Having both hands on the steering wheel: Driving behaviour of white-collar workers with degenerative eye conditions

Because people in the United States are highly reliant on cars for transportation, individuals with restricted driving abilities face severe accessibility constraints in the labour market. Guided by the social exclusion framework, we used a qualitative approach to gain insights into the role of car driving and alternative commute modes in the lives of white-collar workers with degenerative eye conditions. The study participants gradually restricted their driving behaviour as the disease progressed. They also exhibited several types of commute solutions, which lent themselves to a variation in the experienced degree of exclusion (both between participants and within participants over time), with changes in vision state and available resources. Another aim of our study was to identify the motivations for driving behaviour. The results showed that while a desire to reduce the risk of an accident motivated the participants to stop driving, certain normative (for men) and practical considerations motivated participants to continue driving. While all of the participants eventually stopped driving due to vision decline, the decision to quit often occurred only after the participants experienced one or more car accidents. Workplace accessibility is a factor that hinders labour market participation of individuals with degenerative eye conditions and encourages individuals to engage in risky behaviour.     

Why employee psychopathy leads to counterproductive workplace behaviours : an analysis of the underlying mechanisms

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study is to examine possible explanatory mechanisms linking employee secondary psychopathy to counterproductive workplace behaviour (CWB). Based on the emotion-centred model of voluntary work behaviour we argue that secondary psychopathy is characterized by unfavourable cognitive appraisal tendencies, which in turn positively relate to negative affectivity. We further assume that this cognitive-affective process enhances CWB. We also include primary psychopathy into our research model to test if the presumed mechanism applies to both psychopathy dimensions. We collected daily-survey data from 470 employees (1670 days) and analysed these data using multilevel structured equation modelling. We found strong support for the hypothesized serial mediation model, indicating that secondary psychopathy triggers dysfunctional cognitive-affective tendencies and consequently increases the likelihood of CWB. The proposed model did not hold up for primary psychopathy. Our study outlines the presence of distorted cognition-affective patterns in employee secondary psychopathy only. These patterns seem to play a key role in explaining the link between employee secondary psychopathy and deviant workplace behaviour. Based on this procedural knowledge relevant implications for theory and practice are provided.     

Travel and residual emotional well-being

This study addresses the question of how work commutes change positive versus negative and active versus passive mood experienced after the commutes. Analyses are presented for 230 time-sampled morning commutes to work, made by 146 randomly sampled people in three different Swedish cities, asking them to use smartphones to report mood before, directly after, and later in the work place after the commute. The results show that self-reported positive emotional responses evoked by critical incidents are related to mood changes directly after the commute but not later in the day. It is also shown that satisfaction with the commute, measured retrospectively, is related to travel mode, travel time, as well as both positive and negative emotional responses to critical incidents.     

Distance de pouvoir et auto-évaluation de l’efficacité d’une équipe de travail

We introduce a study concerning relation between power and the evaluation of the effectiveness of working teams (Savoie & Brunet, 2000). The power model of Mulder lead to postulate a relation between power distance in the team and the evaluation of the effectiveness. We collected a series of measurements in working teams composed of students engineers. Results allow proving such relation.