Coaching challenging executives

This book chapter explores the mental health of senior leaders, its impact on the organization, and the role of coaching executives in the workplace. Specifically, we explore four regularly encountered toxic behavior patterns amongst leaders that can derail their organizations. For each personality type, we describe the conditions underlying the behavior pattern, how to recognize the pattern, how to coach individuals who exhibit this pattern, as well as to provide a real live case study to illustrate how coaching can bring about better ways of running their organizations

Exploring the Concept of Individual Workplace Well-Being: What does it mean to have Workplace Well-being and What is the Role of Identity-Related Resources in Achieving it?

When exploring workplace phenomena such as well-being, it is important to recognise the context in which the experience takes place. For example, many contemporary jobs require people to interact with others or to work in groups. Therefore, the social dimension of the workplace well-being experience calls for recognition in research. Keeping the social context of work in mind, the PhD programme had two research aims in order to develop current understanding further on what well-being encompasses and what the best ways are to enhance it. The first aim was to explore relevant components of individual workplace well-being. The second aim was to explore the relevance of two antecedents of individual workplace well-being: Authenticity and social identification were conceptualized through an identity lens as identity-related resources, incorporating the personal self (authenticity) and the social self (shared social identity). Well-being experience accounts of managers, consultants, and staff from different work contexts were explored in two studies through questionnaires, interviews, and focus groups and then analysed with thematic qualitative content analysis. The findings suggest that well-being descriptions from people who work are aligned with existing well-being concepts. Furthermore, the social aspect of well-being was indeed highlighted through the frequent use of indicators such as feeling connected with others, high interaction, and collaboration. In addition, depending on whose well-being was explored, different workplace well-being components were referred to in descriptions of the experience. The findings further suggest that the identity-related resources can act as positive, negative, or irrelevant resources for well-being depending on the work context (i.e. job role and work characteristics). This research indicates that the social aspect of the well-being is a prevalent part of the experience and is not just important in itself but is also for successfully working together with others. Furthermore, any action to improve well-being needs to be tailored to the characteristics of the work context and the workers themselves

Reconceptualising workplace resilience - A cross-disciplinary perspective

Stressful situations, performance pressure, and setbacks are part of contemporary organizational life. The dynamic nature of technological advances and globalisation of business leads to tougher competitive pressures and constant change. People‘s responses to these challenging circumstances vary widely. Some bounce back and adapt to increasing challenges and adversity, others‘ healthy functioning is significantly impaired. Even though resilience is recognised as a crucial issue in the workplace, the rates of new cases of work-related stress and depression have remained broadly flat for more than 10 years. Resilience research within Applied Psychology typically focuses on the psychological domain of a person‘s functioning. This means that also resilience trainings or interventions focus on only one area. The present paper aims to build a comprehensive conceptualization of workplace resilience ultimately to assist in informing targeted intervention and in developing a model to move the research area forward as a whole. A cross-disciplinary understanding of and approach to individual resilience in the workplace would allow to better understand the mechanism of why some people bounce back from adverse events whereas others‘ well-being declines. We propose a resilience framework with antecedents considering psychological (cognitive and emotional) and physiological correlates (cardiovascular, gastrointestinal and metabolic)

The impact of self-esteem, conscientiousness and pseudo-personality on technostress

Purpose We investigated how personality traits are associated with workplace technostress (perception of stressors related to the use of Information and Communication Technologies—ICTs). Methodology We collected 95 self-rated and 336 observer-rated questionnaires using the Personality Audit and a shortened version of the Technostress Scale. To analyze relationships between personality dimensions and technostress, we applied partial least squares structural equation modeling. Findings Our study shows that in line with previous studies, self-esteem is negatively related to levels of technostress. Contrary to our expectations, conscientiousness is positively related to technostress. Finally, the gap between a person’s self-ratings and observer ratings in all personality dimensions is positively associated with technostress. Practical implications We showed that the experience of technostress varies significantly amongst individuals. By taking personality differences into account when allocating responsibilities and creating guidelines for ICT use at work, technostress could be addressed. Instead of setting organization-wide norms for availability and use, we suggest it would be more effective to acknowledge individual needs and preferences. Originality/value This study contributes to current technostress research by further examining antecedents, and by focusing on the role of personality. In addition, we examined how differences in “self” and “observer” ratings of personality characteristics may point to variations in the way individuals experience technostress. We outline concrete best practice guidelines for ICTs in organisations that take inter-individual differences into account

Relating cultural distance to self-other agreement of leader-observer dyads: the role of hierarchical position

Multisource feedback is important for leadership development and effectiveness. An important asset of such feedback is that it provides information about the self-other agreement between leaders and observers. Self-other agreement relates to several positive individual, dyadic, and organizational outcomes. Given the increasingly intercultural context in organizations, it is imperative to understand whether and how cultural distance between leaders and observers relates to self-other agreement. We hypothesize that cultural distance within leader-observer dyads is negatively associated with self-other agreement. Moreover, we expect that this relationship is stronger for leader-superior than leader-subordinate dyads. We use a unique multi-cultural dataset of 7,778 leaders (52 nationalities) rated by 22,997 subordinates (56 nationalities) and 10,132 superiors (54 nationalities) to test our hypotheses. Results confirm that cultural distance is negatively associated with self-other agreement; we show that this relationship is driven by increased self-ratings and by reduced other-ratings. In addition, we find that these results are more pronounced for leader-superior than for leader-subordinate dyads. Implications for the theory and practice of self-other agreement and multisource feedback are discussed

Laser capture microdissection (LCM) and whole genome amplification (WGA) of DNA from normal breast tissue --- optimization for genome wide array analyses

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Laser capture microdissection (LCM) can be applied to tissues where cells of interest are distinguishable from surrounding cell populations. Here, we have optimized LCM for fresh frozen normal breast tissue where large amounts of fat can cause problems during microdissection. Since the amount of DNA needed for genome wide analyses, such as single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) arrays, is often greater than what can be obtained from the dissected tissue, we have compared three different whole genome amplification (WGA) kits for amplification of DNA from LCM material. In addition, the genome wide profiling methods commonly used today require extremely high DNA quality compared to PCR based techniques and DNA quality is thus critical for successful downstream analyses.</p> <p>Findings</p> <p>We found that by using FrameSlides without glass backing for LCM and treating the slides with acetone after staining, the problems caused by excessive fat could be significantly decreased. The amount of DNA obtained after extraction from LCM tissue was not sufficient for direct SNP array analysis in our material. However, the two WGA kits based on Phi29 polymerase technology (Repli-g^®(Qiagen) and GenomiPhi (GE Healthcare)) gave relatively long amplification products, and amplified DNA from Repli-g^®gave call rates in the subsequent SNP analysis close to those from non-amplified DNA. Furthermore, the quality of the input DNA for WGA was found to be essential for successful SNP array results and initial DNA fragmentation problems could be reduced by switching from a regular halogen lamp to a VIS-LED lamp during LCM.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>LCM must be optimized to work satisfactorily in difficult tissues. We describe a work flow for fresh frozen normal breast tissue where fat is inclined to cause problems if sample treatment is not adapted to this tissue. We also show that the Phi29-based Repli-g^®WGA kit (Qiagen) is a feasible approach to amplify DNA of high quality prior to genome wide analyses such as SNP profiling.</p

Marriage, social integration and loneliness in the second half of life: A comparison of Dutch and german men and women

Contains fulltext : 55589.pdf (publisher's version ) (Closed access)Although marriage is usually considered to be socially integrative, some studies indicate that it can be privatizing, enclosing couples in isolated dyads. This study compared the availability of support, companionship, and negative relational experiences in various types of relationships for married men and women aged 40 to 85 years in the Netherlands and Germany. The Dutch demonstrated a more varied pattern of relationships beyond the nuclear family than the Germans but also reported worrying about a greater variety of people. In both countries, men relied more strongly on their partners, whereas women had more varied networks and experienced more worries. A continuum of social involvement can be drawn with German men, for whom marriage is privatizing, at one end and Dutch women, for whom marriage is highly socially integrating, at the other. Loneliness was related to the provisions of social relations, but no national and gender differences in predictors of loneliness were found.17 p