The Relationship Between Stress and Sleep Sufficiency in the Context of Varied Workplace Social Support.

OBJECTIVE: Sufficient sleep is essential for well-being. We examined the relationship between work-related social support, work stress, and sleep sufficiency, predicting that workers with higher social support would report higher sleep sufficiency across varying levels of work stress. METHODS: The data set analyzed in the present study included 2213 workers from approximately 200 small (<500 employees) businesses in high, medium, and low hazard industries across Colorado. RESULTS: Perceived social support variables moderated the relationship between work stress and sleep sufficiency such that employees reporting higher levels of social support reported higher sleep sufficiency when work stress was low or moderate but not high. CONCLUSIONS: Although preventing work stress is optimal, in cases where employers cannot apply primary interventions to prevent stress (eg, eliminating/reducing night shifts), employers should attempt to increase social support or other more relevant resources for employees.

Risks and rewards of conscientiousness during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Highly conscientious workers are more motivated and productive than their less conscientious colleagues. Moreover, conscientious employees tend to be more satisfied and less stressed from their work. One consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic, however, is that many workers have transitioned to working remotely, often under conditions of less direct supervision and less clarity about expected work activities and outcomes. We proposed that this significant change in work context constitutes a weakening of situational strength that can change the relationship of conscientiousness with job strain, job satisfaction, and job performance. Using Meyer et al.'s (2010) conceptualization of situational strength, we tested the moderating effect of situational strength by surveying 474 white-collar employees in a Fortune-1000 firm in 2019 and again in 2020 after they had all transitioned to working remotely. We found that the changes in work context due to COVID-19 significantly lowered scores on situational strength and this was accompanied by a stronger positive effect of conscientiousness on performance. Importantly, during COVID-19, the relationships of conscientiousness with strain and satisfaction showed a reversal of sign, with more conscientious workers reporting higher strain and lower satisfaction. These effects were partially mediated by job demands and were replicated with work hours. The results provide a test of situational strength theory and suggest that changes in situational strength due to COVID-19 may cause an organization's most conscientious employees to be at elevated risk for burnout and dissatisfaction, and consequently, turnover, if not managed appropriately. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Occupational Physical Stress Is Negatively Associated With Hippocampal Volume and Memory in Older Adults.

Our jobs can provide intellectually and socially enriched environments but also be the source of major psychological and physical stressors. As the average full-time worker spends >8 h at work per weekday and remains in the workforce for about 40 years, occupational experiences must be important factors in cognitive and brain aging. Therefore, we studied whether occupational complexity and stress are associated with hippocampal volume and cognitive ability in 99 cognitively normal older adults. We estimated occupational complexity, physical stress, and psychological stress using the Work Design Questionnaire (Morgeson and Humphrey, 2006), Quantitative Workload Inventory and Interpersonal Conflict at Work Scale (Spector and Jex, 1998). We found that physical stress, comprising physical demands and work conditions, was associated with smaller hippocampal volume and poorer memory performance. These associations were independent of age, gender, brain size, socioeconomic factors (education, income, and job title), duration of the job, employment status, leisure physical activity and general stress. This suggests that physical demands at work and leisure physical activity may have largely independent and opposite effects on brain and cognitive health. Our findings highlight the importance of considering midlife occupational experiences, such as work physical stress, in understanding individual trajectories of cognitive and brain aging.

Assessing the validity of sales self-efficacy: a cautionary tale.

We developed a focused, context-specific measure of sales self-efficacy and assessed its incremental validity against the broad Big 5 personality traits with department store salespersons, using (a) both a concurrent and a predictive design and (b) both objective sales measures and supervisory ratings of performance. We found that in the concurrent study, sales self-efficacy predicted objective and subjective measures of job performance more than did the Big 5 measures. Significant differences between the predictability of subjective and objective measures of performance were not observed. Predictive validity coefficients were generally lower than concurrent validity coefficients. The results suggest that there are different dynamics operating in concurrent and predictive designs and between broad and contextualized measures; they highlight the importance of distinguishing between these designs and measures in meta-analyses. The results also point to the value of focused, context-specific personality predictors in selection research.