Why does using personal strengths at work increase employee engagement, who makes the most out of it, and how?

Engaging in behaviors that take advantage of one's personal strengths at work can promote employee flourishing in the workplace and mental health. Personal strengths use has thus gained increasing attention within occupational psychology and positive organizational scholarship. In this article, we first integrate work on personal strengths use with the latest developments in the job demands-resources theory (and its extensions) to develop a conceptual model explaining how and why personal strengths use on the job increases work engagement.

Stop the spin: The role of mindfulness practices in reducing affect spin.

Affect spin refers to shifts in emotional states over time; it captures people's reactivity to affective events. Recent evidence suggests that affect spin has costs for both organizations and for employees, yet little is known about the antecedents of affect spin and possibilities to reduce it. The present study builds on existing research by examining mindfulness as an antecedent of affect spin in employees.

How and when service beneficiaries' gratitude enriches employees' daily lives.

Conventional research on gratitude has focused on the benefits of expressing or experiencing gratitude for the individual. However, recent theory and research have highlighted that there may too be benefits associated with others' gratitude. Grounded in the Work-Home Resources model, we develop a conceptual model to understand service providers (i.

How social stressors at work influence marital behaviors at home: An interpersonal model of work-family spillover.

Drawing on conservation of resources and related theories, this study develops and tests an interpersonal model of work-family spillover. Our model specifies how social stressors at work (i.e.

An App-Based Workplace Mindfulness Intervention, and Its Effects Over Time.

We investigated the week-to-week effects of a mindfulness intervention on emotional exhaustion, work engagement, and job satisfaction in a field study involving 218 participants who participated and reported their weekly outcomes during the 8-week program. To examine how mindfulness impacted work outcomes, we used intraindividual modeling of the 8-week data. Mindfulness increased over time, and time also had indirect effects on emotional exhaustion, work engagement, and job satisfaction, through mindfulness.

Robots at work: People prefer-and forgive-service robots with perceived feelings.

Organizations are increasingly relying on service robots to improve efficiency, but these robots often make mistakes, which can aggravate customers and negatively affect organizations. How can organizations mitigate the frontline impact of these robotic blunders? Drawing from theories of anthropomorphism and mind perception, we propose that people evaluate service robots more positively when they are anthropomorphized and seem more humanlike-capable of both agency (the ability to think) and experience (the ability to feel). We further propose that in the face of robot service failures, increased perceptions of experience should attenuate the negative effects of service failures, whereas increased perceptions of agency should amplify the negative effects of service failures on customer satisfaction.

Dispositional empathy, emotional display authenticity, and employee outcomes.

With the rise of jobs in the health care sector, research on emotional labor has become of increasing importance. In this study, we follow calls for scholars to include authentic emotional displays alongside the more traditionally examined emotional labor strategies (surface and deep acting) when examining the effects of employees' emotional performance at work. We theorize that dispositional empathy is an individual difference variable that influences whether and how employees regulate their emotional displays at work, and examine the indirect relationships between dispositional empathy and employees' self-reported job satisfaction, and objectively measured job performance and sickness absenteeism, through these emotional displays.

Doing good, feeling good? The roles of helping motivation and citizenship pressure.

Drawing on self-determination theory, this research investigates whether the motivation behind employees' helping behaviors is associated with their positive affect and their subsequent help provision, and whether citizenship pressure moderates these relationships. A recall-based experiment and an experience-sampling study capturing helping episodes among fulltime employees found that when employees helped coworkers because of higher autonomous (controlled) motivation in a helping episode, they experienced higher (lower) positive affect, and they had stronger (weaker) helping intentions and helped coworkers more (less) subsequently. We further found that citizenship pressure enhanced the positive relationship between episodic autonomous motivation and positive affect.

Personality characteristics that are valued in teams: Not always "more is better"?

This study investigates the relationships between personality traits and contributions to teamwork that are often assumed to be linear. We use a theory-driven approach to propose that extraversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness have inverted U-shaped relationships with contributions to teamwork. In a sample of 220 participants asked to perform a creative task in teams, we found that extraversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness were curvilinearly associated with peer-rated contributions to teamwork in such a way that the associations were positive, with a decreasing slope, up to a peak, and then they became negative as personality scores further increased.

Why do employees have better family lives when they are highly engaged at work?

Past research on the effects of work engagement on the family has demonstrated contrasting effects, with some suggesting that work engagement is beneficial for family life whereas others suggesting that it may be detrimental. In this research, using a sample of 125 employees who responded to daily surveys both at work and at home for 2 consecutive weeks, the authors present a multilevel examination of the relationships of work engagement to family outcomes aimed at elucidating such work-family effects. Their findings revealed that employees' daily work engagement experiences related positively, within individuals, to work-family interpersonal capitalization, which in turn, related positively to daily family satisfaction and to daily work-family balance.

Guilty and helpful: an emotion-based reparatory model of voluntary work behavior.

This study proposes a dynamic reparatory model of voluntary work behavior. We test the hypothesis that when people are made aware of their high level of negative behavior at work (i.e.

The mind and heart (literally) of the negotiator: personality and contextual determinants of experiential reactions and economic outcomes in negotiation.

The authors developed and tested a model proposing that negotiator personality interacts with the negotiation situation to influence negotiation processes and outcomes. In 2 studies, the authors found that negotiators high in agreeableness were best suited to integrative negotiations and that negotiators low in agreeableness were best suited to distributive negotiations. Consistent with this person-situation fit argument, in Study 1 the authors found that negotiators whose dispositions were a good fit to their negotiation context had higher levels of physiological (cardiac) arousal at the end of the negotiation compared with negotiators who were "misplaced" in situations inconsistent with their level of agreeableness, and this arousal was in turn related to increased economic outcomes.

Alternative reference points and outcome evaluation: the influence of affect.

Two studies examined the effect of affective states on decision outcome evaluation under the presence or absence of salient alternative reference points. Alternative reference points exist when there are 2 possible referents from which an outcome can be evaluated, and the outcome is judged as good from the perspective of one referent and bad from the perspective of the other. The results support a motivational process of evaluating outcomes in which individuals select the reference point that allows them to maintain positive mood or improve negative mood.

Too much of a good thing: curvilinear relationships between personality traits and job performance.

The relationships between personality traits and performance are often assumed to be linear. This assumption has been challenged conceptually and empirically, but results to date have been inconclusive. In the current study, we took a theory-driven approach in systematically addressing this issue.

Are health and happiness the product of wisdom? The relationship of general mental ability to educational and occupational attainment, health, and well-being.

This study tested a structural model explaining the effects of general mental ability on economic, physical, and subjective well-being. A model was proposed that linked general mental ability to well-being using education, unhealthy behaviors (smoking and excessive drinking), occupational prestige, and health as mediating variables. The sample consisted of 398 individuals, from whom measures were collected across 4 periods.

Mood, blood pressure, and heart rate at work: an experience-sampling study.

We describe a study that examined the distinctiveness of momentary positive and negative affect (PA and NA) and their relationships with blood pressure and heart rate at work in a sample of 67 full-time employees who provided psychological and physiological measurements multiple times a day, over 10 working days. These employees recorded their subjective ratings on personal digital assistant devices programmed specifically for this study, and assessed their blood pressure and heart rate using automatic recording devices, at each measurement period. Results support the distinctiveness of PA and NA.

Personality and citizenship behavior: the mediating role of job satisfaction.

Using meta-analytic path analysis, the authors tested several structural models linking agreeableness and conscientiousness to organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Results showed that the 2 personality traits had both direct effects and indirect effects-through job satisfaction-on overall OCB. Meta-analytic moderator analyses that distinguished between individual- and organization-targeted citizenship behaviors (OCB-I and OCB-O) showed that agreeableness was more closely related with OCB-I and conscientiousness with OCB-O.

When can employees have a family life? The effects of daily workload and affect on work-family conflict and social behaviors at home.

This article presents a longitudinal examination of antecedents and outcomes of work-to-family conflict. A total of 106 employees participating in an experience-sampling study were asked to respond to daily surveys both at work and at home, and their spouses were interviewed daily via telephone for a period of 2 weeks. Intraindividual analyses revealed that employees' perceptions of workload predicted work-to-family conflict over time, even when controlling for the number of hours spent at work.

Explaining affective linkages in teams: individual differences in susceptibility to contagion and individualism-collectivism.

To expand on the understanding of how affective states are linked within teams, the authors describe a longitudinal study examining the linkages between team members' affective states over time. In a naturalistic team performance setting, they found evidence that the average affective state of the other team members was related to an individual team member's affect over time, even after controlling for team performance. In addition, they found that these affective linkages were moderated by individual differences in susceptibility to emotional contagion and collectivistic tendencies such that the strength of the linkage was stronger for those high in susceptibility and those with collectivistic tendencies.

Leader-member exchange and citizenship behaviors: a meta-analysis.

This article provides a meta-analytic review of the relationship between the quality of leader-member exchanges (LMX) and citizenship behaviors performed by employees. Results based on 50 independent samples (N = 9,324) indicate a moderately strong, positive relationship between LMX and citizenship behaviors (rho = .37).

The dynamic process of life satisfaction.

Drawing from the Cognitive Affective Personality System (Mischel & Shoda, 1995, 1998), we argue for a need to examine within-individual variation in life satisfaction. Thus, employing a diary study of 76 fully employed, married adults we examined the magnitude, antecedents, and consequences of intra-individual variation in life satisfaction. Our findings establish a substantial amount of intra-individual variation, comparable to other personal evaluations assessed with a state approach (e.

Hostility, job attitudes, and workplace deviance: test of a multilevel model.

The authors tested a model, inspired by affective events theory (H. M. Weiss & R.

Goal regulation across time: the effects of feedback and affect.

This research focused on the processes individuals use to regulate their goals across time. Two studies examined goal regulation following task performance with 6 samples of participants in a series of 8-trial task performance experiments. The experiments involved: (a) 3 task types, (b) 2 goal types, and (c) actual or manipulated performance feedback referring to the focal participant's own performance or to the participant's performance compared with others' performance.

Affect and job satisfaction: a study of their relationship at work and at home.

The authors investigated 2 broad issues: (a) across- and within-individual relationships between mood and job satisfaction and (b) spillover in moods experienced at work and at home. Using an experience-sampling methodology, they collected multisource data from a sample of 74 working individuals. Multilevel results revealed that job satisfaction affected positive mood after work and that the spillover of job satisfaction onto positive and negative mood was stronger for employees high in trait-positive and trait-negative affectivity, respectively.

Intelligence and leadership: a quantitative review and test of theoretical propositions.

Meta-analysis was used to aggregate results from studies examining the relationship between intelligence and leadership. One hundred fifty-one independent samples in 96 sources met the criteria for inclusion in the meta-analysis. Results indicated that the corrected correlation between intelligence and leadership is.