High-performance work systems and individual performance: a longitudinal study of the differential roles of happiness and health well-being.

As a part of the growing strand of employee-centered HRM research, employee well-being is suggested to be a key mechanism that may help to explain the relationship between HRM and performance. To investigate how an employee's well-being mediates the HRM-performance relationship, we distinguish between two types of well-being identified in prior work, happiness well-being and health well-being, and present arguments for differences in their effects on individual performance. Building on Job Demands-Resources (JDR) theory, we propose that happiness well-being positively mediates the relationship between perceived High-Performance Work Systems (HPWS) and individual task performance, while health well-being negatively mediates this focal relationship. Thus, happiness well-being fits the "mutual gains" perspective. In contrast, health well-being fits the "conflicting outcomes" perspective, and thus may be harmed by the HPWS to enhance the performance. We find partial support for our arguments in an analysis of longitudinal survey data of 420 participants spanning a total of four waves of data collection.

The Impact of the Covid-19 Pandemic on Older Workers: The Role of Self-Regulation and Organizations.

We live in an unusual time, which effects all of us in different ways. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, some people are working harder than ever, some people have lost their job, some people can only work from home, and some people have to reinvent how they work (Kniffin et al., 2020). Older 50+ workers might even be more affected by the pandemic compared to younger workers because they are labeled as vulnerable and as being at risk in terms of Covid-19 (Ayalon et al., 2020). However, emerging studies on the impact of Covid-19 suggest that older workers respond more effectively to measures that counter Covid-19 (Losada-Balter et al., 2020). This is in line with the lifespan developmental perspective, which theorizes and demonstrates that older adults generally are very capable of adapting and very effective in dealing with the aging process (Baltes and Baltes, 1990; Freund, 2008). Multiple studies show that older adults engage in various self-regulation strategies aimed at continuously maintaining or restoring person-environment fit (e.g., Kooij et al., 2020; Taneva and Arnold, 2018; Zacher, Kooij, & Beier, 2018a) thus helping them to age successfully at work. In this commentary, I will take a more positive perspective on older workers and discuss the self-regulation strategies that older workers engage in and how organizations can stimulate this. I will end my commentary with some suggestions for future research.