Implications of work effort and discretion for employee well-being and career-related outcomes: an integrative assessment

How does work effort affect employee outcomes? The authors bridge distinct literatures on the well-being versus career-related implications of work effort by analyzing the relation of overtime work and work intensity to both types of outcomes. They also extend examination of the role of discretion in modifying the effects of work effort from well-being to career-related outcomes. Using data from the fifth and sixth European Working Conditions Surveys, the authors show that greater work effort relates strongly to reduced well-being and modestly to inferior career-related outcomes, while discretion may attenuate these adverse implications. Even with discretion, work intensity generally is a stronger predictor of unfavorable outcomes than overtime work. Implications include the need for employees to become aware of the broader limitations of excessive work effort, for employers to give discretion when viable, and for public policy to devise strategies that help limit the adverse consequences of work intensity

Beyond reward expectancy: How do periodic incentive payments influence the temporal dynamics of performance?

Prior theory suggests that incentive plans, such as piece-rate or commission plans, motivate good performance because employees anticipate that current performance will generate matching future incentive payments. In this article, we move beyond reward expectancy to argue that performance can also derive from employees’ reactive responses to received incentive payments. We propose a salience-based theory casting incentive payments as recurring temporal markers that periodically increase the salience of the incentive plan, to which employees respond by temporarily increasing incentivized and unincentivized performance. We introduce multivariate time-series methods to test our hypotheses in longitudinal data spanning 169 weeks (1183 days), drawn from an online firm using an incentive plan for its customer-support employees. While we find no evidence that incentive payments affect the dynamics of incentivized performance, they do temporarily boost several unincentivized behaviors and outcomes. Combined with fieldwork, these findings support our proposed mechanism of ‘salience-induced reciprocity’ – i.e., the temporary reciprocity in response to a periodic increase in the salience of the incentive plan. This article contributes to a more complete understanding of performance and effort dynamics in incentive plans, offers new inroads into studying temporality in the functioning of HR practices, and provides other future research avenues

The Online Shadow of Offline Signals: Which Sellers Get Contacted in Online B2B Marketplaces?

This article extends the understanding of what impels buyers to contact particular sellers in online business-to-business (B2B) marketplaces, which are typically characterized by sparse social structures and concomitant limitations in observing social cues. Integrating an institutional perspective with signaling theory, our core argument is that offline seller characteristics that are visible online—in particular, geographic location and legal status—convey credible signals of seller behavior because they provide buyers with information on sellers’ local institutional quality and the institutionally-induced obligations and controls acting on sellers. Using unique data from a large Italian online B2B marketplace between the fourth quarter of 1999 and July 2001, we find that both sellers’ local institutional quality and their legal statuses affect a buyer’s likelihood of contacting a seller. Moreover, consistent with the idea that a buyer’s own local institutional quality generates a relevant reference point against which sellers are evaluated, we find that a buyer is progressively more likely to contact sellers the higher their local institutional quality relative to the buyer. Jointly, our findings imply that in online B2B marketplaces, signals conveyed by sellers’ geographic locations and legal statuses may constitute substantive sources of competitive heterogeneity and market segmentation

All work intensity is not created equal: Effort motives, job satisfaction, and quit intentions at a grocery chain

Prior research has shown that the well-being of employees engaged in intensive work can vary with the discretion their jobs afford regarding how and when to carry out the work. This paper explores a different avenue. It argues that well-being also varies with employees’ individual motives for working intensively. The paper introduces self-determination theory to the domain of work intensity and focuses on two hypotheses. The first is whether intensive work driven by explicit or implicit incentives is more positively associated with an employee’s job satisfaction than intensive work driven by job demands. The second is whether intensive work driven by intrinsic motives is more positively associated with job satisfaction than that driven by explicit or implicit incentives. In both these cases, the paper also examines whether equivalent effects exist on (reduced) quit intentions. Original data from a major Greek grocery chain provide corroborative evidence that is robust to a rich set of covariates, including increasingly demanding adjustments for job discretion. The findings contribute to a more complete understanding of why differences in well-being exist among employees performing intensive work, with implications for workers and employers

Neural predictors of chocolate intake following chocolate exposure

Previous studies have shown that one's brain response to high-calorie food cues can predict long-term weight gain or weight loss. The neural correlates that predict food intake in the short term have however hardly been investigated. This study examined which brain regions' activation predicts chocolate intake after participants had been either exposed to real chocolate or to control stimuli during approximately one hour, with interruptions for fMRI measurements. Further we investigated whether the variance in chocolate intake could be better explained by activated brain regions than by self-reported craving. In total, five brain regions correlated with subsequent chocolate intake. The activation of two reward regions (the right caudate and the left frontopolar cortex) correlated positively with intake in the exposure group. The activation of two regions associated with cognitive control (the left dorsolateral and left mid-dorsolateral PFC) correlated negatively with intake in the control group. When the regression analysis was conducted with the exposure and the control group together, an additional region's activation (the right anterior PFC) correlated positively with chocolate intake. In all analyses, the intake variance explained by neural correlates was above and beyond the variance explained by self-reported craving. These results are in line with neuroimaging research showing that brain responses are a better predictor of subsequent intake than self-reported craving. Therefore, our findings might provide for a missing link by associating brain activation, previously shown to predict weight change, with short-term intake

Systematic Review of the Effect of Cerebrospinal Fluid Drainage on Outcomes After Endovascular Descending Thoracic/Thoraco-Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm Repair

Objective: This study aimed to investigate whether prophylactic use of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) drainage in endovascular descending thoracic aortic aneurysm (DTAA) and thoraco-abdominal aortic aneurysm (TAAA) repair contributes to a lower rate of post-operative spinal cord ischaemia (SCI). Data Sources: MEDLINE, Embase, and CINAHL. Review Methods: A literature review was conducted in accordance with PRISMA guidelines (PROSPERO registration no. CRD42021245893). Risk of bias was assessed through the Newcastle–Ottawa scale (NOS), and the certainty of evidence was graded using the GRADE approach. A proportion meta-analysis was conducted to calculate the pooled rate and 95% confidence interval (CI) of both early and late onset SCI. Pooled outcome estimates were calculated using the odds ratio (OR) and associated 95% CI. The primary outcome was SCI, both early and lateonset. Secondary outcomes were complications of CSF drainage, length of hospital stay, and peri-operative (30 day or in hospital) mortality rates. Results: Twenty-eight observational, retrospective studies were included, reporting4 814 patients (2 599 patients with and 2 215 without CSF drainage). The NOS showed a moderate risk of bias. The incidence of SCI was similar in patients with CSF drainage (0.05, 95% CI 0.03 ? 0.08) and without CSF drainage (0.05, 95% CI 0.00 ? 0.14). No significant decrease in SCI was found when using CSF drainage (OR 0.67, 95% CI 0.29 ? 1.55, p = .35). The incidence rate of CSF drainage related complication was 0.10 (95% CI 0.04 ? 0.19). The 30 day and in hospital mortality rate with CSF drainage was 0.08 (95% CI 0.05 ? 0.12). The 30 day and in hospital mortality rate without CSF drainage and comparison with late mortality and length of hospital stay could not be determined due to lack of data. The quality of evidence was considered very low. Conclusion: Pre-operative CSF drainage placement was not related to a favourable outcome regarding SCI rate in endovascular TAAA and DTAA repair. Due to the low quality of evidence, no clear recommendation on pre-operative use of CSF drainage placement can be made