Job crafting and job satisfaction in a sample of Italian teachers: the mediating role of Perceived Organizational Support

We aimed to explore the mediating role of perceived organizational support (POS) on the relationship between job crafting and job satisfaction, which is considered as an important outcome for the development of well being at work. Participants were 263 teachers from public schools in the South of Italy. Results indicated that POS fully mediated the relationship between job crafting and job satisfaction. Implications for management educational practice and limitations of the study are discussed

The role of employability in students during academic experience: a preliminary study through PLS-PM technique

In the current socio-economic scenario, affected by constant changes inthe labor market, employability found greater echo. Universities frequently adopt strategies aimed at improving the employability and usefulness of theareas of competence, motivation and interests of young graduates and workers. In this study a preliminary research was conducted on a sample of 84 university students who attended a consulting service at the University of Salento, the Career Service Office. The average age of the sample was 26.74 years (DS = 4.95), 63% women, 71.4% unemployed. The tool used was a questionnaire-interview. The aim of this research was to assess the role of employability and its influence on personal variables and active work behaviours, as job searching activities. Analyses were conducted through PLS-PM technique, a non-parametrical SEM modeling, and demonstrated that employability affects job search and personal efficacy, while personal efficacy had a non signicant relation with job search behaviours

The role of employability in students during academic experience: A preliminary study through PLS-PM technique

In the current socio-economic scenario, affected by constant changes in the labor market, employability found greater echo. Universities frequently adopt strategies aimed at improving the employability and usefulness of the areas of competence, motivation and interests of young graduates and workers. In this study a preliminary research was conducted on a sample of 84 university students who attended a consulting service at the University of Salento, the Career Service Office. The average age of the sample was 26.74 years (DS = 4.95), 63% women, 71.4% unemployed. The tool used was a questionnaire-interview. The aim of this research was to assess the role of employability and its in uence on personal variables and active work behaviours, as job searching activities. Analyses were conducted through PLS-PM technique, a non-parametrical SEM modeling, and demonstrated that employability affects job search and self-efficacy, while self-efficacy had a non significant relation with job search behaviour

Development and validation of the Remote Working Benefits & Disadvantages scale

The changes that are constantly occurring in the labour sector have led organisations and companies to move towards digital transformation. This process was accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic and  conducted to a massive recourse to the practice of remote working, which in this study is understood as the term for the way of performing work outside the usual workplace and with the support of ICT. Currently, there are no flexible scales in the literature that allow measuring the benefits and disadvantages of remote working with a single instrument. Thus, the distinction between the positive and negative consequences of working remotely, substantiated by a solid literature, provides a framework for a systematical understanding of the issue. The aim of the present study is to develop and validate a scale on remote working benefits and disadvantages (RW-B&D scale). For this end, a preliminary Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) with 304 participants, a tailored EFA with a sample of 301 workers and a Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) with 677 workers were conducted. Participants were all Italian employees who worked remotely during the period of the COVID-19 health emergency. Data were collected between October 2020 and April 2021. The psychometric robustness of the model was assessed through bootstrap validation (5000 resamples), fit indices testing and measurement of factorial invariance. The statistical analyses demonstrated the bifactorial nature of the scale, supporting the research hypothesis. The model showed good fit indices, bootstrap validation reported statistically significant saturations, good reliability indices, and convergent and discriminant validity. Measurement invariance was tested for gender and organisational sector. The results suggested that the novel scale facilitates the quantitative measurement of the benefits and disadvantages associated with remote working in empirical terms. For this reason, it could be a streamlined and psychometrically valid instrument to identify the potential difficulties arising from remote working and, at the same time, the positive aspects that can be implemented to improve organisational well-being

QUASUS: A Tool for Measuring the Parents’ School Satisfaction

No validated instruments for assessing school users’ satisfaction are available. This paper means to contribute to address this lack. It outlines a new instrument of measurement of school users’ satisfaction – QUASUS (QUestionnaire for the Analysis of the School User’s Satisfaction). The main peculiarity of QUASUS lies in the fact that it pays specific attention to the dimension of prosumership, namely the view of the client-service co-constructive relation as a constitutive component of the service’s construction and delivery. The study reports the output of an initial validation study of the instrument. Based on two samples of parents (N = 2802 and N = 1365) from Italian schools, analyses provided support to the hypotheses tested: QUASUS proved to be characterized by a good level of reliability (HP1); is able to detect the component comprising the school users’ satisfaction (HP2); proves a global connotation of the experience of the school by a unidimensional measure of the overall satisfaction (HP3), associated significantly with the prosumership (HP4)

Social Resources and Emotional Exhaustion: The Role of Communication in Professional Relationships

CC BY-NC-ND 4.0Communication is an element that permeates the lives of individuals, from birth to death. Through it, it is possible to create new shared meanings, relationships, and social networks. The importance of the communication process emerges in different contexts, one of which is undoubtedly the work context: several types of research have affirmed that efficient organizational communication produces positive outcomes at the level of workers and organizations, such as increased work commitment, satisfaction, and the reduction of phenomena such as emotional exhaustion and cynicism. Starting from the theoretical framework of the Job Demands-Job Resources model, which divides the characteristics of each work context according to two general categories – namely job demands (representing workers’ efforts in performing their job tasks) and job resources (facilitating aspects of work that can provide opportunities for personal growth) – the aim of this research is to explore the role of communication between colleagues and superiors in the relationship between a job resource (increased social resources) and a negative outcome, such as emotional exhaustion, by means of a non-parametric structural equation model (PLS-SEM), in a sample of 479 workers. Reliable structural and measurement models yielded excellent fit indices of the hypothesized latent variables. The results show that, for workers, enhancing social resources by asking for feedback from colleagues and bosses does not protect against the risks of emotional exhaustion, but in fact improves communication. The exclusive use of social resources at work does not have a significant impact on the risk of emotional exhaustion if it is not accompanied by perceived communication appropriate to the circumstances and contexts. Communication, therefore, fully mediates the relationship between increased social resources and emotional exhaustion and stands out as a crucial protective factor

The Italian version of the Job Crafting Scale (JCS)

Job crafting refers to actions carried out by workers in order to bring their job demands and job resources at a preferred level. Crafting behaviors are measured by the Dutch Job Crafting Scale (JCS). The Italian version of the JCS includes the following three positive factors: increasing structural job resources, social job resources and challenging job demands. To assess the factorial validity of the scale, an exploratory factor analysis (N=311) and confirmatory factor analyses (N=410) were performed. Convergent and criterion validity were investigated through correlations with other variables. Factor analyses showed a good three-factor structure, in line with the literature. Moreover, as expected, job crafting behaviors were correlated with work self-efficacy, work engagement and job performance. Results suggest that the Italian version of the JCS can be reliably used to measure job crafting