Journal of occupational health psychology
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J Occup Health Psychol · Jul 2013
Measurement development and validation of the Family Supportive Supervisor Behavior Short-Form (FSSB-SF).
Recently, scholars have demonstrated the importance of Family Supportive Supervisor Behaviors (FSSB), defined as behaviors exhibited by supervisors that are supportive of employees' family roles, in relation to health, well-being, and organizational outcomes. FSSB was originally conceptualized as a multidimensional, superordinate construct with four subordinate dimensions assessed with 14 items: emotional support, instrumental support, role modeling behaviors, and creative work-family management. Retaining one item from each dimension, two studies were conducted to support the development and use of a new FSSB-Short Form (FSSB-SF). ⋯ Using data from a sample of 823 information technology professionals and their 219 supervisors, Study 2 extends the validation of the FSSB-SF to a new sample of professional workers and new outcome variables. Results from multilevel confirmatory factor analyses and multilevel regression analyses provide evidence of construct and criterion-related validity of the FSSB-SF, as it was significantly related to work-family conflict, job satisfaction, turnover intentions, control over work hours, obligation to work when sick, perceived stress, and reports of family time adequacy. We argue that it is important to develop parsimonious measures of work-family specific support to ensure supervisor support for work and family is mainstreamed into organizational research and practice.
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J Occup Health Psychol · Jul 2013
Stress in highly demanding IT jobs: transformational leadership moderates the impact of time pressure on exhaustion and work-life balance.
The objective of this article is to investigate transformational leadership as a potential moderator of the negative relationship of time pressure to work-life balance and of the positive relationship between time pressure and exhaustion. Recent research regards time pressure as a challenge stressor; while being positively related to motivation and performance, time pressure also increases employee strain and decreases well-being. Building on the Job Demand-Resources model, we hypothesize that transformational leadership moderates the relationships between time pressure and both employees' exhaustion and work-life balance such that both relationships will be weaker when transformational leadership is higher. ⋯ The results support our assumptions. Specifically, we find that under high transformational leadership the impact of time pressure on exhaustion and work-life balance was less strong. The results of this study suggest that, particularly under high time pressure, transformational leadership is an important factor for both employees' work-life balance and exhaustion.
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J Occup Health Psychol · Jul 2013
The development and validation of the Incivility from Customers Scale.
Scant research has examined customers as sources of workplace incivility, despite evidence suggesting that mistreatment is more common from organizational outsiders, including customers, than from organizational members (Grandey, Kern, & Frone, 2007; Schat & Kelloway, 2005). As an important step in extending the literature on customer incivility, we conducted two studies to develop and validate a measure of this construct. Study 1 used focus groups of retail and restaurant employees (n = 30) to elicit a list of uncivil customer behaviors, based on which we wrote initial scale items. ⋯ Significant correlations between the scale and individuals' job satisfaction, turnover intentions, and general and job-specific psychological strain provide evidence of criterion-related validity. Hierarchical regression analyses show that the scale significantly predicts three of four organizational and personal strain outcomes over and above a workplace incivility measure adapted for customer incivility, providing some evidence of incremental validity. Limitations and future research directions are discussed.
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J Occup Health Psychol · Jul 2013
A note on emotion appraisal and burnout: the mediating role of antecedent-focused coping strategies.
Burnout is a serious problem in the profession of teaching. Previous studies have found that teachers with high perceived abilities to appraise emotions tend to experience symptoms of burnout less frequently than others. The aim of this study was to investigate processes that may underlie this relation. ⋯ We tested the hypotheses using multiple mediation analyses of self-report data from 300 teachers, controlling for general perceived self-efficacy, teaching experience, work demands, and school-level effects. Results showed that both proactive coping and attending to student needs constituted mediators of the relations between self-emotion appraisal and burnout as well as between other-emotion appraisal and burnout. Although we cannot infer causality from the present data, the perceived abilities to appraise their own emotions and those of others may help to protect teachers from burnout by enabling them to prevent potential stressors and to engage with their students effectively.