Why does using personal strengths at work increase employee engagement, who makes the most out of it, and how?

Engaging in behaviors that take advantage of one's personal strengths at work can promote employee flourishing in the workplace and mental health. Personal strengths use has thus gained increasing attention within occupational psychology and positive organizational scholarship. In this article, we first integrate work on personal strengths use with the latest developments in the job demands-resources theory (and its extensions) to develop a conceptual model explaining how and why personal strengths use on the job increases work engagement. Specifically, we propose that feelings of inspiration and meaningfulness explain the relationship between personal strengths use and work engagement. Second, we identify two mechanisms through which employees can amplify the benefits associated with personal strengths use at work; that is, we propose that the increased engagement associated with strengths use makes employees more likely to capitalize on the positive aspects of their work by engaging in work-family interpersonal capitalization and positive work reflection. Further, our model predicts that employees' psychological capital moderates the effects of personal strengths use. We tested our theoretical predictions in a sample of 160 full-time employees who provided ratings that comprise a three-level data set (person, week, and day) comprising 943 matched weekly ratings and 2,787 daily ratings. Our hypotheses were largely supported by these data. Implications for theory, practice, and future research are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Stop the spin: The role of mindfulness practices in reducing affect spin.

Affect spin refers to shifts in emotional states over time; it captures people's reactivity to affective events. Recent evidence suggests that affect spin has costs for both organizations and for employees, yet little is known about the antecedents of affect spin and possibilities to reduce it. The present study builds on existing research by examining mindfulness as an antecedent of affect spin in employees. Specifically, we hypothesized that mindfulness practice reduces affect spin over time. We also expected that levels of affect spin are positively related to emotional exhaustion and negatively to job satisfaction, both at the between- and the within-person level of analysis. Finally, we hypothesized that decreases in affect spin due to mindfulness practice are associated with lower levels of emotional exhaustion and higher levels of job satisfaction. To examine trajectories of affect spin over time, we tested our hypotheses in a randomized controlled mindfulness intervention study (with a wait-list control group; total N = 173 individuals) using experience sampling methods over the course of a month. Results revealed that mindfulness practice led to gradual decreases in affect spin over the course of the study. As expected, between-person differences in affect spin were positively related to emotional exhaustion and negatively to job satisfaction. However, affect spin was not related to well-being outcomes at the within-person level and decreases in affect spin over time were also not associated with levels of emotional exhaustion and job satisfaction. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

How social stressors at work influence marital behaviors at home: An interpersonal model of work-family spillover.

Drawing on conservation of resources and related theories, this study develops and tests an interpersonal model of work-family spillover. Our model specifies how social stressors at work (i.e., workplace incivility, abusive supervision, interpersonal conflict) result in the experience of a social-based form of work-family conflict, ultimately influencing marital behaviors at home, on a daily basis. The mediating role of burnout and the moderating role of trust were also examined. A 2-week experience-sampling study with daily employee surveys at work and at home and with spousal ratings for employees' marital behaviors in the evening provided general support for the proposed relationships. Within individuals, social stressors at work were associated with burnout symptoms, which mediated the effect of workplace social stressors on social-based work-family conflict. In line with congruence response models, we found that those who are more trusting were more negatively affected by social stressors at work. Finally, on evenings when employees experienced social-based work-family conflict, their spouses reported more withdrawn and angry behaviors and less supportive behaviors shown toward them. Overall, the present research explicates a specific form of work-family conflict, one in which social stressors in one domain result in negative behaviors in the other domain via burnout experiences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

How and when service beneficiaries' gratitude enriches employees' daily lives.

Conventional research on gratitude has focused on the benefits of expressing or experiencing gratitude for the individual. However, recent theory and research have highlighted that there may too be benefits associated with receiving others' gratitude. Grounded in the Work-Home Resources model, we develop a conceptual model to understand whether, how, and for whom service providers (i.e., healthcare professionals) benefit from receiving service beneficiaries' (i.e., patients) gratitude in their daily work. We hypothesize that perceived gratitude from service beneficiaries enhances service providers' relational energy at work, which spills over to benefit their family lives later in the day. In addition, we hypothesize that the effect of gratitude on relational energy and its subsequent spillover effect to the family are contingent on employees' occupational identity. Two experience sampling studies with data collected from healthcare professionals and their spouses for two consecutive weeks (each) provided support for our hypothesized model. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and practical implications of our work. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

An App-Based Workplace Mindfulness Intervention, and Its Effects Over Time.

We investigated the week-to-week effects of a mindfulness intervention on emotional exhaustion, work engagement, and job satisfaction in a field study involving 218 participants who participated and reported their weekly outcomes during the 8-week program. To examine how mindfulness impacted work outcomes, we used intraindividual modeling of the 8-week data. Mindfulness increased over time, and time also had indirect effects on emotional exhaustion, work engagement, and job satisfaction, through mindfulness. Supplementary growth curve analyses on the improvement of mindfulness over time showed a slight decrease in the positive effect of time on mindfulness.

Robots at work: People prefer-and forgive-service robots with perceived feelings.

Organizations are increasingly relying on service robots to improve efficiency, but these robots often make mistakes, which can aggravate customers and negatively affect organizations. How can organizations mitigate the frontline impact of these robotic blunders? Drawing from theories of anthropomorphism and mind perception, we propose that people evaluate service robots more positively when they are anthropomorphized and seem more humanlike-capable of both agency (the ability to think) and experience (the ability to feel). We further propose that in the face of robot service failures, increased perceptions of experience should attenuate the negative effects of service failures, whereas increased perceptions of agency should amplify the negative effects of service failures on customer satisfaction. In a field study conducted in the world's first robot-staffed hotel (Study 1), we find that anthropomorphism generally leads to higher customer satisfaction and that perceived experience, but not agency, mediates this effect. Perceived experience (but not agency) also interacts with robot service failures to predict customer satisfaction such that high levels of perceived experience attenuate the negative impacts of service failures on customer satisfaction. We replicate these results in a lab experiment with a service robot (Study 2). Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Dispositional empathy, emotional display authenticity, and employee outcomes.

With the rise of jobs in the health care sector, research on emotional labor has become of increasing importance. In this study, we follow calls for scholars to include authentic emotional displays alongside the more traditionally examined emotional labor strategies (surface and deep acting) when examining the effects of employees' emotional performance at work. We theorize that dispositional empathy is an individual difference variable that influences whether and how employees regulate their emotional displays at work, and examine the indirect relationships between dispositional empathy and employees' self-reported job satisfaction, and objectively measured job performance and sickness absenteeism, through these emotional displays. Additionally, we examine how different types of job stressors (challenge and hindrance stressors) act as boundary conditions for the relationships of empathy with emotional displays and employee outcomes. Results from a study of 156 employees in a public hospital mostly supported our theoretical model. Implications for theory and practice are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Doing good, feeling good? The roles of helping motivation and citizenship pressure.

Drawing on self-determination theory, this research investigates whether the motivation behind employees' helping behaviors is associated with their positive affect and their subsequent help provision, and whether citizenship pressure moderates these relationships. A recall-based experiment and an experience-sampling study capturing helping episodes among fulltime employees found that when employees helped coworkers because of higher autonomous (controlled) motivation in a helping episode, they experienced higher (lower) positive affect, and they had stronger (weaker) helping intentions and helped coworkers more (less) subsequently. We further found that citizenship pressure enhanced the positive relationship between episodic autonomous motivation and positive affect. Overall, the results challenge the universality of the "doing good-feeling good" effect and explicate the joint roles of citizenship pressure and helpers' episodic motivation in influencing employees' positive affect and their subsequent helping behaviors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Personality characteristics that are valued in teams: Not always "more is better"?

This study investigates the relationships between personality traits and contributions to teamwork that are often assumed to be linear. We use a theory-driven approach to propose that extraversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness have inverted U-shaped relationships with contributions to teamwork. In a sample of 220 participants asked to perform a creative task in teams, we found that extraversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness were curvilinearly associated with peer-rated contributions to teamwork in such a way that the associations were positive, with a decreasing slope, up to a peak, and then they became negative as personality scores further increased. We replicated the results concerning the non-linear association between extraversion, conscientiousness and peer-rated contributions to teamwork in a sample of 314 participants engaged in a collaborative learning exercise. Our results support recent claims and empirical evidence that explorations of personality-work-related behaviours relationships should move beyond the linearity assumptions. We conclude by discussing the implications of our research for personnel selection.

Why do employees have better family lives when they are highly engaged at work?

Past research on the effects of work engagement on the family has demonstrated contrasting effects, with some suggesting that work engagement is beneficial for family life whereas others suggesting that it may be detrimental. In this research, using a sample of 125 employees who responded to daily surveys both at work and at home for 2 consecutive weeks, the authors present a multilevel examination of the relationships of work engagement to family outcomes aimed at elucidating such work-family effects. Their findings revealed that employees' daily work engagement experiences related positively, within individuals, to work-family interpersonal capitalization, which in turn, related positively to daily family satisfaction and to daily work-family balance. The findings also indicate that both the relationship between daily work engagement and work-family interpersonal capitalization and the indirect effects of daily work engagement on the family outcomes were stronger for employees with higher intrinsic motivation than for those with lower intrinsic motivation. The authors discuss theoretical and practical implications of the findings and offer directions for future research. (PsycINFO Database Record

Guilty and helpful: an emotion-based reparatory model of voluntary work behavior.

This study proposes a dynamic reparatory model of voluntary work behavior. We test the hypothesis that when people are made aware of their high level of negative behavior at work (i.e., counterproductive work behavior) and are informed that their behavior is counternormative and undesirable, the knowledge that they violated social norms induces guilt. This guilt, in turn, results in compensatory behavior that is positive in nature (i.e., organizational citizenship behavior). We report results from a field experiment involving normative feedback about employees' counterproductive work behavior to support this model. The findings indicate that undesirable behaviors in the workplace can be redressed by making employees aware of the negative consequences of these behaviors.

The mind and heart (literally) of the negotiator: personality and contextual determinants of experiential reactions and economic outcomes in negotiation.

The authors developed and tested a model proposing that negotiator personality interacts with the negotiation situation to influence negotiation processes and outcomes. In 2 studies, the authors found that negotiators high in agreeableness were best suited to integrative negotiations and that negotiators low in agreeableness were best suited to distributive negotiations. Consistent with this person-situation fit argument, in Study 1 the authors found that negotiators whose dispositions were a good fit to their negotiation context had higher levels of physiological (cardiac) arousal at the end of the negotiation compared with negotiators who were "misplaced" in situations inconsistent with their level of agreeableness, and this arousal was in turn related to increased economic outcomes. Study 2 replicated and extended the findings of Study 1, finding that person-situation fit was related to physiological (heart rate), psychological (positive affect), and behavioral activation (persistence) demonstrated during the negotiation, and these measures in turn were related to the economic outcomes achieved by participants.

Alternative reference points and outcome evaluation: the influence of affect.

Two studies examined the effect of affective states on decision outcome evaluation under the presence or absence of salient alternative reference points. Alternative reference points exist when there are 2 possible referents from which an outcome can be evaluated, and the outcome is judged as good from the perspective of one referent and bad from the perspective of the other. The results support a motivational process of evaluating outcomes in which individuals select the reference point that allows them to maintain positive mood or improve negative mood. Mood measurements taken before and after the task revealed that those in positive moods maintained their mood whether or not they had alternative reference points in the evaluation of their outcomes. Those in negative affective states improved their mood only when there was an alternative reference point that allowed the outcome to be compared favorably; when there was no such alternative reference point, they maintained their negative mood.

Too much of a good thing: curvilinear relationships between personality traits and job performance.

The relationships between personality traits and performance are often assumed to be linear. This assumption has been challenged conceptually and empirically, but results to date have been inconclusive. In the current study, we took a theory-driven approach in systematically addressing this issue. Results based on two different samples generally supported our expectations of the curvilinear relationships between personality traits, including Conscientiousness and Emotional Stability, and job performance dimensions, including task performance, organizational citizenship behavior, and counterproductive work behaviors. We also hypothesized and found that job complexity moderated the curvilinear personality­performance relationships such that the inflection points after which the relationships disappear were lower for low-complexity jobs than they were for high-complexity jobs. This finding suggests that high levels of the two personality traits examined are more beneficial for performance in high- than low-complexity jobs. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for the use of personality in personnel selection.

Are health and happiness the product of wisdom? The relationship of general mental ability to educational and occupational attainment, health, and well-being.

This study tested a structural model explaining the effects of general mental ability on economic, physical, and subjective well-being. A model was proposed that linked general mental ability to well-being using education, unhealthy behaviors (smoking and excessive drinking), occupational prestige, and health as mediating variables. The sample consisted of 398 individuals, from whom measures were collected across 4 periods. The results supported a model that includes direct and indirect (through unhealthy behaviors and occupational prestige) links from mental ability to physical well-being (i.e., health) and economic well-being. Furthermore, the results supported the relationships of economic well-being and physical well-being to subjective well-being. Overall, the study underscores the importance of general mental ability to work and nonwork outcomes, including physical, economic, and psychological well-being.

Mood, blood pressure, and heart rate at work: an experience-sampling study.

We describe a study that examined the distinctiveness of momentary positive and negative affect (PA and NA) and their relationships with blood pressure and heart rate at work in a sample of 67 full-time employees who provided psychological and physiological measurements multiple times a day, over 10 working days. These employees recorded their subjective ratings on personal digital assistant devices programmed specifically for this study, and assessed their blood pressure and heart rate using automatic recording devices, at each measurement period. Results support the distinctiveness of PA and NA. First, within-individual factor analyses confirmed the existence of two underlying factors in the momentary affect ratings. Second, the within-individual correlations between PA and NA scores (-.14), and among the two latent constructs (-.13) were both low in magnitude. Finally, as predicted by theory, NA was significantly related to blood pressure within individuals, whereas PA and blood pressure were unrelated (both PA and NA were related to heart rate within individuals, as predicted).

Personality and citizenship behavior: the mediating role of job satisfaction.

Using meta-analytic path analysis, the authors tested several structural models linking agreeableness and conscientiousness to organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Results showed that the 2 personality traits had both direct effects and indirect effects-through job satisfaction-on overall OCB. Meta-analytic moderator analyses that distinguished between individual- and organization-targeted citizenship behaviors (OCB-I and OCB-O) showed that agreeableness was more closely related with OCB-I and conscientiousness with OCB-O. Finally, the path analyses predicting OCB-I and OCB-O offered further support for the general hypothesis that these 2 constructs are distinct. That is, the results of these analyses revealed that agreeableness had both direct and indirect effects on OCB-I but only indirect effects on OCB-O, and that for conscientiousness the pattern of direct and indirect effects was exactly opposite (direct and indirect effects on OCB-O but only indirect effects on OCB-I).

When can employees have a family life? The effects of daily workload and affect on work-family conflict and social behaviors at home.

This article presents a longitudinal examination of antecedents and outcomes of work-to-family conflict. A total of 106 employees participating in an experience-sampling study were asked to respond to daily surveys both at work and at home, and their spouses were interviewed daily via telephone for a period of 2 weeks. Intraindividual analyses revealed that employees' perceptions of workload predicted work-to-family conflict over time, even when controlling for the number of hours spent at work. Workload also influenced affect at work, which in turn influenced affect at home. Finally, perhaps the most interesting finding in this study was that employees' behaviors in the family domain (reported by spouses) were predicted by the employees' perceptions of work-to-family conflict and their positive affect at home.

Explaining affective linkages in teams: individual differences in susceptibility to contagion and individualism-collectivism.

To expand on the understanding of how affective states are linked within teams, the authors describe a longitudinal study examining the linkages between team members' affective states over time. In a naturalistic team performance setting, they found evidence that the average affective state of the other team members was related to an individual team member's affect over time, even after controlling for team performance. In addition, they found that these affective linkages were moderated by individual differences in susceptibility to emotional contagion and collectivistic tendencies such that the strength of the linkage was stronger for those high in susceptibility and those with collectivistic tendencies. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Leader-member exchange and citizenship behaviors: a meta-analysis.

This article provides a meta-analytic review of the relationship between the quality of leader-member exchanges (LMX) and citizenship behaviors performed by employees. Results based on 50 independent samples (N = 9,324) indicate a moderately strong, positive relationship between LMX and citizenship behaviors (rho = .37). The results also support the moderating role of the target of the citizenship behaviors on the magnitude of the LMX-citizenship behavior relationship. As expected, LMX predicted individual-targeted behaviors more strongly than it predicted organizational targeted behaviors (rho = .38 vs. rho = .31), and the difference was statistically significant. Whether the LMX and the citizenship behavior ratings were provided by the same source or not also influenced the magnitude of the correlation between the 2 constructs.