Career adaptability, turnover and loyalty during organizational downsizing

During organizational restructuring and downsizing, employees often worry about being redundant, actually are redundant, and/or feel unsatisfied with their jobs. Employees, in turn, often react with poor loyalty to and high voluntary exit from the organization. The current study addresses this process from a careers' perspective, showing that career adaptability in the form of employees' career exploration and planning can account for at least some of these relationships. Redundancy fostered employees' career adaptive behaviors while job insecurity inhibited their career planning. Career planning, in turn, positively predicted employees' loyalty to the organization five months later while career exploration negatively predicted employees' loyalty, and positively predicted employees' exit reactions in the form of turnover intentions, job-search behaviors, and actual turnover. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.     

Relationships between climate, process, and performance in continuous quality improvement groups

This study examined relationships between group climate (participants’ learning orientation, feelings of psychological safety, and self-disclosure), process (feedback and conflict), and performance in continuous quality improvement groups. Forty-nine participants in eight hospital groups were surveyed as the groups neared completion. Groups were classified as high or low performing based on interviews with group leaders and facilitators. Ratings of self-disclosure and feelings of psychological safety were related to lower relationship and task conflict and more giving and seeking feedback. Learning orientation was positively related to feedback. Climate and feedback were positively related to creativity of outcomes, while learning orientation and having an active facilitator were related to performance ratings. High performing teams were higher in ratings of learning orientation, facilitation, creativity of outcomes, and overall performance. The results demonstrate the importance of facilitation of learning and interpersonal relationships within structured groups.     

Burnout and work engagement: Independent factors or opposite poles?

Burnout researchers have proposed that the conceptual opposites of emotional exhaustion and cynicism (the core dimensions of burnout) are vigor and dedication (the core dimensions of engagement), respectively ( [Maslach and Leiter, 1997] and [Schaufeli et al., 2002]). We tested this proposition by ascertaining whether two sets of items, exhaustion-vigor and cynicism-dedication, were scalable on two distinct underlying bipolar dimensions (i.e., energy and identification, respectively). The results obtained by means of the non-parametric Mokken scaling method in three different samples (Ns = 477, 507, and 381) supported our proposal: the core burnout and engagement dimensions can be seen as opposites of each other along two distinct bipolar dimensions dubbed energy and identification.     

Employability during unemployment: Adaptability, career identity and human and social capital

Recently, Fugate et al. [Fugate, M., Kinicki, A. J., & Ashforth, B. E. (2004). Employability: A psycho-social construct, its dimensions, and applications. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 65(1), 14] defined employability as a psycho-social construct comprised of three dimensions: (i) adaptability; (ii) career identity; and (iii) human and social capital. The aim of the current paper was to empirically test Fugate et al.’s model in a sample of 416 unemployed Australians (n = 126 for longitudinal sample). Specifically, this research explored employability in relation to three aspects of unemployment: (1) self-esteem during unemployment; (2) job search during unemployment; and (3) re-employment (at a 6-month follow-up). Overall, the results of this longitudinal study provide broad support for the psycho-social construct of employability and demonstrate its applicability to the unemployment context.     

Flow,performance and moderators of challenge-skill balance

The concept of flow is briefly reviewed and several theoretical and methodological problems related to flow research are discussed. In three studies, we attempted to avoid these problems by measuring the experience of flow in its components, rather than operationally defining flow in terms of challenge and skill. With this measure, we tested the assumption that experience of flow substantially depends on the balance of challenge and skill. This assumption could only be partially supported, and, as expected, this relationship was moderated by the (perceived) importance of the activity and by the achievement motive. Furthermore, flow predicted performance in two of the three studies.