Translating trait to state assessment: The case of grandiose narcissism.

Although interest in within-person variability in grandiose narcissism is growing, measurement tools are lacking that allow studying fluctuations in this personality characteristic in a differentiated manner (i.e., distinguishing narcissistic admiration and rivalry). This study explores whether a measurement approach using the six-item version of the Narcissistic Grandiosity Scale (NGS Rosenthal et al. (2007)) and six additional newly formulated adjectives allows assessing state admiration and rivalry. Structural characteristics and convergent validity of this approach were examined in an experience sampling study in which 114 adults participated, providing state assessments twice a day (total number of observations = 1306). Multilevel bifactor analyses revealed three factors (i.e., one general and two specific factors) at both within- and between-person levels. Further, admiration and rivalry showed a pattern of within-person associations with fluctuations in self-esteem and Big Five states that were consistent with theoretical expectations. Finally, average state admiration and average state rivalry correlated substantively with trait measures of these respective constructs assessed one week prior to the experience sampling design.

Align your job with yourself: The relationship between a job crafting intervention and work engagement, and the role of workload.

This article describes a quasi-experiment that evaluates the relationship between a job crafting intervention and work engagement. More particularly, we focused on three different types of job crafting: crafting towards strengths, crafting towards interests, and crafting towards development. Building on the conservation of resources theory, we hypothesized that participating in a job crafting intervention will be positively associated with job crafting, which in turn will promote work engagement. Additionally, based on the activation theory, we hypothesized that employees with a relatively high workload will benefit more from a job crafting intervention compared with employees with a relatively low workload. In all, 99 employees from a Dutch health care organization participated in our study (n = 45 in the treatment group; n = 54 in the control group). Results indicated that there was no association between the intervention and job crafting behaviors. However, the job crafting intervention was found to be positively related to interests crafting for workers with a relatively high workload, which in turn was associated with an increase in dedication and absorption. Additionally, we found that job crafting towards strengths was associated with all aspects of work engagement (vigor, dedication, and absorption), whereas job crafting towards interests was related to dedication and absorption, and crafting towards development was not associated with work engagement. We conclude that a job crafting intervention can be an effective tool for enhancing work engagement for employees with a high workload. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Actively Coping with Violation: Exploring Upward Dissent Patterns in Functional, Dysfunctional, and Deserted Psychological Contract End States.

Recently, scholars have emphasized the importance of examining how employees cope with psychological contract violation and how the coping process contributes to psychological contract violation resolution and post-violation psychological contracts. Recent work points to the important role of problem-focused coping. Yet, to date, problem-focused coping strategies have not been conceptualized on a continuum from constructive to destructive strategies. Consequently, potential differences in the use of specific types of problem-focused coping strategies and the role these different strategies play in the violation resolution process has not been explored. In this study, we stress the importance of focusing on different types of problem-focused coping strategies. We explore how employee upward dissent strategies, conceptualized as different forms of problem-focused coping, contribute to violation resolution and post-violation psychological contracts. Two sources of data were used. In-depth interviews with supervisors of a Dutch car lease company provided 23 case descriptions of employee-supervisor interactions after a psychological contract violation. Moreover, a database with descriptions of Dutch court sentences provided eight case descriptions of employee-organization interactions following a perceived violation. Based on these data sources, we explored the pattern of upward dissent strategies employees used over time following a perceived violation. We distinguished between functional (thriving and reactivation), dysfunctional (impairment and dissolution) and deserted psychological contract end states and explored whether different dissent patterns over time differentially contributed to the dissent outcome (i.e., psychological contract end state). The results of our study showed that the use of problem-focused coping is not as straightforward as suggested by the post-violation model. While the post-violation model suggests that problem-focused coping will most likely contribute positively to violation resolution, we found that this also depends on the type of problem-focused coping strategy used. That is, more threatening forms of problem-focused coping (i.e., threatening resignation as a way to trigger one's manager/organization to resolve the violation) mainly contributed to dysfunctional and deserted PC end states. Yet, in some instances the use of these types of active coping strategies also contributed to functional violation resolution. These findings have important implications for the literature on upward dissent strategies and psychological contract violation repair.