Capturing the impact employees have on their coworkers and leaders: a holistic approach on health-specific support behavior from employees.

Support is a valuable resource for ensuring employee health in the workplace. However, research on health-specific support behavior (i.e., support specifically targeting concrete health aspects) has only concentrated on either leader behavior (e.g., healthy leadership styles) or support provided by employees for specific health issues (e.g., healthy eating or smoking cessation). Although the importance of employee health has been well established, the examination of a wider range of potential health-specific support behaviors from employees provided for their colleagues and leaders has been neglected. To understand employee health-specific support behavior, we adapted an existing health-oriented leadership questionnaire to cover support for colleagues (PeerCare) and their leaders (LeaderCare). Capturing the employee perspective with a sample of 347 employees, the results confirmed a delineation of health-oriented scales (factor, convergent, and discriminant validity). By testing health-specific support behavior processes at work, the positive effects of PeerCare on general health were demonstrated. Contrary to expectations, existing health effects are outweighed when leaders provide health-specific support behavior to their employees (StaffCare). However, the results imply that the health-specific support behavior practices of different actors reinforce each other: the effects of StaffCare and PeerCare enhance each other, and StaffCare has a strong influence on LeaderCare. Remarkably, SelfCare has a key role in this process. The open questions and implications regarding the effects of the different health-specific support behavior measurements are discussed.

Drawing transformation pathways for making use of joint effects of food and energy production with biodiversity agriphotovoltaics and electrified agricultural machinery.

The achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals is being pursued worldwide. While energy production and consumption are to be oriented towards renewable energies, ecologically and socially sustainable agriculture is also a target for science and society. Due to the expansion of renewable energies, agricultural land in particular is the focus of various interest groups, from food production to energy production. In this interdisciplinary study, we show the opportunities and limits of joint synergies from the nexus of food production, energy production, energy consumption, biodiversity protection and social acceptance of renewable energies in a scenario. Biodiversity agriphotovoltaics, i.e. agriphotovoltaics in combination with biodiversity protection measures, such as flower strips, can make a valuable contribution to promoting biotope connectivity in addition to significant energy production. We show this in a GIS-based regional assessment for Lower Saxony in northern Germany. This rough spatial assessment is followed by a modelling of energy production and consumption during the cultivation of a characteristic agricultural field in the loess region of Lower Saxony. Our focus here is on the possibilities of using cable electricity or battery storage for carrying out the cultivation. In an accompanying survey of farmers regarding the use of agriphotovoltaics, we collected and evaluated their prior knowledge, experiences, and attitudes towards this technology. Finally, we show which advantages agriphotovoltaics and electrified agricultural machinery can also have for the sustainable transformation of agriculture and which challenges exist for a truly sustainable use of these technologies.

Integrating appraisal processes in the study demands-resources framework - a diary study.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Students face various demands that can lead to health complaints. Hindering demands appear to be especially harmful. Since the perception of demands differs between persons, their individual appraisal determines stress perception. However, individual appraisal processes are largely neglected in research. Therefore, this study builds on the study demands-resources model in examining the dynamics of students' demand-appraisal processes and their effects on well-being. DESIGN: During ten days in a four-week period, 247 students participated in a diary study. METHODS: We analyzed our data via multilevel path analysis. RESULTS: Our analyses revealed that the student's appraisal of the same demands varied across days and depended on available resources, i.e., the received support quality on the respective day. Appraising demands as hindering was positively linked to the perception of stress on the same day. Daily perception of stress was positively linked to person-level strain and health complaints after four weeks. CONCLUSIONS: The results highlight the importance of assessing the individual appraisal of demands rather than pre-categorizing demands. Furthermore, our findings identify social support as a crucial resource in reducing hindering appraisal; hence, it should be included in student-focused stress-management interventions. Limitations and further implications are also discussed.

Student Presenteeism in Digital Times-A Mixed Methods Approach.

In young adulthood, important foundations are laid for health later in life. Hence, more attention should be paid to the health measures concerning students. A research field that is relevant to health but hitherto somewhat neglected in the student context is the phenomenon of presenteeism. Presenteeism refers to working despite illness and is associated with negative health and work-related effects. The study attempts to bridge the research gap regarding students and examines the effects of and reasons for this behavior. The consequences of digital learning on presenteeism behavior are moreover considered. A student survey (N = 1036) and qualitative interviews (N = 11) were conducted. The results of the quantitative study show significant negative relationships between presenteeism and health status, well-being, and ability to study. An increased experience of stress and a low level of detachment as characteristics of digital learning also show significant relationships with presenteeism. The qualitative interviews highlighted the aspect of not wanting to miss anything as the most important reason for presenteeism. The results provide useful insights for developing countermeasures to be easily integrated into university life, such as establishing fixed learning partners or the use of additional digital learning material.

Focus meets motivation: When regulatory focus aligns with approach/avoidance motivation in creative processes.

According to Regulatory Focus Theory, two systems determine our strategies to pursue goals - the promotion and the prevention system. Individuals with a dominant promotion system focus on achieving gains, i.e., promoters, and individuals with a dominant prevention system focus on avoiding losses, i.e., preventers. Regulatory Fit Theory suggests that a fit between this focus and the situation causes superior performance and makes individuals feel right. We transfer the fit idea to the interaction of dominant regulatory focus (promotion vs. prevention) with motivational direction (approach vs. avoidance motivation). We investigated these interaction effects on individuals' performance and their experience within creativity workshops. In Study 1 (N 1 = 172), using multi-level analyses, we found that a promotion focus was associated with fluency and a prevention focus with elaborated ideas. This effect was stronger, when preventers also scored high on avoidance motivation. Further, preventers experienced more autonomy support and were more satisfied when they scored high on avoidance. Promoters high on approach motivation reported more autonomy support and more satisfaction than preventers high on approach motivation. For Study 2 (N 2 = 112), we used an experimental design: After measuring regulatory focus, we manipulated approach vs. avoidance motivation in creativity workshops. Using multi-level analyses, we did not find main or interaction effects on fluency or elaboration but we found interaction effects on participants' experience of the creativity workshop. Preventers were more satisfied when they received the avoidance condition. Promoters reported less autonomy support, lower satisfaction, and more perceived conflicts within their teams in the avoidance condition.

Future competencies in human-machine interaction: An interdisciplinary approach for the anticipation of strategically relevant competencies in the field of automotive human-machine interaction.

BACKGROUND: Digitalization and technological progress lead to an increasingly fast development of promising fields for action and new technologies whereas the time required to qualify employees for new activities and work content has remained largely the same. Organizations have to establish anticipative competence measures to secure their competitiveness. OBJECTIVES: Those developments suggest that a new approach to develop human resource development strategies is required. METHODS: This article describes the results of a competence survey that was developed in an interdisciplinary approach between organizational psychology and futurology and conducted in the field of automotive Human-Machine Interaction (HMI) research. The content of the questionnaire is based on a series of expert interviews focusing and a data-driven approach that scanned significant patents for competence demand data. RESULTS: The conducted ANOVAs show that both sources for data retrieval create relevant items even though experts from the conceptual field rate data-based items significantly less relevant than the other participants. Moreover, interview-based items lead to significantly more relevant ratings in methodological fields while data-driven items were rated significantly more relevant for the technological area. CONCLUSIONS: Even though there are some uncertainties to examine, the displayed approach seems promising for the derivation of more detailed and enriched future competency demands in technological fields.

Identification of patent-based inventor competencies: An approach for partially automated competence retrieval in technological fields.

BACKGROUND: Semantic analyses of patents have been used for years to unlock technical knowledge. Nevertheless, information retrievable from patents remains widely unconsidered when making strategic decisions, when recruiting candidates or deciding which qualifications to offer to employees in technological fields. OBJECTIVES: This paper provides an approach to evaluate whether competencies and competence demands in technological fields can be derived from patents and if this process can be automated to a certain extent. METHODS: A sample of significant patents is analyzed with regard to comprised competence data via semantic structures like n-gram and Subject--Action-Object (SAO) analysis. The retrieved data is cleansed and matched semantically to inventor competencies from social career networks and checked for similarities. RESULTS: A social career network profile analysis of significant inventors revealed a total of 570 competencies that were matched with the results of the n-gram and SAO analysis. Overall, 15%of the extracted social career network competence data were covered through extracted n-grams (87 out of 570 terms), while the SAO analysis showed a match rate of 18.8%, covering 107 terms. CONCLUSIONS: The outlined approach suggests a partly automatable process of promising character to identify technological competence demands in patents.

The Emergence of Employees' Change Readiness for Energy-Conservation Behavior During Guided Group Discussions.

Studies of energy conservation efforts to reduce CO2 emissions in the residential sector are abundant; however similar efforts in organizations have not received as much attention as they deserve. In this study, we focus on methods for increasing employees' readiness to change their behaviors in favor of energy conservation, specifically examining the use of guided group discussions (GGDs). We use observational research methods to examine the micro-level of behavioral dynamics and understand the emergence of change readiness. We describe how facilitators ("change agents") can conduct GGDs and foster employees' change readiness using the established communication approach of Motivational Interviewing (MI). We also explore how employees can increase each other's change readiness regarding energy conservation behavior. Based on our sample of eight videotaped GGDs (5430 behavioral events), interaction analysis reveals that solution-focused communication elicits change readiness in employees, whereas problem-focused communication prompts resistance to change. We further show that employees can motivate their co-workers to express "green" intentions: when employees verbalized statements in favor of energy saving, this increased other employees' change readiness, while verbalized statements against energy saving had the opposite effect. This demonstrates that GGD participants are active individuals who can spark behavior change in their co-workers. Finally, based on our findings we propose several communication guidelines for working with groups and discuss the importance of solution-focused energy management practices to facilitate change readiness for energy saving in the workplace.

The Concept of Health-Promoting Collaboration-A Starting Point to Reduce Presenteeism?

Background: Since presenteeism is related to numerous negative health and work-related effects, measures are required to reduce it. There are initial indications that how an organization deals with health has a decisive influence on employees' presenteeism behavior. Aims: The concept of health-promoting collaboration was developed on the basis of these indications. As an extension of healthy leadership it includes not only the leader but also co-workers. In modern forms of collaboration, leaders cannot be assigned sole responsibility for employees' health, since the leader is often hardly visible (digital leadership) or there is no longer a clear leader (shared leadership). The study examines the concept of health-promoting collaboration in relation to presenteeism. Relationships between health-promoting collaboration, well-being and work ability are also in focus, regarding presenteeism as a mediator. Methods: The data comprise the findings of a quantitative survey of 308 employees at a German university of applied sciences. Correlation and mediator analyses were conducted. Results: The results show a significant negative relationship between health-promoting collaboration and presenteeism. Significant positive relationships were found between health-promoting collaboration and both well-being and work ability. Presenteeism was identified as a mediator of these relationships. Conclusion: The relevance of health-promoting collaboration in reducing presenteeism was demonstrated and various starting points for practice were proposed. Future studies should investigate further this newly developed concept in relation to presenteeism.

Does It Matter What I Say? Using Language to Examine Reactions to Ostracism as It Occurs.

Most of our knowledge related to how social exclusion affects those who ostracize and those who are being ostracized is based on questionnaires administered after the ostracism situation is over. In this research, we strived to further our understanding of the internal dynamics of an ostracism situation. We therefore examined individuals' language-specifically, function words-as a behavior indicative of psychological processes and emergent states that can be unobtrusively recorded right in the situation. In online chats, 128 participants talked about a personal topic in groups of three. In the experimental group (n = 79), two conversation partners ignored every contribution by the third. We found that, compared to the control group, these targets of ostracism used language indicative of a self-focus and worsened mood, but not of social focus or positivity, although positivity was related to a writer's likeability. Sources of ostracism used language suggesting that they were distancing themselves from the situation, and they further engaged in victim derogation. We discuss how our results highlight the severity and potential self-sustainability of ostracism.

Beyond Consistency: Contextual Dependency of Language Style in Monolog and Conversation.

Language is highly dynamic: It unfolds over time, and we can use it to achieve a wide variety of communicative goals, from telling a story to trying to persuade another person. One aspect of language that has gained increasing popularity among researchers in the last several decades is the individual language style (LS) represented by an individual's use of function words (e.g., pronouns, articles). Previous approaches to LS mostly focus on LS of one individual in isolation, paying less attention to the fact that language emerges from interaction with others. The aim of this paper is twofold: First, we integrate LS into a dynamical theoretical framework and present an innovative methodological approach. Second, this paper aims to address how interactive conversation-as an aspect of the communicative setting-changes an individual's LS. We use recurrence quantification analysis to look at structure in patterns of LS in monologs and conversations of 118 participants. Our results showed that LS significantly differs from monolog to conversation, and post hoc analyses further revealed that the change in LS is greater for conflict than for friendly conversations. The difference between monologs and conversations is reflected more strongly in the dynamics (i.e., structure and complexity) of LS than the proportion of function words used. Theoretical implications and directions for future studies are discussed.

Introducing rLSM: An integrated metric assessing temporal reciprocity in language style matching.

The way that individuals use function words in a conversation-reflecting how they say things, rather than what they say-is called their individual language style. The dyadic coordination of language styles, called language style matching (LSM), is central to the development of social relationships in conversations. Despite a growing body of research on LSM, conceptual and methodological approaches are inconsistent between scholars. After giving a conceptual overview of LSM, we derive the properties desirable for analyses of LSM in interaction (e.g., reciprocity, consistency, and frequency sensitivity). Building on these properties, the existing three methodological approaches to LSM are reviewed. Since none of the existing metrics fulfills all the desired properties, we introduce a new metric to assess LSM in dyadic interaction, capturing reciprocal adaption throughout the dynamic process of a conversation. Hence, the new metric is called reciprocal LSM (rLSM). To empirically establish the conceptual underpinnings of rLSM, the metric is compared to the LSM metric most commonly used in psychological research. Both metrics are applied to a set of N = 77 transcribed real-life dyadic conversations, analyzed with the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software. The results indicate that rLSM is a better estimate of LSM than is the old metric and that there is high conceptual similarity between the two metrics. Implications for existing research and directions for future research are discussed. To facilitate the standardization and comparability of research, guidelines are provided for authors on the use of the new and existing metrics.

What happens during annual appraisal interviews? How leader-follower interactions unfold and impact interview outcomes.

Despite a wealth of research on antecedents and outcomes of annual appraisal interviews, the ingredients that make for a successful communication process within the interview itself remain unclear. This study takes a communication approach to highlight leader-follower dynamics in annual appraisal interviews. We integrate relational leadership theory and recent findings on leader-follower interactions to argue (a) how supervisors' task- and relation-oriented statements can elicit employee involvement during the interview process and (b) how these communication patterns affect both supervisors' and employees' perceptions of the interview. Moreover, we explore (c) how supervisor behavior is contingent upon employee contributions to the appraisal interview. We audiotaped 48 actual annual appraisal interviews between supervisors and their employees. Adopting a multimethod approach, we used quantitative interaction coding (N = 32,791 behavioral events) as well as qualitative open-axial coding to explore communication patterns among supervisors and their employees. Lag sequential analysis revealed that supervisors' relation-oriented statements triggered active employee contributions and vice versa. These relation-activation patterns were linked to higher interview success ratings by both supervisors and employees. Moreover, our qualitative findings highlight employee disagreement as a crucial form of active employee contributions during appraisal interviews. We distinguish what employees disagreed about, how the disagreement was enacted, and how supervisors responded to it. Overall employee disagreement was negatively related to ratings of supervisor support. We discuss theoretical implications for performance appraisal and leadership theory and derive practical recommendations for promoting employee involvement during appraisal interviews. (PsycINFO Database Record

Using Motivational Interviewing to reduce threats in conversations about environmental behavior.

Human behavior contributes to a waste of environmental resources and our society is looking for ways to reduce this problem. However, humans may perceive feedback about their environmental behavior as threatening. According to self-determination theory (SDT), threats decrease intrinsic motivation for behavior change. According to self-affirmation theory (SAT), threats can harm individuals' self-integrity. Therefore, individuals should show self-defensive biases, e.g., in terms of presenting counter-arguments when presented with environmental behavior change. The current study examines how change recipients respond to threats from change agents in interactions about environmental behavior change. Moreover, we investigate how Motivational Interviewing (MI) - an intervention aimed at increasing intrinsic motivation - can reduce threats at both the social and cognitive level. We videotaped 68 dyadic interactions with change agents who either did or did not use MI (control group). We coded agents verbal threats and recipients' verbal expressions of motivation. Recipients also rated agents' level of confrontation and empathy (i.e., cognitive reactions). As hypothesized, threats were significantly lower when change agents used MI. Perceived confrontations converged with observable social behavior of change agents in both groups. Moreover, behavioral threats showed a negative association with change recipients' expressed motivation (i.e., reasons to change). Contrary to our expectations, we found no relation between change agents' verbal threats and change recipients' verbally expressed self-defenses (i.e., sustain talk). Our results imply that MI reduces the adverse impact of threats in conversations about environmental behavior change on both the social and cognitive level. We discuss theoretical implications of our study in the context of SAT and SDT and suggest practical implications for environmental change agents in organizations.

Talking with consumers about energy reductions: recommendations from a motivational interviewing perspective.

Reduction of energy costs has become a concern for many organizations. First, we review energy-saving studies in organizations in which consumers showed resistance to change their behavior. Second, we relate resistance to change to the psycholinguistic construct "sustain talk" that describes verbal arguments against behavior change (e.g., "Work processes have priority here"). Third, we argue how Motivational Interviewing (MI)-an interaction-approach to facilitate behavior change-might be helpful in dealing with this behavior. We transfer MI to interactions about energy-savings in organizations and demonstrate how qualification in MI for energy managers may affect these interactions. Therefore, we present three short case scenarios (i.e., video vignettes) that demonstrate socio-interactional mechanisms underlying energy-relevant decisions and behaviors. Consumer' verbal responses are graphed as one single time-variant index of readiness versus resistance (R-index) in order to illustrate interactional dynamics. In sum, we combine theoretical and empirical perspectives from multiple disciplines and discuss an innovative socio-interaction approach that may facilitate energy-efficient behavior in organizations.

Appreciating age diversity and German nurse well-being and commitment: co-worker trust as the mediator.

Nursing practice faces the challenges of succeeding with a great diversity of customers and managing a diverse workforce with a wide range of age differences. While age diversity can lead to increased creativity and a greater richness of values and skills, it can also lead to value clashes, disrespect of each other's viewpoints, and increased conflict. As a result, nurses frequently experience stress, work-life imbalance, and a withdrawal from commitment. We propose the injection of positive diversity mindsets (age diversity appreciation) as one remedy. Specifically, we suggest that age diversity appreciation is positively related to nurses' well-being (stress and work-life balance), and also positively related to their team commitment. We further hypothesize that nurses' trust in co-workers mediates the hypothesized relationships. Our survey data of 138 nurses in a large hospital in Germany supported our hypotheses. We discuss both theoretical and managerial implications of our findings in the context of age diversity and nursing work outcomes in hospitals.