Ineffective kintsugi: The detrimental contribution of emotional and cognitive factors on psychological contract breach outcomes.

BACKGROUND: The literature acknowledges that when there is a failure of expectations in the organization-employee relationship, namely the Psychological Contract Breach, it can potentially contribute to deviant behavior such as Counterproductive Work Behavior (CWB). A justice perspective helps to disentangle this link by suggesting that unethical behaviors may represent the revenge response to perceived organizational unfairness. OBJECTIVE: To gain a more granular understanding of the pathway from Psychological Contract Breach to CWB, this study explores the mediating role of negative emotions in eliciting CWB. It also proposes that the mechanism of moral disengagement helps to deactivate self-sanctioning processes, allowing individuals to engage in deviant behaviors. METHODS: A cross-sectional design was employed, and conditional process analysis was conducted on a sample of 635 Italian police officer cadets, who were entering the prison system, a context highly susceptible to a failure of expectations and where, at the same time, counteracting unethical behaviors is a key issue. RESULTS: The results supported the tested model, highlighting the mediator role of Job-Related Negative Emotions in the Psychological Contract Breach-CWB relationship and their interaction with Moral Disengagement in shaping CWB. CONCLUSIONS: By examining the interplay between affective and cognitive components, the study provides valuable insights into the underlying processes involved in the relationship between failure in expectancies and deviant behavior. From a managerial perspective, the findings emphasize the importance of prioritizing fairness within organizations through balanced mutual obligations, and raising awareness of moral regulation mechanisms that may shape deviant behaviors.

The Workaholism-Technostress Interplay: Initial Evidence on Their Mutual Relationship.

During the pandemic, the occurrence of extreme working conditions (e.g., the sudden shift to remote work, isolation, and the slowdown of the work processes) exacerbated several phenomena, such as increased workaholism and stress due to technological devices; that is, technostress. Literature on the onset of these phenomena during the pandemic highlighted a possible interplay among them; however, there is still a dearth of knowledge about the direction of the relationship between workaholism and technostress. The present study assessed the relationship between workaholism and technostress through a two-wave cross-lagged study using path analysis in SEM (Structural Equation Modeling). The study was conducted in Italy during the pandemic, and a total of 113 Italian employees completed the online survey at each wave. Results showed that workaholism at Time 1 was a significant predictor of technostress at Time 2 (ß = 0.25, p = 0.049), while the reversed causation was not supported (ß = 0.08, p = 0.22). These findings may help employees and organizations to better understand the phenomena of technostress and workaholism and develop strategies to prevent the consequences of excessive and compulsive work and to improve the balanced use of technology for their daily activities.

Bringing social interaction at the core of organizational neuroscience.

Organizations are composed of individuals working together for achieving specific goals, and interpersonal dynamics do exert a strong influence on workplace behaviour. Nevertheless, the dual and multiple perspective of interactions has been scarcely considered by Organizational Neuroscience (ON), the emerging field of study that aims at incorporating findings from cognitive and brain sciences into the investigation of organizational behaviour. This perspective article aims to highlight the potential benefits of adopting experimental settings involving two or more participants (the so-called "second person" approach) for studying the neural bases of organizational behaviour. Specifically, we stress the idea that moving beyond the individual perspective and capturing the dynamical relationships occurring within dyads or groups (e.g., leaders and followers, salespersons and clients, teams) might bring novel insights into the rising field of ON. In addition, designing research paradigms that reliably recreate real work and life situations might increase the generalizability and ecological validity of its results. We start with a brief overview of the current state of ON research and we continue by describing the second-person approach to social neuroscience. In the last paragraph, we try and outline how this approach could be extended to ON. To this end, we focus on leadership, group processes and emotional contagion as potential targets of interpersonal ON research.

Undergraduates' academic socialization. A cross-time analysis.

BACKGROUND: Socialization practices support undergraduates' transitional processes when beginning their academic careers and afterwards. Anyhow, the absence of specific socialization measures for academic contexts does not allow Universities to assess it. AIMS: The present study aimed to contribute to the socialization literature by proposing a reliable measure (USQ, Undergraduate Socialization Questionnaire) specific for the academic context, that is, reflecting the same construct at different developmental stages. METHOD AND SAMPLES: Based on an organizational socialization scale (NSQ; Haueter al., 2003, Journal of Vocational Behavior, 63, 20), we examined in Study One the USQ's three-factor structure (task, group, organization) (n. 451 undergraduates) and, in Study Two, we tested the construct invariance across time, comparing undergraduates' developmental changes through a two-wave longitudinal design (n.185 undergraduates attending their first and their second year). RESULTS: Findings supported both the USQ's dimensionality and measurement invariance, thus ensuring that the same underlying construct is being assessed, and its concurrent and predictive validity. CONCLUSIONS: Overall, results showed that USQ is a reliable instrument useful to monitor the effectiveness of undergraduates' adjustment process, also allowing comparison between specific groups of students or longitudinal comparison to evaluate their career development or the effectiveness of policies targeted to reduce the risk of marginalization and dropout.

User-centered practices in the eyes of informal caregivers of in-patients with severe acquired brain injury: needs, caring experience, and satisfaction.

OBJECTIVE: This study examines the perceived needs, experience, and satisfaction of informal caregivers (ICGs) in in-hospital settings, related to their involvement in the design and delivery of services together with hospital staff, namely co-production. DESIGN: To obtain a picture of current ICG-staff relationship, a multicenter observational study was carried out. Participants were 75 ICGs recruited in five dedicated in-patient neurorehabilitation wards. Participants answered a self-report questionnaire tapping perceived information/communication needs, emotional/social needs, and their satisfaction; family-centered practices implemented by the staff (namely involving practices and cooperative communication); and ICGs' satisfaction with the service. RESULTS: Need satisfaction related positively to staff practices aimed at involving IGCs in treatment and training, but not in decision-making. Involving practices concerning treatment also related positively to ICGs' information/communication needs. In addition, the more the staff involved ICGs in decision-making and promoted cooperative communication regarding treatment, the more ICGs felt that their collaboration in the healthcare process was valuable. Finally, all involvement practices and cooperative communication were positively related to ICGs' overall satisfaction with the service. CONCLUSION: The results of the study help to identify gaps in meeting ICGs' needs and to promote strategies to implement family participation toward co-production in in-hospital settings.

Other-Focused Approach to Teaching. The Effect of Ethical Leadership and Quiet Ego on Work Engagement and the Mediating Role of Compassion Satisfaction.

Recent revisions of the Job Demands Resources (JDR) model acknowledged the importance of personal and organizational dimensions enriching job resources' effect on work engagement. Consistently, this paper addresses the role of compassion satisfaction, as a job resource, on teacher work engagement, given the saliency of caring in teaching as a helping profession. Furthermore, quiet ego, as a personal dimension, and ethical leadership, as an organizational dimension, are studied as antecedents of compassion satisfaction. Overall, the study verifies with a Structural Equation Model whether and how compassion satisfaction mediates the relationships among work engagement, quiet ego, and ethical leadership. One hundred and eighty-eight Italian teachers took part in the study by completing four scales: the Ethical Leadership Scale, the Quiet Ego scale, the Professional Quality Of Life Questionnaire, and the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale-ultra-short version. The final model showed a good fit to the data: χ2 ( 48 ) = 75.399, p = 0.007, CFI = 0.979, TLI = 0.971, RMSEA = 0.055 (90% CI = 0.029-0.078, p = 0.342), SRMR = 0.039. Findings showed that teachers' compassion satisfaction is strongly related to their engagement at school, confirming that teachers' care toward their students is an important resource supporting their engagement. Furthermore, compassion satisfaction totally mediates the relationship between quiet ego and work engagement (bDIRECT = ns, bINDIRECT = 0.327, p = 0.000). Such mediating path confirms recent expansions of the JDR model about the role of personal resources on job resources and, consequently, on work engagement and confirms the Conservation of Resources theory, stating that personal resources impact work outcomes. At the same time, compassion satisfaction does not mediate the relationship between ethical leadership and work engagement, so that ethical school leaders directly impact teachers' work engagement. A possible reason for this finding relies on ethical leadership's role in promoting higher school life participation as a community. More theoretical and practical implications are described in the paper.

Caregivers' engagement during in-hospital care of sABI's patients: Evaluation of informal co-production from the health providers' perspective.

One of the challenges of providing healthcare services is to enhance its value (for patients, staff and the service) by integrating the informal caregivers into the care process, both concretely managing their patient's health conditions and treatment (co-executing) and participating in the whole healthcare process (co-planning). This study aims at exploring the co-production contribution to the healthcare process, analysing whether and how it is related to higher caregivers' satisfaction with service care and reduced staff burnout, in the eyes of the staff. It also investigated two possible factors supporting caregivers in their role of co-producers, namely relationship among staff and informal caregivers related to knowledge sharing (i.e. an ability determinant supporting co-production) and related to role social conflict (i.e. a willingness determinant reducing co-production). Results of a structural equation model on a sample of 119 healthcare providers employed by neurorehabilitation centers in Italy with severe acquired brain injury confirmed that knowledge sharing positively related with caregivers' co-executing and co-planning. Also, social role conflict was negatively related with co-executing but positively with co-planning. Furthermore, co-planning resulted in being unrelated to both outcomes, whereas co-executing was associated with caregivers' satisfaction, as measured by staff perceptions. Overall, our data provided initial empirical evidence supporting the ability of the determinant's contribution in allowing informal caregivers to assume an active role in both co-production domains. Furthermore, as expected, the role of conflict willingness determinant was found to be a hindering factor for co-executing but, conversely, a trigger for co-planning. This result should be considered more carefully in future studies.

Managing Knowledge in Organizations: A Nonaka's SECI Model Operationalization.

PURPOSE: The SECI model (Nonaka, 1994) is the best-known conceptual framework for understanding knowledge generation processes in organizations. To date, however, empirical support for this framework has been overlooked. The present study aims to provide an evidence-based groundwork for the SECI model by testing a multidimensional questionnaire Knowledge Management SECI Processes Questionnaire (KMSP-Q) designed to capture the knowledge conversion modes theorized by Nonaka. METHODOLOGY: In a twofold study, the SECI model was operationalized via the KMSP-Q. Specifically, Study One tested its eight-dimensional structure through exploratory and confirmatory factorial analyses on 372 employees from different sectors. Study Two examined the construct validity and reliability by replicating the KMSP-Q factor structure in knowledge-intensive contexts (on a sample of 466 health-workers), and by investigating the unique impact of each dimension on some organizational outcomes (i.e., performance, innovativeness, collective efficacy). FINDINGS: The overall findings highlighted that the KMSP-Q is a psychometrically robust questionnaire in terms of both dimensionality and construct validity, the different knowledge generation dimensions being specifically linked to different organizational outcomes. RESEARCH/PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS: The KMSP-Q actualizes and provides empirical consistency to the theory underlying the SECI model. Moreover, it allows for the monitoring of an organization's capability to manage new knowledge and detect the strengths/weaknesses of KM-related policies and programs. ORIGINALITY/VALUE: This paper proposes a comprehensive measure of knowledge generation in work contexts, highlighting processes that organizations are likely to promote in order to improve their performance through the management of their knowledge resources.

Assessing the Risk of Stress in Organizations: Getting the Measure of Organizational-Level Stressors.

Great Britain's Health and Safety Executive (HSE) developed the Management Standards Indicator Tool to help organizations to assess and monitor organizational risks of work-related stress through surveying employees about the psychosocial risks for stress in their jobs. The use of employee-level data for deriving an organizational-level measure of psychosocial risks assumes that the constructs have equivalent meanings at different levels. However, this isomorphic condition has never been tested and this study fills this gap. Using data collected by the Italian Workers' Compensation Authority (INAIL) from 66,188 employees nested in 775 organizations, we demonstrate that the organizational-level measure representing the seven dimensions of the Management Standards Indicator Tool is equivalent, though not identical, to the individual-level measure. This implies that the organizational level is not a mirror of the aggregation of the individual level, and that the risk of work-related stress in an organization may derive not simply from bottom-up processes, but may be generated by top-down influences (e.g., organizational policies). Interventions may then be meaningfully targeted at the organizational level in the expectation that they will reduce the risk of work-related stress among the entire workforce, the valid measurement of which can be performed through the HSE's Management Standards Indicator Tool.

"You Can See How Things Will End by the Way They Begin": The Contribution of Early Mutual Obligations for the Development of the Psychological Contract.

This study explores dynamic processes in the development of the psychological contract, focusing on the interaction of obligations related to the two parties (i.e., employees' perceptions of both their own and the organization's obligations fulfillment) on attitudinal outcomes (organizational commitment and turnover intention) during the initial stage of the employment relationship. In a twofold cross-sectional and two-wave study on newly hired correctional police officers, we examined: (a) whether perception of organizational obligations fulfillment moderates the relationship between employee obligations and their attitudes (Study 1, n.500); (b) the direct and moderated influence of perceived obligations at the entrance stage on those in the following months (Study 2, n.223). Results confirmed that, in the eyes of the newcomer, the obligations fulfillment of each of the two parties interact, having an additional effect beyond the main direct effects, in influencing both subsequent obligations perceptions and, through this, the outcome variables. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.

"Yes, I Can": the protective role of personal self-efficacy in hindering counterproductive work behavior under stressful conditions.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Within the stressor-emotion model, counterproductive work behavior (CWB) is considered a possible result of stress. It is well-known that self-efficacy mitigates the detrimental effects of stress and the stressor-strain relation. We aim to extend the stressor-emotion model of CWB by examining the additive and moderating role of work and regulatory emotional self-efficacy dimensions. DESIGN AND METHODS: A structural equation model and a set of hierarchical regressions were conducted on a convenience sample of 1147 Italian workers. RESULTS: Individuals who believed in their capabilities to manage work activities had a lower propensity to act counterproductively. Workers who believed in their capabilities to cope with negative feelings had a lower propensity to react with negative emotions under stressful conditions. Finally, results showed that self-efficacy moderates at least some of the relationships between stressors and negative emotions, and also between stressors and CWB, but did not moderate the relationship between negative emotions and these types of conduct. CONCLUSIONS: Self-efficacy beliefs proved to be a protective factor that can reduce the impact of stressful working conditions.

Work self-efficacy scale and search for work self-efficacy scale: a validation study in spanish and italian cultural contexts / Escala de Autoeficacia en el Trabajo y Escala de Autoeficacia para la Búsqueda de Empleo: Estudio de Validez en Contextos Culturales Español e Italiano

The aim of the current article was to investigate the psychometric properties of two self-efficacy scales – the Work Self-Efficacy Scale (WSES) and Search for Work Self-Efficacy Scale (SWSES) – and their measurement invariance (configural, metric, and residual) across two different cultural contexts: Spanish and Italian. The WSES was measured by 10 items assessing perceived work capability, while the SWSES was measured by 12 items assessing perceived capability to manage and cope with different situations in the search for a job. The sample included 658 young adults from Italy and Spain (20-26 years of age). Multi-group confirmatory factor analysis reveal that both configural and metric invariance can be assumed, suggesting that meaningful comparisons of the relations between latent factors and external variables can be made across Spain and Italy(AU)

El objetivo de este artículo fue analizar la estructura factorial y la comprobación de la invarianza (configuración, métrica y residual) en dos contextos sociales diferentes: español e italiano. WSES está compuesta por 10 ítems que evalúan las creencias de eficacia sobre las actividades laborales; SWSES está compuesta por 12 ítems que evalúan las creencias de eficacia para hacer frente a situaciones diferentes en la búsqueda de trabajo. La muestra incluye 658 jóvenes de Italia y de España (20-26 edad). Los resultados fueron examinados a través de un análisis factorial confirmatorio multigrupo revelando que puede asumirse invarianza factorial en la configuración y la métrica, al tiempo que sugiere que pueden hacerse las comparaciones de las relaciones entre los factores latentes y las variables externas para España e Italia(AU)