Responsible Business and Individual Differences

Corporate social responsibility is increasingly regarded as an important performance domain for organizations. Critical to implementing responsible organizational policies and initiatives, however, are the behaviors by individual employees at all levels of the organizational hierarchy. This chapter reviews the nature, structure, and dispositional antecedents of individual-level responsible business behaviors contributing to organizational CSR efforts. It focuses on two domains of employee responsible—externally directed citizenship behaviors (OCB-X) and employee green behaviors. Their divergent conceptualizations, measures, and dispositional antecedents are reviewed. Four major limitations pervade the literatures on OCB-X and employee green behaviors, and consequently hinder progress on understanding the individual-level (micro) foundations of CSR. Suggestions and directions for future research are offered to improve scholarship, understanding, and applications involving these constructs.

Emotional Exhaustion Among Hotel Employees: The Interactive Effects of Affective Dispositions and Positive Work Reflection

Hospitality employees inevitably face emotional exhaustion when performing their jobs. The purpose of this study was to investigate dispositional antecedents of hospitality employees’ emotional exhaustion, including self-instability, pessimism, and affect variability, and how employees’ affect variability mediates the relations between self-instability and pessimism and emotional exhaustion. In addition, we explored the moderating role of positive work reflection on the relation between affect variability and emotional exhaustion. A total of 224 frontline employees in 18 four- and five-star hotels in Ecuador responded to surveys about their emotions and work lives. The findings suggest that (a) emotional exhaustion was influenced by affect variability, (b) affect variability mediated the relations between self-instability and pessimism and emotional exhaustion, and (c) the relation between affect variability and emotional exhaustion was weakened by positive work reflection. The results highlight the importance of potential low-cost and easily trainable interventions that could help in attenuating the negative effects of highly variable emotions and the resulting exhaustion that are prevalent in the hospitality industry. This research is among the first to examine the dispositional antecedents of emotional exhaustion, and the first to highlight the role of positive work reflection as a moderating variable that can buffer the negative effect of affect variability on emotional exhaustion.

Controlling Coaching Behaviors and Athlete Burnout: Investigating the Mediating Roles of Perfectionism and Motivation

This investigation sought to replicate and extend earlier studies of athlete burnout by examining athlete-perceived controlling coaching behaviors and athlete perfectionism variables as, respectively, environmental and dispositional antecedents of athlete motivation and burnout. Data obtained from NCAA Division I swimmers (n = 487) within 3 weeks of conference championship meets were analyzed for this report. Significant indirect effects were observed between controlling coaching behaviors and burnout through athlete perfectionism (i.e., socially prescribed, self-oriented) and motivation (i.e., autonomous, amotivation). Controlling coaching behaviors predicted athlete perfectionism. In turn, self-oriented perfectionism was positively associated with autonomous motivation and negatively associated with amotivation, while socially prescribed perfectionism was negatively associated with autonomous motivation and positively associated with controlled motivation and amotivation. Autonomous motivation and amotivation, in turn, predicted athlete burnout in expected directions. These findings implicate controlling coaching behaviors as potentially contributing to athlete perfectionism, shaping athlete motivational regulations, and possibly increasing athlete burnout.