend the measurement periods to examine soldiers' readjustment process after returning home. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

The long reach of the leader: Can empowering leadership at work result in enriched home lives?

Work-home enrichment occurs when employees' work roles and experiences lead to benefits and resources that improve the quality of life in the home role. Guided by the self-determination theory (SDT), we developed a serial mediation model in which empowering leadership predicted work-home enrichment via satisfaction of innate psychological needs of SDT and then via work engagement. Four waves of data over a 9-month period were obtained from 289 full-time U.S. employees. Structural equation modeling and the PROCESS macro were used to verify the indirect effect of empowering leadership on work-to-home enrichment. Empowering leadership predicted subordinates' need satisfaction, which, in turn, predicted work engagement. Work engagement was then associated with positive spillover from work to home roles in the form of work-home enrichment. Theoretically, empowering leadership is a condition of the work environment that can satisfy important psychological need requirements outlined in SDT and promote work engagement, thereby influencing employees' home functioning. Integrating the frameworks of empowering leadership and SDT, this study provided valuable insights for general employee well-being by showing how empowering leadership could have a spillover effect in the form of work-home enrichment. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Interventions in occupational health psychology.

The set of studies in this issue focus on applied interventions in occupational health psychology (OHP), that is, interventions that are intended to treat employee health and well-being problems or prevent these problems from occurring in the first place. An issue regarding many past evaluations of the effectiveness of these treatments was the relatively weak research methods, especially in regard to obtaining comparable groups to study so that internal validity is enhanced. Many of the studies presented here used the classically recommended approach of random assignment to alleviate this potential problem. We can see that there are a variety of types of potential treatments in OHP, including interventions focusing on changing the employee, other people in the employee's workplace (supervisors or coworkers), the employee's job characteristics, or the organization's climate. Although the ultimate criterion variables in OHP are indicators of employee wellness, some studies focused on improving what might theoretically be mediating variables between the interventions and employees' actual health or well-being. These outcomes include reductions of work-nonwork conflict and stigma of mental illness potentially present in the organization, its supervisors, or employees' coworkers. We note that there are probably moderators of the effectiveness of the interventions, so that a treatment may work better in some people, some situations, and some times than others. Finally, it is interesting to note that the interventions and their studies may be geographically concentrated rather than distributed equally around the globe. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Stress as Offense to Self: a Promising Approach Comes of Age.

Stress is related to goals being thwarted. Arguably, protecting one's self, both in terms of personal self-esteem and in terms of social self-esteem, is among the most prominent goals people pursue. Although this line of thought is hardly disputed, it does not play the prominent role in occupational health psychology that we think it deserves. Stress-as-Offense-to-Self theory focuses on threats and boosts to the self as important aspects of stressful, and resourceful, experiences at work. Within this framework we have developed the new concepts of illegitimate tasks and illegitimate stressors; we have investigated appreciation as a construct in its own right, rather than as part of larger constructs such as social support; and we propose that the threshold for noticing implications for the self in one's surroundings typically is low, implying that even subtle negative cues are likely to be appraised as offending, as exemplified by the concept of subtly offending feedback. Updating the first publication of the SOS concept, the current paper presents its theoretical rationale as well as research conducted so far. Research has covered a variety of phenomena, but the emphasis has been (a) on illegitimate tasks, which now can be considered as an established stressor, and (b) on appreciation, showing its importance in general and as a core element of social support. Furthermore, we discuss implications for further research as well as practical implications of an approach that is organized around threats and boosts to the self, thus complementing approaches that are organized around specific conditions or behaviors.

Challenge and hindrance demands lead to employees' health and behaviours through intrinsic motivation.

Based on the job demand-resource theory, this study examined the differential relationships of two types of job demands, challenge and hindrance stressors, with three outcomes: ill health, organizational citizenship behaviour, and work engagement. These relationships were mediated by two personal resources: psychological empowerment and organization-based self-esteem (OBSE). Data were collected at two separate points, 2 weeks apart. With 336 full-time U.S. employees, results from path analysis indicated that the challenge stressor, workload, was positively related to psychological empowerment and OBSE, both of which were in turn positively related to good work behaviours as well as negatively related to ill health, an indication that employees experienced physical symptoms and psychological strains. In contrast, hindrance stressors (role stressors and interpersonal conflict) showed the opposite patterns of relationships with these intermediate outcomes, resulting in less empowerment and OBSE. Overall, findings suggested that psychological empowerment and OBSE were important intrinsic motivational mechanisms through which some stressors (especially hindrance demands) can promote employees' favourable work behaviours as well as alleviate the negative health outcomes.

A Longitudinal Study of Work After Retirement: Examining Predictors of Bridge Employment, Continued Career Employment, and Retirement.

Older employees are increasingly accepting bridge employment, which occurs when older workers take employment for pay after they retire from their main career. This study examined predictors of workers' decisions to engage in bridge employment versus full retirement and career employment. A national sample of 482 older people in the United States was surveyed regarding various work-related and nonwork related predictors of retirement decisions, and their retirement status was measured 5 years later. In bivariate analyses, both work-related variables (career goal achievement and experienced pressure to retire) and nonwork-related variables (psychological distress and traditional gender role orientation) predicted taking bridge employment, but in multinomial logistic regression, only nonwork variables had unique effects. Few predictors differentiated the bridge employed and fully retired groups. Nonwork variables were salient in making the decision to retire, and bridge employment may be conceptually more similar to full retirement than to career employment.

Illegitimate tasks as a source of work stress.

Illegitimate tasks represent a task-level stressor derived from role and justice theories within the framework of "Stress-as-Offense-to-Self" (SOS; Semmer, Jacobshagen, Meier, & Elfering, 2007). Tasks are illegitimate if they violate norms about what an employee can properly be expected to do, because they are perceived as unnecessary or unreasonable; they imply a threat to one's professional identity. We report three studies testing associations between illegitimate tasks and well-being/strain. In two cross-sectional studies, illegitimate tasks predicted low self-esteem, feelings of resentment towards one's organization and burnout, controlling for role conflict, distributive injustice and social stressors in Study 1, and for distributive and procedural/interactional justice in Study 2. In Study 3, illegitimate tasks predicted two strain variables (feelings of resentment towards one's organization and irritability) over a period of two months, controlling for initial values of strain. Results confirm the unique contribution of illegitimate tasks to well-being and strain, beyond the effects of other predictors. Moreover, Study 3 demonstrated that illegitimate tasks predicted strain, rather than being predicted by it. We therefore conclude that illegitimate tasks represent an aspect of job design that deserves more attention, both in research and in decisions about task assignments.

A three-phase model of retirement decision making.

The present article organizes prominent theories about retirement decision making around three different types of thinking about retirement: imagining the possibility of retirement, assessing when it is time to let go of long-held jobs, and putting concrete plans for retirement into action at present. It also highlights important directions for future research on retirement decision making, including perceptions of declining person-environment fit, the role of personality traits, occupational norms regarding retirement, broader criteria for assessing older workers' job performance, couples' joint decision making about retirement, the impact of self-funded and self-guided pension plans on retirement decisions, bridge employment before total withdrawal from the work force, and retirement decisions that are neither entirely forced nor voluntary in nature.

Occupational stress and failures of social support: when helping hurts.

Research, theory, and practice generally assume that contact with others, often characterized as social support, is beneficial to the recipient. The current study, however, explores the possibility that workplace social interactions, even if intended to be helpful, can sometimes be harmful. University employees (N = 403) completed an online survey examining three types of potentially supportive interactions with other people in the workplace that might be harmful: Interactions that make the person focus on how stressful the workplace is, help that makes the recipient feel inadequate or incompetent, and help that is unwanted. Results suggest that these types of social interactions at work were indeed likely to be related to worse rather than to improved psychological and physical health. The most potentially harmful forms of these three social interactions were those that drew the person's attention to stress in the workplace. These results indicate that in some instances social interactions, even if ostensibly helpful, may be harmful.

Workplace harassment from the victim's perspective: a theoretical model and meta-analysis.

Although workplace harassment affects the lives of many employees, until recently it has been relatively ignored in the organizational psychology literature. First, the authors introduced an attribution- and reciprocity-based model that explains the link between harassment and its potential causes and consequences. The authors then conducted a meta-analysis to examine the potential antecedents and consequences of workplace harassment. As shown by the meta-analysis, both environmental and individual difference factors potentially contributed to harassment and harassment was negatively related to the well-being of both individual employees and their employing organizations. Furthermore, harassment contributed to the variance in many outcomes, even after controlling for 2 of the most commonly studied occupational stressors, role ambiguity and role conflict.

Adaptation-level theory, opponent process theory, and dispositions: an integrated approach to the stability of job satisfaction.

Research suggests that the stability of job satisfaction is partially the result of dispositions (J. J. Connolly & C. Viswesvaran, 2000; C. Dormann & D. Zapf, 2001; T. A. Judge & J. E. Bono, 2001a; T. A. Judge, D. Heller, & M. K. Mount, 2002). Opponent process theory (R. L. Solomon & J. D. Corbit, 1973, 1974) and adaptation-level theory (H. Helson, 1948) are alternative explanations of this stability that explain how environmental effects on job satisfaction dissipate across time. On the basis of an integration of these explanations, the authors propose that dispositions (a) influence employees' equilibrium or adaptation level of job satisfaction, (b) influence employees' sensitivity to workplace events, and (c) influence the speed at which job satisfaction returns to equilibrium after one is exposed to a workplace event. Research and applied implications are discussed.

Explaining potential antecedents of workplace social support: reciprocity or attractiveness?

Effects of social support are an important topic in occupational stress theories and research, yet little is known about support's potential antecedents. Based on reciprocity theory, the authors hypothesized that the social support received is related to the extent the employee performs organizational citizenship behaviors directed at individuals and to one's social competence; based on the notion of personal attraction, the authors hypothesized that employees' physical attractiveness and sense of humor would be associated with the amount of social support received. In a survey of 123 high school employees and separate ratings of their attractiveness, reciprocity variables were related but attraction variables were not related to social support availability. Further research should examine reciprocity in predicting social support.

The enigma of social support and occupational stress: source congruence and gender role effects.

Research on the potential ameliorating effects of social support on occupational stress produces weak, inconsistent, and even contradictory results. This study of 117 employees, mostly from a southern U.S. hospital supply company, examined potential moderators that were theorized might reduce the confusion: source congruence (congruence between sources of the stressor and of social support) and gender role. Congruence between the sources of stressors and of social support appeared to make little difference in determining the moderating or buffering effect of social support on the relationship between stressors and strain. Gender role, however, may moderate the relationship between social support and individual stains such that more feminine people react more strongly and positively to social support than more masculine people do.

Applying work-role attachment theory to retirement decision-making.

This study examined the relationships between work-role attachment variables (job involvement, affective organizational commitment, and career identification) and intention to retire. Results indicated that organizational commitment was negatively related to retirement intent. Contrary to expectations, job involvement displayed a positive relationship and career identification had no relationship to retirement intent.