“How Can We Catch Fire?”

Chapter 5 explores the Vineyard movement, one of the fastest-growing church movements in the United States, which is committed to holding together the “already” and “not yet” of the Kingdom of God in worship. In addition to looking for a dramatic, miraculous inbreaking of the Holy Spirit, there is a less dramatic but equally formative influence at work in worship: the Quaker notion of “gospel order” and its accompanying understanding of ethics. These commitments are tested at “Koinonia Vineyard,” a congregation located in the Pacific Northwest, where one African American member wrestles with her vision of activism and her Caucasian pastor’s desire for the congregation to remain politically neutral during a time of national racial unrest.

Influence at Work tied to Materiality in Danish Care Work

Influence at work is known to be an important factor for workers health. Researchers have called for studies on influence at work as a contextualized phenomenon. Based on individual interviews with managers and focus group interviews with employees in three care workplaces, the article shows how the materiality of the work setting ties employees’ influence to perform tasks in both hindering and enabling ways. We show that a work environment where employees’ influence is hindered produces negative experiences in the work environment, while an environment where employees’ influence is enabled produces positive experiences. Additionally, we study how employees influence the material aspects of their workplace.We present a view of influence at work as constituted by materiality and social organization in sociomaterial assemblages. This study reintroduces materiality as a concern in psychosocial work environment research and contributes a sociomaterial view on influence at work and materiality.

Antecedents of Workplace Bullying among Employees in Germany: Five-Year Lagged Effects of Job Demands and Job Resources

Objectives: The aim of the present study was to examine the long-term association of job demands and job resources with self-reported exposure to workplace bullying in a representative sample of employees in Germany. Methods: We analysed a nation-wide representative cohort of employees working in the same workplace with a 5-year follow-up (S-MGA; N = 1637). The study contained self-reported measures of psychosocial working conditions, including work pace, amount of work, influence at work, role clarity and quality of leadership, and workplace bullying, and of organisational factors, including organisational restructuring and layoffs. Results: After controlling for bullying and occupational level at baseline, higher baseline levels of organisational restructuring (OR 1.73; 95% CI 1.10–2.70), work pace (1.30; 95% CI 1.01–1.66), and amount of work (1.55; 95% CI 1.21–1.99), and lower baseline levels of influence at work (0.70; 95% CI 0.55–0.90) and quality of leadership (1.99; 0.64; 95% CI 0.50–0.82), were associated with an elevated risk of workplace bullying at follow-up. In all, 90% of cases of self-reported workplace bullying could be attributed to these factors. Conclusions: The study suggests that employees reporting higher demands and lower resources, as well as organisational factors such as restructuring, are at a higher long-term risk of being targets of workplace bullying. Interventions aimed at preventing workplace bullying could benefit from a focus on psychosocial working conditions and organisational factors.

Appreciation and job control predict depressive symptoms: results from the Study on Mental Health at Work

Objective Depressive symptoms are a leading cause of disability retirement and sick leave. The aim of this study was to assess the risk of depressive symptoms in German employees and its associations with factors from both the occupational and the non-occupational domain and gender. Methods In the second wave of the German Study of Mental Health at Work (SMGA), a representative sample of 2640 German employees (52% women) was studied. Depressive symptoms were assessed with the PHQ-9 questionnaire. Psychosocial occupational and non-occupational conditions were assessed with quantitative interviews. In this cross-sectional sample, the association of these factors with depressive symptoms was examined using logistic regression models. Results Factors from both the occupational and the non-occupational domain were associated with risk of depressive symptoms. Low appreciation from superior (ORmen 2.1 (95% CI 1.2–3.7); ORwomen 3.2 (95% CI 2.1–4.8)), low job control (ORmen 2.9 (95% CI 1.6–5.4); ORwomen 1.6 (95% CI 1.0–2.5)), and critical life events (ORmen 3.0 (95% CI 1.6–5.4); ORwomen 2.3 (95% CI 1.5–3.7)) had the strongest association with risk of depressive symptoms. The association with quantitative demands was stronger in caregivers than in non-caregivers. The results indicated possible differences in the associations of working conditions between men and women, and between family caregivers and non-caregivers. Conclusion Factors from both work and private life are associated with depressive symptoms, especially appreciation, job control, and critical life events. Gender differences, with respect to appreciation and influence at work, suggest a more gender sensitive approach to psychosocial occupational health research and interventions.

Efficacy beliefs and employee voice: the role of perceived influence and manager openness

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to explore how and when an employee's belief in their voice self-efficacy leads to promotive and prohibitive voice behavior. By banking on social cognitive theory, this study examines perceived influence at work as a mediator and managerial openness as a moderator in the link between voice self-efficacy and the two forms of voice.Design/methodology/approachThis study's data come from 285 Indian information technology (IT) employees by adopting a cross-sectional survey design. The effect of moderator and mediator is examined by employing structural equation modeling in AMOS 22.FindingsThe results reveal that perceived influence at work partially mediates the positive link between voice self-efficacy and the two forms of voice behaviors. The test of moderation also exposes that prohibitive voice is more contingent on managerial openness as compared to promotive voice.Originality/valueThis is one of the initial studies to explore perceived influence at work as a mediator in the association between voice self-efficacy and employee voice behavior. The treatment of voice as a bidimensional construct in this study discloses the difference between the two forms, contributing to the voice literature and inviting further research.

Environmental racialisation and poetics of influence in the postgenomic era: fire, soil, spirit

This article considers processes of environmental racialisation in the postgenomic era through their politics of difference and poetics of influence. Subfields like epigenetics promise to account for a plurality of possible influences on health outcomes. While this appears to present possibilities for historical reparation to communities whose epigenomes may have been chronically altered by histories of violence and trauma, the prevailing trend has been to compound processes of racialisation in the reproduction of good/bad environments. The postgenomic era has promised an epistemological transformation of ideas and values of human life, but its practices, technologies and ideology have so far prevented this. Epigenetics, rather, reproduces biomedical exclusions through imaginaries of embodied contexts, methods of occlusion and hypervisibility, and assignations of delay and deviance. This is more complex than both genetic reductionism and environmental racism: studies on epigenetics reveal a poetics of influence at work under liberal humanism complicit in the creation of death-worlds for racialised populations. Other experiments with life are possible and unfolding: Jay Bernard’s poem ‘Chemical’, set in the aftermath of London’s Grenfell Tower fire in 2017, unmoors its bodies from material environment, offering a spectral configuration of collective life. This configuration involves negotiating with the fixing of time and space on which genomic imaginaries depend.

Role of job and personal resources in the appraisal of job demands as challenges and hindrances

Previous research has shown that challenge and hindrance job demands show different effects on employees’ wellbeing and performance. Moreover, it has been demonstrated that employees’ subjective appraisal of job demands as challenges and hindrances may vary: they can be appraised as challenges or hindrances or both. Subjective appraisal of job demands was found to be also related to employees’ wellbeing and productivity. However, little is known about predictors of the appraisals of job demands made by employees. The aim of the study was to identify predictors of such appraisals among job and individual resources. Cross-sectional research was carried out among 426 IT, healthcare and public transport employees. COPSOQ II scales were used to measure job demands (emotional, quantitative, cognitive demands, work pace and role conflicts) and job resources (influence at work, possibilities for development, vertical and horizontal trust), single questions were used to measure employees’ subjective appraisals of job demands as hindrances and challenges, and PCQ was used to measure psychological capital. Multiple hierarchical regression analyses showed that only horizontal trust predicted the appraisal of job demands as challenges, and vertical trust predicted the appraisal of job demands as hindrances among four analysed job resources. Individual resource–psychological capital–predicted only the appraisal of job demands as challenges. Control variables–occupation, age and job demands also played a significant role in predicting the appraisal of job demands. Implications and future directions are discussed.

Joint association of physical and psychosocial working conditions with risk of long-term sickness absence: Prospective cohort study with register follow-up

Aims: The interplay between physical and psychosocial working conditions for the risk of developing poor health is not well understood. This study aimed to determine the joint association of physical and psychosocial working conditions with risk of long-term sickness absence (LTSA) in the general working population. Methods: Based on questionnaire responses about physical working conditions and psychosocial working conditions (influence at work, emotional demands, support from colleagues and support from managers) and two-year prospective follow-up in a national register on social transfer payments, we estimated the risk of incident LTSA of >30 days among 9544 employees without previous LTSA from the Danish Work Environment Cohort Study. The analyses were censored for all events of permanent labour market drop-out (retirement, disability pension, immigration or death) and controlled for potential confounders. Results: In the total cohort, more demanding physical working conditions were associated with risk of LTSA in a dose–response fashion (trend test, p<0.0001). The combination of poor overall psychosocial working conditions (index measure of influence at work, emotional demands, support from managers and support from colleagues) and hard physical working conditions showed the highest risk of LTSA. However, poor overall psychosocial working conditions did not interact with physical working conditions in the risk of LTSA ( p=0.9677). Conclusions: The results of this study suggest that workplaces should strive to improve both psychosocial and physical work factors in order to ensure the health of workers.