Abstract Previous research on job crafting has predominantly focused on an ‘actors' perspective’, failing to comprehensively explore how job crafting relates to others within the work context. Drawing upon the appraisal theory of emotion, this study adopts an ‘others' perspective’ and proposes a dual pathway framework to illustrate both the negative and positive behavioural responses associated with coworker job crafting. We argue that coworker job crafting is associated with observer functional behavioural responses (i.e., more helping and less undermining) and dysfunctional behavioural responses (i.e., less helping and more undermining) through its associations with observer inspiration and anxiety. We also propose that construal level acts as an important boundary condition of these indirect relationships. Results from a three‐wave study and an experience sampling study indicated that inspiration mediated the relationship between coworker job crafting and both helping behaviour and social undermining, while anxiety only mediated the relationship between coworker job crafting and social undermining. Construal level further moderated the indirect relationship between coworker job crafting and social undermining via observer anxiety. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
Abstract Off‐hour work interruptions are prevalent in organizations that expect employee availability during off‐hours through information‐communication technologies (ICTs). We bring together domain switch theory and threaded cognition theory to argue that ICT availability demands increase off‐hour interruptions during periods intended for generating work‐relevant resources, resulting in exhaustion at work. We sought to identify how individuals could buffer this threat. While to date the literature has primarily examined sleep disruption as an outcome of ICT use or a means of restoring resources post‐stressor exposure, we extend the literature by exploring the protective power of sleep duration as a resource‐generating activity employees can leverage in ICT‐demanding work environments. Using multilevel data across a five‐day workweek from a sample of working adults (level 2: N = 176) with daily off‐hour interruption reports (level 1: N = 679), we found that sleep duration reduced the indirect effect of ICT availability demands on exhaustion via off‐hour interruptions, while controlling for sleep quality. These findings suggest that prioritizing sleep can help accrue resources needed for work, shifting the perspective from sleep as a reactive restorative process to a proactive protective mechanism. Results also underscore the potential value of organizational policies and leader behaviors that promote and enable sufficient off‐hours worker rest.
Crew rostering (i.e., designing and assigning work schedules for cockpit and cabin crew) is a core personnel management function in commercial airlines. Surprisingly, little is known about how rostering policies shape flight crews' psychological resources and safety performance. Combining Conservation of Resources theory and the Job Demands-Resources model, we investigate if rostering policies that provide greater opportunities to state schedule preferences foster perceived autonomy and inclusion in decision making, thereby reducing fatigue and strengthening dedication, with implications for safety behaviours. Study 1, a vignette experiment with flight crew members (N = 160), shows that policies with more extensive preferential bidding options are perceived as providing greater autonomy and inclusion and, in turn, are associated with lower fatigue and greater dedication. Study 2, a one-month time-lagged panel study (N = 221), extends these findings: perceived autonomy and inclusion predict extra-role safety behaviour and upward safety communication via increased dedication, with autonomy also reducing fatigue to enhance upward safety communication. Indirect effects on in-role safety behaviour were not significant. Overall, the findings suggest that rostering policies can shape flight crew safety performance, offering airlines actionable, evidence-based guidance for rostering-system design.
This study examines how occupational conditions influence psychological experiences of flexibility through an interpretive analysis of interviews with social entrepreneurs. While existing research demonstrates that flexibility access is often limited to privileged workers, we reveal that power and autonomy do not guarantee psychological experiences of flexibility. Our analysis reveals that despite having autonomy and power, social entrepreneurs experience constrained psychological job and boundary control due to prosocial role entrapment as the convergence of multi-stakeholder demands, power position duality, mission-driven obligations and heightened organizational identification that accompany the pursuit of prosocial work. In response, social entrepreneurs engage in situated boundary work that combines integration preferences with learned segmentation practices and continuous boundary negotiation. The study advances our understanding of flexibility and social entrepreneurship by revealing how occupational conditions shape psychological experiences of flexibility, introducing prosocial role entrapment as a dual-pathway mechanism constraining flexibility in prosocial work and highlighting the relevance of emotional boundaries to social entrepreneurship research.
Our research undertakes two studies to address three questions: (1) who is likely to seek flexibility i-deals; (2) who (among those who ask) is likely to have their request granted; and (3) what is the impact of a flexibility i-deal on employee work-life balance and well-being over time? Study 1 uses a large, diverse sample of Canadian employees (n 1 = 22,815) to identify who seeks and who secures flexibility i-deals. Study 2 examines how receiving an i-deal moderates the relationship between role overload, role interference and stress over time (n 2 = 449). We find that (1) requests for flexibility i-deals were rare and grants rarer still; (2) antecedents of seeking i-deals included gender, caregiving responsibilities, and resource constraints; (3) privileged employees were more likely to be granted an i-deal, while unionized workers and caregivers were more likely to be denied; and (4) flexibility i-deals had dual effects-strengthening the path from work-role overload to work-interferes-with-family (WIF) while buffering the path from WIF to perceived stress. Our findings expose hidden inequities in access, challenge assumptions that resources invariably yield positive outcomes and introduce the i-Deals Access Matrix as a tool for advancing theory and guiding organizational practice.
This study examines how motivational climates change in response to external shocks (e.g. COVID-19) and through leader behaviours that shape shared perceptions of success at work. Our study focuses on the perceived motivational climate in a context where employees move from in-person to socially distanced work, that is, remote work and contact reduction in the workplace. We draw on the literature from organizational climate, achievement goal theory (AGT), and the social information processing (SIP) perspective to propose that both the average motivational climate level and motivational climate strength (consensus) decrease over time because of such contextual changes. Furthermore, we propose that mastery-oriented and performance-oriented leader behaviours attenuate this decrease in both the average motivational climate level and motivational climate strength (consensus). A three-wave study of 37 work groups (612 employees) shows that both mastery and performance climate strength (consensus) erode over time and that mastery- and performance-oriented leader behaviours attenuate this erosion. In addition, mastery-oriented leader behaviour buffers any decline in the average mastery climate level. We discuss the implications of these findings for theory and future research.
This study examines how team interpersonal emotion regulation (IER) shapes teamwork processes and outcomes. Although the influence of IER in dyadic relationships is well established, its understanding as a collective team-level phenomenon remains unexplored. We propose that teams develop shared regulatory practices comprising antecedent-focused strategies (addressing emotion causes) and response-focused strategies (managing emotional expressions) and that these differentially influence performance via team relationship conflict. Drawing on multisource data from 697 teams of a Latin American financial organization, we find that antecedent-focused IER reduces relationship conflict and enhances leader-rated performance, while response-focused strategies increase conflict without consistent performance effects. Alignment in regulatory perceptions within teams further shapes the conflict-reducing effects of antecedent-focused IER. Our findings extend emotion regulation theory beyond individual and dyadic levels by demonstrating IER as a collective team-level phenomenon and highlight the strategic importance of cultivating both regulatory strategy type and shared understanding of emotional regulation practices in teams.
Organizational risk exposure arises from external sources and internal activities intended to reduce the potential for risks to cause harm. While organizational risk exposure is necessary to realize opportunities, misalignment between risk management and risk exposure may achieve the opposite outcomes. Through an inductive, qualitative case study, I explore how 73 managers in a technology services company perceive and manage risk and consider how their risk management contributes to organizational risk exposure. Through analysing informants' accounts, I show how managers perceive risk in terms of uncertainty. These perceptions motivate risk management that involves knowledge acquisition and knowledge sharing. By identifying these individual-level concepts and how they shape risk management, I elucidate how interdependence between practices and the supporting structures necessary for acquiring and sharing knowledge constitutes cross-level mechanisms that connect individual behaviour with organizational outcomes. Yet variable and undeveloped structures hamper the effectiveness of risk management by reducing the visibility of risks. The corollary is that executives' decisions and actions are not informed by risk knowledge, and organizational risk exposure is increased unknowingly. I advance psychological microfoundations research with these findings and make novel contributions to theorizing about cross-level mechanisms involving interdependence between risk management and organizational structures.
Abstract A quarter‐century has passed since the publication of ‘The practitioner–researcher divide in Industrial, Work and Organizational (IWO) psychology’ ( Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology , 2001, 74, 391 ‐ 411). In this commentary, I revisit our original objectives and assess the progress made in addressing the existential threat we identified. Despite stimulating extensive debate, the problems we documented remain largely unresolved and, in many respects, have intensified and now extend well beyond IWO psychology. Drawing on recent developments in research assessment, impact governance, and responsible science, I argue that addressing these challenges requires fundamental reforms to the wider knowledge production ecosystem, against a backdrop of growing public scepticism towards scientific evidence and expertise.
While prior research has established the relationship between leader humility and shared leadership, the boundary conditions and specific mechanisms remain underexplored. Drawing on signalling theory, the current study examines the moderating role of perceived leader power distance and the mediating roles of team voice and team information sharing in the relationship between leader humility and shared leadership. Using a three-wave time-lagged design, we collected data from 82 teams comprising 523 members across nine IT firms in China. The results indicate that the effects of leader humility on shared leadership, via the dual mediating pathways of team voice and information sharing, are significant only when perceived leader power distance is low. We discussed the theoretical and practical implications of our findings for signal consistency, workplace paradox and shared leadership development.
Abstract This invited reflective commentary revisits Zhang, Ke, Wang, and Liu's (2018) article on empowering leadership and employee creativity, published in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology . The original study proposed and tested a dual‐mechanism perspective, demonstrating that empowering leadership simultaneously shapes employees' self‐concept (through organization‐based self‐esteem) and their contextual conditions (through access to resources), and that these pathways interact to influence creative outcomes. Since publication, the article has accumulated approximately 213 citations as of April 2026 across diverse scholarly communities. In this commentary, we reflect on the significant impact of the paper and then outline key directions for future research. We conclude by affirming the continued relevance of the dual‐mechanism framework in a rapidly evolving world of work.
Negative feedback is often intended to promote employee learning, yet its effects remain inconclusive. Help-seeking represents a promising but underexplored interpersonal mechanism that may explain how employees learn from negative feedback. This paper aimed to investigate why and when negative feedback relates to learning performance through two distinct types of help-seeking behaviour: autonomous and dependent. Drawing on achievement goal theory, we propose a moderated serial mediation model in which negative feedback influences learning performance through state goal orientations and help-seeking behaviours in sequence, with trait goal orientations as boundary conditions. We tested our model across two studies in China: a four-wave survey (N = 239 employees, 33 supervisors) and an experimental-causal-chain study (Study 2a: N = 120; Study 2b: N = 170). Results show that negative feedback promotes supervisor-rated learning performance by fostering state mastery goal orientation and autonomous help-seeking, particularly among employees high in trait mastery goal orientation. Conversely, employees high in trait performance-avoidance goal orientation tend to adopt state performance-avoidance goal orientation and engage in dependent help-seeking after receiving negative feedback, which in turn undermines learning. These findings underscore the importance of employees' motivational states and interpersonal responses in determining whether negative feedback promotes or undermines learning.
This study explores the role of affect dynamics in the relationship between resilience and work engagement. Previous resilience research has mainly focused on mean affect levels rather than fluctuating affective states over time. We address this by examining emotional inertia, a feature of affect dynamics that refers to an individual's tendency to carryover affective experiences from one moment to the next and operationalized as the degree to which deviations from mean affect persist. We investigate whether emotional inertia mediates between resilience and work engagement, beyond mean levels of affect. Additionally, as resilience is seen as most relevant in adverse conditions, we explore the moderating role of perceived stress. Data were collected from 171 employees completing affect surveys up to five times a day over 5 days, yielding a total of 3895 observations. As expected, resilience related negatively to emotional inertia and had a significant indirect effect on work engagement through inertia. The relationship of resilience with emotional inertia and the indirect effect on engagement were only significant when stress was higher. Our findings contribute to the literature by showing how resilience supports work engagement through facilitating recovery from affective fluctuations and offer research insights for creating an engaged workforce.
In this longitudinal field study, we build on social information processing theory and idiosyncrasy credits theory to examine the change-related reciprocal relations between self-perceived status and voice. Three-wave panel data of 585 employees in a large financial organization and latent change score modelling were used to analyse the theorized intra-individual process, whereby self-perceived status and voice reinforce each other across the first 6 months of working in leaderless teams. The results indicate that higher status related to intra-individual increases in promotive voice, especially in the early months of the teams. Reversely, promotive voice fuelled intra-individual increases in status during the first 3 months but not after. Further, we found that self-perceived status increased concurrently with increases of promotive but not prohibitive voice throughout the 6-month study period. The results indicate that promotive voice functions to gain and maintain higher status beliefs in leaderless teams. Our study extends theory on voice by uncovering how different types of voice and status emerge and co-evolve during the first months of natural teams. Our findings provide important insights on who speaks out in leaderless teams and in what way.
Organizations risk losing invaluable expertise as the workforce ages, a problem exacerbated when age discrimination discourages older workers from sharing and seeking knowledge. Drawing on the workplace inclusion framework and work design theory, this study investigates a moderated mediation model where perceived age discrimination hinders knowledge transfer by diminishing older workers' sense of belongingness and uniqueness. We further propose that task significance, a core work design feature, buffers these negative effects by making the broader impacts of older workers' efforts more salient and enhancing feelings of social embeddedness and contribution. A three-wave time-lagged survey of 296 older Australian workers supported our hypotheses. The results showed that age discrimination indirectly hindered knowledge sharing via diminished belongingness and uniqueness, but hindered knowledge seeking only via belongingness. Importantly, task significance buffered the negative impact of discrimination on both belongingness and uniqueness, thereby mitigating the negative indirect effects on knowledge transfer. These findings contribute to theory by distinguishing the distinct pathways through which age discrimination impairs knowledge transfer and by demonstrating that meaningful work can serve as a critical resource to protect older workers from age-discriminatory environments.
Fit is widely used in organizational practice to guide hiring, retention, and employee management decisions, yet how individuals actually experience and make sense of fit remains poorly understood. In response, this study advances a constructivist account of person-environment fit by examining how it becomes meaningful to individuals in practice. Based on in-depth interviews with 60 employees in three major Chinese cities, the study explores how people understand and articulate fit when invited to reflect on their work experience without predefined conceptual guidance. The findings indicate that fit is often tacit, weakly articulated, or taken for granted in routine work contexts, and is typically constructed through reflective narration rather than experienced as a stable, ongoing judgement. Participants assembled their understanding of fit through contrast, temporal comparison, and contextual interpretation, drawing on instrumental, relational, and moral considerations. Through reflexive thematic analysis, we show that fit emerges dialogically and unevenly, shaped by career trajectories, organizational change, and culturally embedded expectations. We develop a process model that reconceptualizes fit as an interpretive and temporally situated construction rather than a static alignment. The study contributes to contemporary fit research by clarifying how fit comes into awareness and acquires meaning in employees' working lives.
Workplace toxicity imposes enormous costs on employees, organizations, and society, yet scholarship lacks an integrated explanation of how harmful practices become routine and why they endure. This article develops the toxicity normalization cascade (TNC), a multilevel process framework addressing two interrelated questions: how does workplace toxicity become normalized, and why does it persist through leadership changes, regulatory interventions, and sincere reform efforts? Drawing on foundational theories of normalization of deviance and corruption, moral disengagement theory, and structuration theory, TNC traces how four dimensions of organizational context generate systemic pressures that activate psychological mechanisms of normalization. These mechanisms co-evolve through social interaction and crystallize into normalized toxic culture. The framework's central contribution is the reproduction mechanism: the process through which normalized culture feeds back to reconstitute the systemic pressures that enabled its emergence, creating self-perpetuating cascades. Six testable propositions specify the framework's architecture. We present an illustrative application, demonstrate generalizability across organizational contexts, propose a research agenda, and derive practical implications for systemic intervention.
Abstract The central questions addressed in this special issue are who receives flexibility i‐deals, who benefits from them, and under what conditions. Although flexibility i‐deals are often portrayed as individualized arrangements that enhance well‐being and work–life integration, the articles in this issue show that access to and outcomes of such deals are unevenly distributed across employees and social groups. Collectively, the papers examine how flexibility i‐deals are shaped by individual, organizational, and societal barriers, with particular attention to underexamined groups such as ethnic minority employees, employees with disabilities, older workers, and workers with limited bargaining power. Across diverse contexts, the studies demonstrate that flexibility i‐deals are negotiated, granted, and enacted within relational systems structured by power, legitimacy, and status. Building on these contributions, this editorial develops a multilevel process model of flexibility i‐deals that captures barriers across the stages of requesting, negotiation, granting, implementation, and outcomes. By drawing attention to relational inequality of access to flexibility i‐deals, the special issue challenges the assumption of a symmetric bargaining space and reconceptualises flexibility i‐deals as arrangements that may either alleviate or reproduce organizational inequality.
Abstract In this reflective commentary, we briefly summarize Eby et al.'s article ‘Risky business: Understanding the association between objective COVID‐19 occupational risk features and worker subjective risk perceptions’ and discuss both its current and anticipated impact on the science of workplace risk. We close by offering our thoughts on key directions for future research and pressing unanswered questions.
Abstract This commentary, prepared for the virtual issue “Celebrating 100 years of the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology ,” revisits the seminal article, “The impending crisis in job redesign,” and reflects on its enduring relevance for contemporary work design scholarship. Blackler and Brown warned that job redesign research risked becoming conceptually ambiguous, methodologically weak, and overly aligned with managerial priorities while neglecting broader psychological and developmental consequences for workers. Drawing on developments over the past five decades, this commentary argues that work design research has evolved along three major trajectories: from static to dynamic work systems, from individualistic to relational perspectives, and from top‐down approaches toward employee agency and proactive work design. The commentary examines how contemporary digital technologies and AI reshape not only work structures, but also relational experiences and meaning‐making processes at work. Building on these developments, the paper outlines future directions for work design scholarship, emphasizing the need to integrate relational, technological, and meaning‐centered perspectives while advancing more human‐centered approaches to AI and digitally mediated work systems.
