The positive relationship between servant leadership and employees’ psychological health:A multi-method approach

Servant leadership is thought to encourage socially responsible and moral behaviors. In the present article, we test the positive relationship between servant leadership and employees’ psychological health. We argue that servant leadership is positively related to employees’ health because servant leaders shape employees’ needs and create work environments that fulfill these needs. We examine the proposed relationship of servant leadership (a) competing for variance with different well-known stressors, (b) in multiple samples, (c) at the within- and between-person level, and (d) in relation to long- and short-term indicators of strain. On the basis of this multi-method approach we seek to demonstrate that our results are invariant across different methodological conditions. In Study 1 (N=443), we simultaneously tested the between-person level relationships of servant leadership and job ambiguity to emotional exhaustion and depersonalization as the core symptoms of burnout. In Study 2 (N=75), we simultaneously tested the relationships of person-level servant leadership and day-level emotional dissonance to day-level ego depletion and need for recovery as outcomes. The results of both studies demonstrate that servant leadership is negatively related to strain and accounts for unique variance in short- and long-term indicators of strain over and above that explained by well-known job-stressors. Accordingly, servant leadership can be regarded as an important determinant of employees’ psychological health

Regulatory job stressors and their within-person relationships with ego depletion: The roles of state anxiety, self-control effort, and job autonomy

AbstractOur research aimed at disentangling the underlying processes of the adverse relationship between regulatory job stressors and ego depletion. Specifically, we analyzed whether state anxiety and self-control effort would mediate the within-person relationships of time pressure, planning and decision-making, and emotional dissonance with ego depletion. In addition, we also tested potential attenuating effects of situational job autonomy on the adverse effects of regulatory job stressors on state anxiety, self-control effort, and ego depletion. Based on an experience sampling design, we gathered a sample of 97 eldercare workers who provided data on 721 experience-sampling occasions. Multilevel moderated serial mediation analyses revealed that time pressure and emotional dissonance, but not planning and decision-making, exerted significant serial indirect effects on ego depletion via state anxiety and self-control effort. Finally, we found conditional serial indirect effects of all three regulatory job stressors on ego depletion as a function of job autonomy. Theoretical implications for scholarly understanding of coping with regulatory job stressors are discussed

Should I Stay or Should I Go? The Role of Daily Presenteeism as an Adaptive Response to Perform at Work Despite Somatic Complaints for Employee Effectiveness

Our study seeks to contribute to scholarly understanding of the antecedents and consequences of the crucial, but so far overlooked within-person daily fluctuations in presenteeism. Drawing on theoretical frameworks of presenteeism, which conceptualize presenteeism as an adaptive behavior to deliver work performance despite limitations due to ill-health, we develop a within-person model of daily presenteeism and examine somatic complaints and work-goal progress as crucial joint determinants of daily fluctuations in presenteeism. We further integrate the aforementioned theoretical frameworks with ego-depletion theory to argue that presenteeism requires self-regulation to suppress cognitions, emotions, and behavioral responses associated with ill-health and instead focus on completing one’s work tasks. Accordingly, we predict that presenteeism depletes employees’ regulatory resources and impairs employees’ next-day work engagement and task performance. The results of a daily-diary study across 15 workdays with N = 995 daily observations nested in N = 126 employees show that daily work-goal progress attenuates the daily relation between somatic complaints and presenteeism, thereby also reducing the indirect effect of somatic complaints on employees’ next-day work engagement and task performance through presenteeism and ego depletion. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of shifting presenteeism research from the macro- to the micro-level. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved

Biological Activity of Volatiles from Marine and Terrestrial Bacteria

The antiproliferative activity of 52 volatile compounds released from bacteria was investigated in agar diffusion assays against medically important microorganisms and mouse fibroblasts. Furthermore, the activity of these compounds to interfere with the quorum-sensing-systems was tested with two different reporter strains. While some of the compounds specific to certain bacteria showed some activity in the antiproliferative assay, the compounds common to many bacteria were mostly inactive. In contrast, some of these compounds were active in the quorum-sensing-tests. γ-Lactones showed a broad reactivity, while pyrazines seem to have only low intrinsic activity. A general discussion on the ecological importance of these findings is given

The role of regulatory, affective, and motivational resources in the adverse spillover of sleep in the home domain to employee effectiveness in the work domain

How does sleep affect employee effectiveness and what can employees do to remain effective on days with a lack of sleep? Drawing on the conservation of resources theory, our research expands on the cognitive (regulatory resources), affective (positive affect), and motivational (subjective vitality) mechanisms that link sleep and employee effectiveness. Furthermore, considering the crucial role of individuals’ beliefs in the spillover of sleep to work, we examine implicit theories about willpower – a mindset about the resource-draining nature of self-regulation – as a moderator of the positive relationship between sleep duration and employee effectiveness through regulatory resources availability. Two daily diary studies with a combined sample of N total = 214 employees (N total = 1317 workdays) demonstrate the predominant role of cognitive- and affective resources in the day-specific relations between sleep at home to engagement, in-role, and extra-role performance at work. Moreover, the spillover of sleep to employee effectiveness via cognitive resources is stronger for individuals holding a limited as compared with a non-limited resource theory. This research not only expands our theoretical understanding of the psychological mechanisms that link sleep to employee effectiveness but also offers practical implications by highlighting the protective role of holding a non-limited resource theory on days with a lack of sleep

a combined ecological momentary assessment and fMRI study

Regulation of emotions is necessary for successful attainment of short-term and long-term goals. However, over-regulation may also have its costs. In anorexia nervosa (AN), forgoing food intake despite emaciation and endocrine signals that promote eating is an example of “too much” self-control. Here we investigated whether voluntary emotion regulation in AN patients comes with associated disorder-relevant costs. Thirty-five patients with acute AN and thirty-five age-matched healthy controls (HCs) performed an established emotion regulation paradigm during functional magnetic resonance imaging after an overnight fast. The task required reducing emotions induced by positively valenced pictures via distancing. We calculated a neural regulation score from responses recorded in a reward-related brain region of interest (ventral striatum; VS) by subtracting activation measured on “positive distance” trials from that elicited under the “positive watch” (baseline) condition. Complementing the imaging data, we used ecological momentary assessment (EMA) to probe disorder-related rumination and affect six times/day for 2 weeks following the scanning session. The neural regulation score indicating reduced VS activation during emotion regulation was used as a predictor in hierarchical linear models with EMA measures as outcomes. No group differences in neural activity were found for the main contrasts of the task. However, regulation of VS activity was associated with increased body-related rumination and increased negative affect in AN, but not in HC. In line with this finding, correlational analysis with longitudinal BMI measurements revealed a link between greater VS regulation and poorer treatment outcome after 60 and 90 days. Together, these results identify a neural correlate of altered emotion regulation in AN, which seems to be detrimental to psychological well-being and may interfere with recovery

Feynman graph polynomials

The integrand of any multi-loop integral is characterised after Feynman parametrisation by two polynomials. In this review we summarise the properties of these polynomials. Topics covered in this article include among others: Spanning trees and spanning forests, the all-minors matrix-tree theorem, recursion relations due to contraction and deletion of edges, Dodgson's identity and matroids.Comment: 35 pages, references adde

How achievement motive enactment shapes daily flow experience and work engagement: The interplay of personality systems

In the present study, we examined how different forms of achievement motive interact to predict daily flow experience and work engagement. In particular, we conducted two diary studies to examine the main and interaction effects of motive enactment via extension memory (a macrosystem that enables holistic and experience-based information processing) and via the object recognition system (an alert-oriented macrosystem). In study 1, in line with personality systems interaction (PSI) theory, we found that motive enactment via extension memory fosters both day-specific flow and work engagement, whereas the conjunction of both forms of motive enactment has beneficial effects on flow and work engagement (two-way interaction). In study 2, we found that role clarity moderates the interaction of the two forms of enactment, indicating that the two-way interaction occurs when role clarity is low. Our results imply that the interplay of different dispositional forms of achievement motive enactment shapes how employees experience flow and engagement

The role of regulatory, affective, and motivational resources in the adverse spillover of sleep in the home domain to employee effectiveness in the work domain

How does sleep affect employee effectiveness and what can employees do to remain effective on days with a lack of sleep? Drawing on the conservation of resources theory, our research expands on the cognitive (regulatory resources), affective (positive affect), and motivational (subjective vitality) mechanisms that link sleep and employee effectiveness. Furthermore, considering the crucial role of individuals’ beliefs in the spillover of sleep to work, we examine implicit theories about willpower – a mindset about the resource-draining nature of self-regulation – as a moderator of the positive relationship between sleep duration and employee effectiveness through regulatory resources availability. Two daily diary studies with a combined sample of Ntotal = 214 employees (Ntotal = 1317 workdays) demonstrate the predominant role of cognitive- and affective resources in the day-specific relations between sleep at home to engagement, in-role, and extra-role performance at work. Moreover, the spillover of sleep to employee effectiveness via cognitive resources is stronger for individuals holding a limited as compared with a non-limited resource theory. This research not only expands our theoretical understanding of the psychological mechanisms that link sleep to employee effectiveness but also offers practical implications by highlighting the protective role of holding a non-limited resource theory on days with a lack of sleep.</p

Organizational tenure and employee performance: a multilevel analysis

Previous research has investigated the relationship between organizational tenure and performance by focusing primarily on organizational tenure of the individual employee. We propose that this approach is limited because organizational tenure should be conceptualized as relating to multiple entities including teams and their leaders. As predicted, analysis of two objective performance indicators of 1,753 employees working with 250 leaders of natural work teams in a financial services company revealed that, beyond employee organizational tenure, team leader organizational tenure and team organizational tenure diversity had positive incremental effects on employee performance. Moreover, the positive impact of employee organizational tenure was less pronounced in teams with high rather than low tenure diversity. Our findings suggest that organizations’ capacity to promote performance will be limited if they focus on organizational tenure of an individual, while neglecting the ways in which performance is shaped by organizational tenure related to multiple entities within a team