Illness narratives and chronic patients' sustainable employability: The impact of positive work stories.

The number of workers with a chronic disease is steadily growing in industrialized countries. To cope with and to give meaning to their illness, patients construct illness narratives, which are widely shared across patient societies, personal networks and the media. This study investigates the influence of these shared illness narratives on patient's working lives, by examining the impact of reading a positive work story versus negative work story on patients' sustainable employability. We expected that this relationship would be mediated by positive emotions and the extent to which the story enhanced awareness of desires future selves, and moderated by identification with story character. An online field experiment with 166 people with Inflammatory Bowel Disease in The Netherlands showed that while reading a positive story of a patient with the same condition significantly increased positive emotions, these emotions did not influence sustainable employability. However, reading a positive story was related to higher sustainable employability when patients became more aware of their desired possible future work selves. Finally, identification with the story character moderated the impact of story type on sustainable employability. This study showed that personal engagement with a positive work story of a fellow patient is related to higher sustainable employability. Findings can be helpful for health professionals to empower employees with a chronic disease.

Buffering the Breach: Examining the Three-Way Interaction Between Unit Climate Level, Strength, and Psychological Contract Breach.

Despite the wealth of research showing that psychological contract breach (PCB) has negative outcomes for individuals, knowledge about the influence of the social context in which breaches are experienced is still scarce. This is surprising, as scholars have argued that work climates, such as when unit members are generally highly committed, could buffer an individual's negative experiences at work. Yet, to date, the unit climate and PCB literatures have largely remained separated and our main goal is to integrate these fields. This is especially timely and relevant, because recent work in the unit climate literature indicates that merely looking at the average climate level might not be enough, because the climate's strength (i.e., the agreement or homogeneity within the unit) could also provide important social cues. Building on these recent advances, we develop and test a theoretical framework which links both climate concepts to PCB. More specifically, we hypothesized that especially when all unit members are highly and homogeneously committed, an employee would reframe their PCB in such a way that it would less adversely affect work engagement and turnover intentions. Using data from 1,272 employees across 36 healthcare units, multilevel structural path analyses supported this three-way interaction. By answering recent calls for more "social PCB research" and integrating the unit climate and PCB literatures, we aim to provide guidance to scholars and practitioners who want to understand in more depth the social context's influence on PCB.

How Do High-Performance Work Systems Affect Individual Outcomes: A Multilevel Perspective.

Research on high-performance work systems (HPWS) has suggested that a potential disconnection may exist between organizational-level HPWS and employee experienced HPWS. However, few studies have identified factors that are implied within such a relationship. Using a sample of 397 employees, 84 line managers, and 21 HR executives in China, we examined whether line managers' goal congruence can reduce the difference between organizational-level HPWS and employee experienced HPWS. Furthermore, this study also theorized and tested organization-based self-esteem (OBSE) as a mediator in the associations between employee experienced HPWS and job performance and job satisfaction. Using multilevel analyses, we found that line managers' goal congruence strengthened the relationship between organizational-level HPWS and employee experienced HPWS, such that the relationship was significant and positive when line managers' goal congruence was high, but a non-significant relationship when line managers' goal congruence was low. Moreover, employee experienced HPWS indirectly affected job performance and job satisfaction through the mechanism of OBSE beyond social exchange perspective.

Future time perspective and promotion focus as determinants of intraindividual change in work motivation.

In the near future, workforces will increasingly consist of older workers. At the same time, research has demonstrated that work-related growth motives decrease with age. Although this finding is consistent with life span theories, such as the selection optimization and compensation (SOC) model, we know relatively little about the process variables that bring about this change in work motivation. Therefore, we use a 4-wave study design to examine the mediating role of future time perspective and promotion focus in the negative association between age and work-related growth motives. Consistent with the SOC model, we found that future time perspective was negatively associated with age, which, in turn, was associated with lower promotion focus, lower work-related growth motive strength, and lower motivation to continue working. These findings have important theoretical implications for the literature on aging and work motivation, and practical implications for how to motivate older workers.

How does fiction reading influence empathy? An experimental investigation on the role of emotional transportation.

The current study investigated whether fiction experiences change empathy of the reader. Based on transportation theory, it was predicted that when people read fiction, and they are emotionally transported into the story, they become more empathic. Two experiments showed that empathy was influenced over a period of one week for people who read a fictional story, but only when they were emotionally transported into the story. No transportation led to lower empathy in both studies, while study 1 showed that high transportation led to higher empathy among fiction readers. These effects were not found for people in the control condition where people read non-fiction. The study showed that fiction influences empathy of the reader, but only under the condition of low or high emotional transportation into the story.