Enriching or Depleting? The Dynamics of Engagement in Work and Family Roles

This study develops a model of engagement in the multiple roles of work and family. I examine two competing arguments about the effects of engaging in multiple roles, depletion and enrichment, and integrate them by identifying the type of emotional response to a role, negative or positive, as a critical contrasting assumption held by these two perspectives. Moreover, I represent depletion and enrichment as complex multistep processes that include multiple constructs, such as engagement and emotion. This study jointly examines both the depleting and enriching processes that link engagement in one role to engagement in another, using structural equation modeling. Findings from a survey of 790 employees reveal evidence for both depletion and enrichment as well as gender differences. Specifically, depletion existed only for women and only in the work-to-family direction. Men experienced enrichment from work to family, while women experienced enrichment from family to work. Overall, more linkages were found between work and family for women than for men

Being There: Work Engagement and Positive Organizational Scholarship

In this chapter, we examine the psychological state of employee work engagement. Our objective is to provide an overview of the engagement construct, clarify its definition, and discuss its behavioral outcomes. We discuss the development of the work engagement construct, which has led to many inconsistencies among scholars about its definition. We clarify that engagement captures employees’ strong focus of attention, intense absorption, and high energy toward their work-related tasks. Work engagement is important to the positive organizational scholarship (POS) field because engagement can lead to a number of positive outcomes, such as in-role and extra-role performance, client satisfaction, proactivity, adaptivity, and creativity. Managers, however, must ensure that employees have adequate resources and sufficient breaks, so that engagement does not lead to burnout or depletion. We encourage scholars interested in studying engagement in the future to investigate the contextual moderators that affect the relationship between engagement and employee behavior and examine the differential effects of the components of engagement—attention, absorption, and energy

Self Disclosure: Beneficial for Cohesion in Demographically Diverse Work Groups?

Many organizational efforts to improve co-worker relationships entail inducing employees to bring their “whole selves” into the workplace, which for employees often means disclosing personal experiences at work. Several psychological theories suggest that increased self-disclosure will lead to better relationships in organizational work groups. However, this chapter considers the factors impacting self-disclosure in demographically diverse settings. We posit that although self-disclosure has led to closer relationships in past research, it may not increase cohesion for employees in demographically diverse work groups, or those who are demographically dissimilar from the majority of their co-workers

When worlds collide in cyberspace: How boundary work in online social networks impacts professional relationships

International audienceAs employees increasingly interact with their professional contacts on online social networks that are personal in nature, such as Facebook or Twitter, they are likely to experience a collision of their professional and personal identities that is unique to this new and expanding social space. In particular, online social networks present employees with boundary management and identity negotiation opportunities and challenges, because they invite non-tailored self-disclosure to broad audiences, while offering few of the physical and social cues that normally guide social interactions. How and why do employees manage the boundaries between their professional and personal identities in online social networks, and how do these behaviors impact the way they are regarded by professional contacts? We build a framework to theorize about how work-nonwork boundary preferences and self-evaluation motives drive the adoption of four archetypical sets of online boundary management behaviors (open, audience, content, and hybrid), and the consequences of these behaviors for respect and liking in professional relationships. Content and hybrid behaviors are more likely to increase respect and liking than open and audience behaviors; audience and hybrid behaviors are less risky for respect and liking than open and content behaviors but more difficult to maintain over time

COVID-19 and the workplace: Implications, issues, and insights for future research and action.

COVID-19's impacts on workers and workplaces across the globe have been dramatic. We present a broad review of prior research rooted in work and organizational psychology, and related fields, for making sense of the implications for employees, teams, and work organizations. Our review and preview of relevant literature focuses on: (i) emergent changes in work practices (e.g. working from home, virtual teams) and (ii) emergent changes for workers (e.g. social distancing, stress and unemployment). In addition, we examine the potential moderating factors of demographic characteristics, individual differences, and organizational norms to generate disparate effects. This broad-scope overview provides an integrative approach for considering the implications of COVID-19 for work and organizations while also identifying issues for future research and insights to inform solutions