Paying Gratitude Forward at Work

Since workers are increasingly suffering from burnout, there is a need for insights into how burnout can be decreased to improve subjective well-being. The broaden-and-build theory proposes that gratitude increases well-being through an upward spiral. Few studies have examined whether gratitude decreases burnout and what mediating behaviors explain this relationship. Using an international sample of employees ( N = 353), this study examines whether work-specific gratitude negatively relates to exhaustion and disengagement. Additionally, since gratitude stimulates helping through upstream reciprocity, this study investigates whether interpersonal helping behavior (IHB) mediates these relationships. Our study showed a negative effect of work-specific gratitude on disengagement and exhaustion and a negative relationship between work-specific gratitude and disengagement, mediated by IHB, suggesting that gratitude stimulates IHB, thereby alleviating disengagement.

Why Not Interview?

Honesty-Humility is a valuable predictor in personnel selection; however, problems with self-report measures create a need for new tools to judge this trait. Therefore, this research examines the interview as an alternative for assessing Honesty-Humility and how to improve judgments of Honesty-Humility in the interview. Using trait activation theory, we examined the impact of interview question type on Honesty-Humility judgment accuracy. We hypothesized that general personality-tailored questions and probes would increase the accuracy of Honesty-Humility judgments. Nine hundred thirty-three Amazon Mechanical Turk workers watched and rated five interviews. Results found that general questions with probes and specific questions without probes led to the best Honesty-Humility judgments. These findings support the realistic accuracy model and provide implications for Honesty-Humility-based interviews.

It's Only Abusive If I Care

Drawing on conservation of resources (COR) theory, we propose that abusive supervision increases stress responses in targets, which, in turn, diminishes their ability to perform extra- and in-role work behaviors. However, based on COR theory, we argue that followers who are driven by low rather than high organizational concern motives place less value on their work and the social context in which technical activities occur. As such, feeling low organizational concern should make people less susceptible to abusive supervision rather than more so. Thus, organizational concern was proposed to moderate the abuse–stress relationship. Across two multisource studies, we found support for most of our hypotheses. Abusive supervision negatively affected organizational citizenship behaviors via increased stress, and low organizational concern was found to attenuate the detrimental effects of abusive supervision. Implications for leadership literature and future research are discussed.

Career Adaptability and Career Success

In this study, we contribute to the ongoing incremental validation efforts of the Career Adapt-Abilities Scale (CAAS). Using primary personality and cognition data from 164 German athletes in vocational careers, we intended to replicate Zacher’s (2014) seminal work in an alternative Western environment while also extending it in two significant ways: first, by adding two components of cognitive ability, and second, by introducing an alternative outcome variable – objective career success. In line with Zacher, we observe a significant role of career adaptability in predicting subjective career success. However, we also note that this initially robust relationship stems from a different psychosocial resource than expected. Interestingly, employing CAAS seems not to possess further incremental validity when predicting objective career success.

Who Speaks Up?

Research on the relationship between personality traits and employee voice has predominantly focused on main effects of one or more traits and has shown equivocal results. In this study, we explore relationships between configurations (i.e., all logically possible combinations) of the Big Five traits and promotive and prohibitive voice using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis. Survey data from 171 employees from 10 organizations in the service industry revealed that none of the traits alone could induce promotive or prohibitive voice. Yet, we found three trait configurations that relate to promotive voice and four configurations that relate to prohibitive voice. We use the theory of purposeful work behavior to explain the different trait configurations for promotive and prohibitive voice.

Pitfalls of Machine Learning-Based Personnel Selection

In recent years, machine learning (ML) modeling (often referred to as artificial intelligence) has become increasingly popular for personnel selection purposes. Numerous organizations use ML-based procedures for screening large candidate pools, while some companies try to automate the hiring process as far as possible. Since ML models can handle large sets of predictor variables and are therefore able to incorporate many different data sources (often more than common procedures can consider), they promise a higher predictive accuracy and objectivity in selecting the best candidate than traditional personal selection processes. However, there are some pitfalls and challenges that have to be taken into account when using ML for a sensitive issue as personnel selection. In this paper, we address these major challenges – namely the definition of a valid criterion, transparency regarding collected data and decision mechanisms, algorithmic fairness, changing data conditions, and adequate performance evaluation – and discuss some recommendations for implementing fair, transparent, and accurate ML-based selection algorithms.

Toward a More PERMA(nent) Conceptualization of Worker Well-Being?

We examined the factor structure of the recently developed worker well-being measure Workplace PERMA Profiler and relationships between PERMA dimensions (i.e., positive emotions, engagement, positive relationships, meaning, accomplishment) and job performance (viz., task performance, organizational citizenship behaviors benefiting individuals and the organization at large). The measure exhibited metric (i.e., weak) invariance across samples of participants from the United States ( N = 284) and China ( N = 420). Additionally, for participants who responded to both the Workplace PERMA Profiler and the performance measures, there was a general pattern of positive PERMA–performance relationships across both samples ( NUS = 147; NChina = 202). Overall, the Workplace PERMA Profiler may have problematic psychometric properties and item wordings and thus would benefit from further refinement.

Toward Optimized Effectiveness of Employee Training Programs

Although organizations invest heavily on employee training, the effectiveness of employee training programs has not been well-established. In the current study, we examine the training delivery features of employee training programs to derive a better understanding of features that may be of best benefit in the improvement of employee affective outcomes. Specifically, and via the use of meta-analysis ( k = 79 studies totaling 107 independent effect sizes), we focus on two broad classes of affective employee training outcomes including attitudinal and motivational outcomes. Results evidence support for the effectiveness of employee workplace training interventions and indicate that employee training programs associated with attitudinal versus motivational outcomes require different features while being delivered to reach optimal effectiveness.

Effects of Action Planning After Employee Surveys

Employee surveys are commonly used tools in organizations for the purpose of organizational development. We investigated the post-survey action planning process in 3,091 organizational units (OUs) of one large company in Germany. We expected action planning to lead to improvements on subsequent employee survey scores, with OUs that continuously and repeatedly planned actions showing the greatest improvements. Results suggest that the development of action plans can lead to improvements on subsequent survey scores, but effect sizes were generally small. Furthermore, managers who initiated action planning in the previous year were more likely to do so again the following year. Overall, these findings contribute to the literature on employee surveys by investigating effects of post-survey action planning.