Can I Smile with Spirit? Towards a Process Model Associating Workplace Spirituality and Emotional Labor

Workplace spirituality (WS) is a framework of organizational values embedded in the culture of the organization that promotes employees to experience a sense of meaningfulness at work, sense of connection with coworkers, congruence of organizational values with theirs\u27 and experience transcendence through their work. This dissertation presents workplace spirituality as an organizational intervention to manage the problem of emotional labor and its dysfunctional consequences among the service employees. The main thesis of the dissertation is that workplace spirituality will enable service employees to appraise emotional labor as a positive stressor (challenge stressor) rather than a negative stressor (hindrance stressor). The positive appraisal of emotional labor as a challenge stressor will enable employees to manage the negative consequences of emotional labor on the individual outcomes of burnout and turnover intention, with a positive outlook. The dissertation presents a process model explaining how the perception of workplace spirituality in organizations affect emotional labor strategies and individual outcomes. The dissertation predicts resilience as a mediator between workplace spirituality and cognitive appraisal of emotional labor. Additionally, the study predicts that challenge appraisal of emotional labor has a positive relationship with deep acting emotional labor strategy while hindrance appraisal of emotional labor has a positive relationship with surface acting emotional labor strategy. Furthermore, the deep acting strategy is hypothesized to be negatively associated with burnout and turnover intention, respectively while surface acting emotional strategy is hypothesized to have a positive association with burnout and turnover intention, respectively. This dissertation has some implication to both theory and practice. The major theoretical implication of the study is that it contributes to the literature of workplace spirituality and emotional labor separately. Additionally, it integrates psychological stress literature with emotional labor and workplace spirituality to present a comprehensive framework to explain the underlying evaluation of emotional labor. Furthermore, it seeks to inform the managers how a transcending workplace (workplace spirituality) can facilitate as a self-managing mechanism for employees to better manage their emotions at work, thereby reducing the negative consequences of emotional labor such as burnout and turnover intention

Effects of Employee Personality on the Relationships between Experienced Incivility, Emotional Exhaustion, and Perpetrated Incivility

Workplace incivility refers to low-intensity negative behaviors that violate workplace norms of respect. Incivility is known to be a type of stressor in the workplace, with recent research drawing attention to how it may differentially affect employees with varying personality traits. Drawing from a stressor–strain theoretical framework, we examined the moderating effects of four of the Big Five personality traits (agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and extraversion) on the relationship between individuals’ experienced incivility and their subsequent emotional exhaustion and perpetrated incivility toward others in the organization. Results from a 2-wave survey of 252 working adults indicate that personality traits moderated the relationship between the stressor of experienced incivility and the examined strains. Agreeableness strengthened the relationship between experienced incivility and the strains examined here. On the other hand, highly conscientious employees were less likely (than employees scoring low on this trait) to perpetrate incivility toward others or become emotionally exhausted in response to experiencing incivility. No moderating effects were found for the personality traits of neuroticism and extraversion. Implications for research and practice are discussed

Partial purification and characterization of amylase enzyme under solid state fermentation from Monascus sanguineus

Amylase is an important enzyme having a varied range of industrial applications from food to cosmetics, from pharmaceutical to detergent industry, etc. The present study was carried out considering these important applications of amylase enzyme. Monascus sanguineus also has not been explored for its efficiency to produce amylase enzymes under solid state fermentation. In the present study, various substrates were screened and among them beetroot as a solid substrate has given maximum yield (0.029 U/mL). Enzyme activity was further optimized by response surface methodology (RSM) and maximum experimental yield of 0.014 U/mL was obtained at optimized conditions of pH 5, incubation temperature of 50 °C and 10 min incubation time. A MATLAB software package was used for the graphical and regression analysis of the experimented data. Enzyme kinetics was calculated with different concentrations of starch and observed Km value was 0.055 mM from linear regression analysis. The enzyme was moderately inhibited (44.7%) by NaCl and KCl (0.105 U/mL) with minimum inhibition (14.8%) observed with SDS. Molecular weight calculation and amylase confirmation in protein sample was done by SDS–PAGE and Zymography. Calculated molecular weight was 56 kDa. Alkaline amylase produced by M. sanguineus has exhibited high efficiency towards removal of stains on cloths in combination with commercial detergent (Surf excel) at 20 °C. It can be concluded that the fungus M. sanguineus is a good source of amylase production under solid state fermentation. Application of amylase produced by M. sanguineus in detergent industry was also carried out and it was proven very effective in stain removal from the fabrics