2010 - Reprints: Organizational Behavior and Human Resources

Drawing on both Job Demands-Resources theory and contagion theory, we conceptualize cognitive, affective, and conative influences on expatriate work role and family role performance. We clarify expatriate adjustment by expanding the concept to capture family role adjustment and by mapping relationships among the forms of adjustment. We also highlight the mediating role of engagement for understanding the influence of adjustment on role performance, and we consider spillover across work and family contexts and crossover between expatriates and partners.

Internal and external sources of efficacy beliefs are distinguished. “Means efficacy,” a particular source of external efficacy, is defined as belief in the utility of the tools available for task performance.  The authors tested the hypothesis that raising means efficacy boosts performance. In two field experiments, experimental participants were told they got a new computerized system proven to be the best of its kind; controls got the same system with no means-efficacy treatment.  In both experiments, means efficacy among experimental participants increased, and they outperformed the controls. A broadened perspective on the efficacy–beliefs construct is elaborated, and practical applications are proposed.

While social psychologists have widely explored the link between adult attachment styles and interpersonal relating behaviors such as caregiving in intimate relationships, organizational researchers have yet to examine the generalizability of such findings to employee interrelating behaviors at work. Addressing this gap in the research, we extend attachment theory (Bowlby, 1969) to the work context in order to generate and test hypotheses regarding the way in which helping behavior may be explained on the basis of the help provider’s level of attachment anxiety and avoidance. Data collected from 320 call center employees of a large Israeli telecommunications company suggest that while attachment anxiety is inversely associated with instrumental helping, it also attenuates the inverse effects of attachment avoidance on such helping. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Drawing upon belongingness theory, we tested organization-based self-esteem (OBSE) as a mediator of the relation between organizational supports and organizational deviance. Data from 237 employees were collected at three points in time over one year. Using structural equation modeling, we found that OBSE fully mediated the relation between organizational supports and organizational deviance. Controlling for preexisting predictors of deviance, including personality traits (agreeableness, neuroticism and conscientiousness) and role stressors (role conflict, ambiguity, and overload), did not eliminate the relation between OBSE and organizational deviance. The implications for the OBSE and deviance literatures are discussed.

In this paper, we theorize a bottom-up model of personality and delineate ways in which personality traits can develop and change from the accumulation of daily situations and behaviors over time. We posit that social roles, which represent important classes of situations, could elicit different types of short-term goals. We then argue that these goals can serve as psychological components of situations, thus exerting an influence on personality states, which aggregated over the long-term can shape broad personality traits. We discuss both the long-term processes involved in the transformation of personality traits as a function of roles, as well as the micro-level processes that occur in people’s daily lives, linking social roles, short-term goals, and personality states. Finally, we discuss future directions extending the scope of our model.

A fundamental problem in organizations is designing mechanisms for eliciting voluntary contributions from individual members of a team who are entrapped in a social dilemma. To solve the problem, we utilize a game-theoretical framework that embeds the traditional within-team social dilemma in a between-team competition for an exogenously determined prize. In equilibrium, such competition enhances the incentive to contribute, thereby reducing free-riding. Extending existing literature, we focus on asymmetric competitions between teams of unequal size, and competitions between more than two teams. Comparing two protocols for sharing the prize—egalitarian and proportional profit-sharing rules—we find that (i) free-riding diminishes and (ii) team members contribute more toward their team’s effort when they belong to the larger team and when the profit-sharing rule is proportional. (iii) Additionally, under the egalitarian profit-sharing rule team members contribute more than predicted by the equilibrium solution. We discuss implications of our findings for eliciting contributions in competitive environments.

A Hebrew version of the 12-item Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale, Form C (SHSS:C) was administered to 169 subjects in Israel.  The authors compared the results with those obtained for the English original administered in the USA and with an additional group of 38 English-speaking subjects in Israel, as well as with versions translated into Spanish (2 versions, for Spain and for Mexico), Italian, German, and Dutch. Mean scores and pair-wise rank-order correlations between item pass rates were comparable across the different samples. Item reliability was somewhat lower in the Hebrew version; however, if testing was discontinued after failure to comply with 3 consecutive items, reliability was similar to that obtained for the other samples. We conclude that the Hebrew version of the SHSS:C can be used for the assessment of hypnotizability and recommend that the discontinuation criterion be applied.

NO ABTRACT

A longitudinal field study conducted in a military setting examined the effects of exchange ideology, pre-entry Perceived Organisational Support, and their interaction, on initial and long-term committed behavior. The effect of exchange ideology was compared to that of a solidly validated biodata score which was assessed with a structured interview. The sample consisted of 1,276 conscripts to military service. Results showed that exchange ideology had effects on both initial and long-term committed behavior; these effects were stronger than those of pre-entry Perceived Organisational Support, and comparable to those of the biodata structured interview.

Une recherche de terrain longitudinale conduite dans un contexte militaire a porté sur les effets de l’idéologie de l’échange, du soutien organisationnel perçu avant l’intégration et de leur interaction sur l’implication initiale et à longterme. Les retombées de l’idéologie de l’échange ont été comparées à celles d’un score biodata correctement validé évalué à partir d’un entretien structuré.  L’échantillon était constitué de 1276 conscrits. Les résultats montrent que l’idéologie de l’échange présente un impact à la fois sur l’implication initiale et à long terme, cet impact étant plus fort que celui du soutien organisationnel perçu avant l’intégration et comparable à celui de l’interview structuré portent sur les biodata.

Two studies are presented with the purpose of investigating teacher absences in Israel from the perspectives of organizational normative behavior (Study 1) and organizational ethical climate (Study 2). Study 1 posits that absence may represent shirking behavior, and tested this hypothesis by investigating temporal absence trends of the entire public teacher population in Israel around weekends, holidays, and days of heavy workload. Results provide evidence which supports our theoretical expectations. Study 2 proposes that teachers' work absences are associated with the school's ethical climate. Using a sample of high-school teachers, our results supported this hypothesis, particularly for low-seniority and non-tenured teachers. We suggest that the normative behavior and ethical climate perspectives offer new vistas for advancing our understanding of absence behavior in organizations.

We tested a model in which perceived workload and autonomy were hypothesized to mediate the effects of work hours and caseload on physician burnout.  The study was based on data provided by 890 specialists representing six medical specialties. We used structural equation modeling to test our hypotheses.  Controlling for the effects of gender, seniority, and the specialists’ academic affiliation, we found that the study data fit the hypothesised model—reflecting these hypotheses—quite well. As expected, workload predicted higher levels of global burnout and physical fatigue, while autonomy predicted lower levels of global burnout. Work hours and caseload predicted global burnout only indirectly, via their effects on either perceived workload or autonomy.  These findings suggest that public policies, designed to reduce physician work hours in order to reduce burnout and improve patients’ safety, should take into account physician perceived workload and autonomy.

Nous avons mis à l’épreuve un modèle centré sur l’hypothèse selon laquelle la charge de travail perçue et l’autonomie régulaient l’impact de la durée du travail médical et administratif sur le burnout des médecins. La recherche a exploité des données fournies par 890 spécialistes relevant de six specialties médicales. On a fait appel à une modélisation en équations structurales pour valider nos hypothèses. En contrôlant l’action du genre, de l’âge et du type de spécialité, il est apparu que les données correspondaient parfaitement au modèle hypothétique. Comme prévu, la charge de travail prédisait des niveaux plus élevés de burnout global et de fatigue physique, alors que l’autonomie débouchait sur des niveaux plus faibles de burnout global. La durée du travail ne prédisait qu’indirectement le burnout global, par l’entremise des retombées sur la charge de travail perçue et l’autonomie. Ces résultats montrent que la réglementation publique qui envisage de réduire le temps de travail des médecins dans le souci d’atténuer le burnout et d’améliorer la sécurité des malades devrait prendre en considération la charge de travail perçue et l’autonomie des médecins.

Objective: To investigate prospectively the effects of vigor at work on the end points of mortality and the prevalence of ischemic heart disease (IHD) and diabetes.

Methods: We tested the hypothesized beneficial effects of feeling vigorous at work at baseline on the risks of all-cause mortality, IHD, and diabetes during a 20-year follow-up. Participants were healthy employees (n = 968) who underwent a routine health check at baseline. We calculated the risk of all-cause mortality, IHD, and diabetes, with days as the time scale, using the Cox proportional hazards model. In our analyses, we predicted the above end points by baseline vigor, age, gender, and educational level, adjusting for the physiological risk factors of total cholesterol, glucose, and body mass index, the behavioral risk factors of smoking, alcohol intake, and physical activity, and the psychological risk factors of depressive and anxiety symptoms.

Results: As hypothesized, we found that, after the above adjustments, baseline vigor decreased the risk of follow-up mortality by 26% (hazard ratio, 0.74; 95% confidence interval, 0.58–0.95) and the risk of diabetes by 17% (hazard ratio, 0.83; 95% confidence interval, 0.68–0.98). However, vigor did not have a significant effect on the risk of IHD.

Conclusions: Independently of physiological, behavioral, and psychological risk factors, feeling vigorous at work protected the participants from diabetes and reduced their risk of mortality.

NO ABSTRACT

The major objective of this chapter is to integrate and summarize what is already known about burnout and certain aspects of physical health. Another objective is to provide a roadmap depicting promising future research directions on employee burnout and health. The major sections of the review focus on burnout and health behaviors, burnout and self-rated health, and burnout and chronic disease. The chronic diseases that I focus on are cardiovascular disease and its major risk factors, diabetes, and musculoskeletal disorders, primarily because there is a significant body of evidence on each of them. In the final section, I suggest several promising future research paths on employee burnout and health. Given the complexity of the burnout construct and the controversy over its operational definition (e.g., Kristensen, Borritz, Villadsen, & Christensen, 2005), I first provide a conceptual analysis of the phenomenon of burnout.  The literature on burnout is now vast; a bibliography covering the period 1990–2002 (Boudreau & Nakashima, 2002) identified 2,138 distinct items, while a more recent (March 2009) search of Google Scholar—under the key term burnout—yielded more than 260,000 entries. Given the amount of time most adults spend on work-related activities, and the wealth of literature pointing to the pivotal importance of one’s job characteristics to one’s self-identity (Bandura, 2002), the focus on burnout is understandable. A number of comprehensive reviews of various aspects of burnout at work have been published in recent years (e.g., Halbesleben, 2006; Halbesleben & Buckley, 2004; Melamed, Shirom, Toker, Berliner, & Shapira, 2006; Schaufeli & Buunk, 2003). The current review, however, does not overlap with any of these; instead, it attempts to discuss themes and topics that have not yet been systematically reviewed in prior studies.  Burnout is viewed as an affective reaction to ongoing stress whose core content is the gradual depletion over time of individuals’ intrinsic energy resources, including, as the major types of energy resource depletion, emotional exhaustion, physical fatigue, and cognitive weariness (cf. Shirom, 2003). This review focuses on employee burnout in work organizations, excluding research that deals exclusively with nonwork-related settings.