Why does using personal strengths at work increase employee engagement; who makes the most out of it; and how?

Engaging in behaviors that take advantage of one's personal strengths at work can promote employee flourishing in the workplace and mental health. Personal strengths use has thus gained increasing attention within occupational psychology and positive organizational scholarship. In this article, we first integrate work on personal strengths use with the latest developments in the job demands-resources theory (and its extensions) to develop a conceptual model explaining how and why personal strengths use on the job increases work engagement. Specifically, we propose that feelings of inspiration and meaningfulness explain the relationship between personal strengths use and work engagement. Second, we identify two mechanisms through which employees can amplify the benefits associated with personal strengths use at work; that is, we propose that the increased engagement associated with strengths use makes employees more likely to capitalize on the positive aspects of their work by engaging in work-family interpersonal capitalization and positive work reflection. Further, our model predicts that employees' psychological capital moderates the effects of personal strengths use. We tested our theoretical predictions in a sample of 160 full-time employees who provided ratings that comprise a three-level data set (person, week, and day) comprising 943 matched weekly ratings and 2,787 daily ratings. Our hypotheses were largely supported by these data. Implications for theory, practice, and future research are discussed. <br/

Are you too happy to serve others? When and why positive affect makes customer mistreatment experience feel worse

Service employees encounter frequent mistreatments on the job, and these mistreatments can occur unexpectedly. Despite the overall favorable impact of positive affect on coping with negative events, we argue that it could create an expectancy disconfirmation for service employees when they face customer mistreatment. Drawing from expectancy disconfirmation theory, we predict that such expectancy disconfirmation heightens service employees’ need for self-regulation and thus consumes self-control resources. Using a total of 791 service professionals in both online and field (i.e., e-commerce firms in China and a hotel in India) experiments, we found that positive expectancy disconfirmation was positively related to self-control depletion, which led to greater subsequent perceived mistreatment by customers and need for psychological detachment from work (Study 1 and 2). Furthermore, we identified expectation of customer mistreatment as a boundary condition that attenuated the relationship between expectancy disconfirmation and self-control depletion (Study 3 and 4). We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our work

How and When Service Beneficiaries' Gratitude Enriches Employees' Daily Lives

Conventional research on gratitude has focused on the benefits of expressing or experiencing gratitude for the individual. However, recent theory and research have highlighted that there may too be benefits associated with receiving others’ gratitude. Grounded in the Work–Home Resources model, we develop a conceptual model to understand whether, how, and for whom service providers (i.e., healthcare professionals) benefit from receiving service beneficiaries’ (i.e., patients) gratitude in their daily work. We hypothesize that perceived gratitude from service beneficiaries enhances service providers’ relational energy at work, which spills over to benefit their family lives later in the day. In addition, we hypothesize that the effect of gratitude on relational energy and its subsequent spillover effect to the family are contingent on employees’ occupational identity. Two experience sampling studies with data collected from healthcare professionals and their spouses for two consecutive weeks (each) provided support for our hypothesized model. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and practical implications of our work

Explaining Affective Linkages in Teams: Individual Differences in Susceptibility to Contagion and Individualism–Collectivism

To expand on the understanding of how affective states are linked within teams, the authors describe a longitudinal study examining the linkages between team members' affective states over time. In a naturalistic team performance setting, they found evidence that the average affective state of the other team members was related to an individual team member's affect over time, even after controlling for team performance. In addition, they found that these affective linkages were moderated by individual differences in susceptibility to emotional contagion and collectivistic tendencies such that the strength of the linkage was stronger for those high in susceptibility and those with collectivistic tendencies. Implications for research and practice are discussed. © 2007 American Psychological Association

Work-related helping and family functioning: a work-home resources perspective

Using the work–home resources (W-HR) model as an overarching framework, our study seeks to examine the interplay between employees’ provision and receipt of interpersonal organizational citizenship behaviours (OCB-I; i.e. helping behaviours), and its spillover effects on two family outcomes (family performance and marital withdrawal behaviours). Further, we simultaneously test resource depletion (emotional exhaustion) and resource generation (personal accomplishment) mechanisms linking OCB-Is and the family domain. Based on a time-lagged, dual-source study of 320 employees, we found that OCB-I enactment is positively related to both exhaustion (only for those who receive low OCB-Is from colleagues) and personal accomplishment at work (regardless of OCB-I receipt), which interferes with and enriches employees’ family lives, respectively. We discuss the theoretical contributions of these findings to OCB research and the W-HR model

The Spillover of Daily Job Satisfaction onto Employees’ Family Lives: The Facilitating Role of Work-Family Integration

The longitudinal, multisource, multimethod study presented herein examines the role of employees' work-family integration in the spillover of daily job satisfaction onto daily marital satisfaction and affective states experienced by employees at home. The spillover linkages are modeled at the within-individual level, and results support the main effects of daily job satisfaction on daily marital satisfaction and affect at home, as well as the moderating effect of work-family integration on the strength of the within-individual spillover effects on home affect. That is, employees with highly integrated work and family roles exhibited stronger intraindividual spillover effects on positive and negative affect at home

Flow at Work and Basic Psychological Needs: Effects on Well‐Being

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/135400/1/apps12075_am.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/135400/2/apps12075.pd

When Can Employees Have a Family Life? The Effects of Daily Workload and Affect on Work-Family Conflict and Social Behaviors at Home

This article presents a longitudinal examination of antecedents and outcomes of work-to-family conflict. A total of 106 employees participating in an experience-sampling study were asked to respond to daily surveys both at work and at home, and their spouses were interviewed daily via telephone for a period of 2 weeks. Intraindividual analyses revealed that employees ’ perceptions of workload predicted work-to-family conflict over time, even when controlling for the number of hours spent at work. Workload also influenced affect at work, which in turn influenced affect at home. Finally, perhaps the most interesting finding in this study was that employees ’ behaviors in the family domain (reported by spouses) were predicted by the employees ’ perceptions of work-to-family conflict and their positive affect at home

Experience-sampling and event-sampling research

In recent years, an emerging focus on studying within-person processes and phenomena has started to complement traditional between-person research streams that explain how and why construct scores co-vary among individuals (Ilies, Schwind, &amp; Heller, 2007; Ilies et al., 2010). This emerging focus has been aided by the introduction of frameworks that include an episodic conceptualization of work events and occurrences in order to explain variations in affective states, attitudes, and behaviors within people and across time (see Weiss &amp; Cropanzano, 1996; Beal et al., 2005). That is, this within-person focus aims to examine the effects of workplace episodes, dynamically experienced states, and temporally fluctuating factors in order to investigate phenomena and research questions that cannot be adequately addressed with between-individual approaches (Alliger &amp; Williams, 1993; Sheldon et al., 1996). Specifically, between-person designs consider variations in construct scores across time as transient error, as they can only investigate the “trait-like” or stable component of the variables being examined