Political affiliation as a moderator of the relationship between organizational climate and COVID-19 vaccine readiness.

RATIONALE: Organizations have a significant influence on their employees' behavior and attitudes across a wide range of areas. A framework to bundle these effects is organizational climate. Here, we argue that in a highly polarized society, such as the United States, many types of organizational climate revolve around issues that are divided along partisan lines (e.g., diversity, sustainability, COVID-19). However, research on organizational climate has largely overlooked the idea that employees perceive these issues through a partisan lens. OBJECTIVE: We aim to address this gap by arguing that political affiliation constitutes a boundary condition for those types of organizational climates addressing partisan cleavages. In particular, we focus on the interplay of organizational climate and the partisan gap in COVID-19. We predicted that the effect of organizational COVID-19 safety climate on employees' COVID-19 vaccine readiness is moderated by political affiliation. METHODS: We conducted a survey with 1158 U.S. citizens. To strengthen the generalizability of our findings, we took care to ensure that the gender and ethnicity distribution of our sample reflected the distribution of both variables in the U.S. RESULTS: As predicted, results showed that the effect of organizational COVID-19 safety climate on employees' COVID-19 vaccine readiness was moderated by political affiliation. Specifically, the relationship between organizational COVID-19 safety climate and COVID-19 vaccine readiness was more pronounced among Republicans than Democrats. CONCLUSION: We provide a new perspective on the interactive effects of organizational climate and political partisanship on attitudes to vaccines. Our research suggests that, when it comes to vaccine readiness, it is precisely those who are most vaccine-hesitant who are most affected by the organizations for whom they work.

Running toward my challenges: Day-level effects of physical activity before work on appraisal of the upcoming workday and employee well-being.

Previous research has typically conceptualized physical activity as a recovery activity after work that promotes well-being by allowing employees to detach from work and replenish their resources. Here, we aimed to go beyond this framework by proposing a new theoretical model of how physical activity in the morning before work affects employee well-being. Drawing upon the transactional theory of stress, we theorized that physical activity before work shapes employees' appraisal of their upcoming workday which, in turn, affects their well-being. In a preregistered study (N = 269), we utilized a within-person daily experience sampling approach to test our model. Results showed that two types of appraisals are particularly important for explaining the effects of physical activity before work on employee well-being: First, challenge appraisal mediated the effects of physical activity before work on work engagement. Second, we found an indirect effect via threat appraisal of physical activity before work on job-related anxiety. Exploratorily, we found that threat appraisal also mediated the effect of physical activity before work on emotional exhaustion. In conclusion, our results show that physical activity before work is beneficially related to several types of well-being outcomes by increasing challenge appraisal and decreasing threat appraisal. Furthermore, our study advances theoretical understanding on physical activity and work stress by shedding light on the mechanisms underlying the effect of physical activity on employee well-being and showing that physical activity before work benefits well-being by shaping how employees appraise their work situation on a day-to-day basis. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Organizations affect their employees' vaccine readiness: A self-perception theory perspective.

Over the past 3 years, employees have constantly witnessed how their organizations have responded to the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, we hypothesize that employees' perceptions of the COVID-19 safety climate of their organization positively affect their vaccine readiness. To examine the underlying mechanisms of this effect, we use a self-perception theory lens. Thus, we hypothesize that an organization's COVID-19 safety climate affects employees' COVID-19 vaccine readiness through employees' adherence to COVID-19 guidelines. We conducted a time-lagged study over the time span of 1 year (N = 351) to test our hypotheses. In general, results support our hypotheses. In particular, results showed that perceived COVID-19 safety climate assessed at an early stage of the pandemic (April 2020, when no vaccines were available) predicted employees' COVID-19 vaccine readiness more than a year later. In line with self-perception theory, this effect was mediated by employees' adherence to COVID-19 guidelines. The present study provides theoretical insight into the underlying mechanisms of organizational climate on employees' attitudes. From a practical perspective, our results suggest that organizations are a powerful lever for promoting vaccine readiness.

What makes the pipeline leak? Women's gender-based rejection sensitivity and men's hostile sexism as predictors of expectations of success for their own and the respective other gender group.

In academia, the proportion of women decreases with each career level. In this research, we examined how this so-called leaky pipeline relates to gender-based relative expectations of success. The participants were students from social sciences where women are the majority among students, such that it is more readily - but erroneously - inferred that gender discrimination is not an issue. We assumed that gender-based relative expectations of success should be predicted by two variables. Women students should experience higher gender-based rejection sensitivity than men students, with gender-based rejection sensitivity mitigating relative success expectations in women, but not in men. Men students should exhibit higher hostile-sexist attitudes toward women than women students, with hostile sexism reducing men students' but not women students' relative success expectations. We tested our hypotheses in an (under-)graduate sample of women and men students enrolled in educational or psychological majors (N = 372). Results show that a quarter of the women students expected men to be more successful than women and that proportionately more women than men students indicated that women have worse chances of success than men in the job they aspire to. Women were more concerned about being treated differently because of their gender than men, and men held more sexist attitudes toward women than women, with gender-based rejection sensitivity contributing to women students' and sexism to men students' expectation that their own gender group will less likely succeed in their aimed for future job. Implications how the leaky pipeline can be patched are discussed.