Journal of occupational health psychology
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J Occup Health Psychol · Jul 2010
Is it better to receive than to give? Empathy in the conflict-distress relationship.
The moderating effect of partner empathy on the relationship between both directions of work-family conflict (work-to-family and family-to-work) and psychological distress of both the job incumbent and partner are examined in this study. Considering empathy as a specific dimension of emotional social support, we hypothesized that receiving empathy would buffer negative spillover to the job incumbent while giving empathy would exacerbate negative crossover to the partner. ⋯ We also found it interesting that giving partner empathy moderated the crossover effects on family-to-work conflict but had no effects with work-to-family conflict. Implications of these findings and avenues for future research are discussed.
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J Occup Health Psychol · Jul 2010
Transformational leadership and employee safety performance: a within-person, between-jobs design.
We investigated the extent to which the safety performance (i.e., self-reported safety compliance and safety participation) of employees with 2 jobs was predicted by their respective supervisors' transformational leadership behaviors. We compared 2 within-person models: a context-specific model (i.e., transformational leadership experienced by employees in 1 context related to those same employees' safety performance only in that context) and a context-spillover model (i.e., transformational leadership experienced by employees in 1 context related to those same employees' safety performance in the same and other contexts). ⋯ Having controlled for individual differences (negative affectivity and conscientiousness) and work characteristics (e.g., hours worked and length of relationship with supervisor), the context-specific model provided the best fit to the data among alternative nested models. Implications for the role of transformational leadership in promoting workplace safety are discussed.