Ticket to Ride: I-deals as a Strategic HR Tool for an Employable Work Force.

We describe how idiosyncratic deals (I-deals), in this case I-deals focused on workers' employability enhancement, can serve as a powerful strategic HR tool for simultaneously meeting both the strategic goals of employers and the career goals of employees. Building on a sustainable career perspective, I-deals are interpreted as highly valuable, as they can help individual employees to more easily adapt to the fast-changing environments that nowadays characterize society and the labor market. After theoretical outlines on the concepts of I-deals and employability, we argue that I-deals can form the basis for integrative employment relationships aimed at employability enhancement. This article concludes with concrete recommendations for practice, indicating that in order to enable the sound use of I-deals as a strategic HR tool, organizations should discuss I-deals and employability openly through constructive dialogue. Moreover, examples for achieving this through specific practices, such as working with employability coaches and world cafés on employability, are described.

Spiraling work engagement and change appraisals: A three-wave longitudinal study during organizational change.

In this longitudinal field study, we examine reciprocal relationships between within-person changes in work engagement and cognitive appraisals of change (threat and challenge) across an organizational merger. Examination of these cyclical relationships provides a more accurate understanding of the complexity of employees' experience of change and a new test of spiraling work engagement and cognitive appraisals. Latent change score modeling is used to analyze 3 waves of longitudinal survey data (N = 623). Our findings showed that engagement mitigated threat appraisals and enhanced challenge appraisals through pre- and postmerger phases. A reciprocal relationship between threat appraisal and engagement was also observed, such that threat fueled decreases in engagement throughout the merger. Challenge appraisal was associated with enhanced work engagement during the first merger phase. This examination advocates managers of change to foster employees' work engagement already prior to change endeavors, along with mitigating threat appraisals throughout organizational change events. Fostering positive challenge appraisals appears to be particularly important for employees' work engagement during times of major changes. Findings suggest that upward spiral of work engagement, as postulated on the basis of the broaden-and-build theory, may be more likely to occur through engagement mitigating negative cognitions (threat) than promoting positive cognitions (challenge). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Do similarities or differences between CEO leadership and organizational culture have a more positive effect on firm performance? A test of competing predictions.

This study examines the nature of the interaction between CEO leadership and organizational culture using 2 common metathemes (task and relationship) in leadership and culture research. Two perspectives, similarity and dissimilarity, offer competing predictions about the fit, or interaction, between leadership and culture and its predicted effect on firm performance. Predictions for the similarity perspective draw upon attribution theory and social identity theory of leadership, whereas predictions for the dissimilarity perspective are developed based upon insights from leadership contingency theories and the notion of substitutability. Hierarchical regression results from 114 CEOs and 324 top management team (TMT) members failed to support the similarity hypotheses but revealed broad support for the dissimilarity predictions. Findings suggest that culture can serve as a substitute for leadership when leadership behaviors are redundant with cultural values (i.e., they both share a task- or relationship-oriented focus). Findings also support leadership contingency theories indicating that CEO leadership is effective when it provides psychological and motivational resources lacking in the organization's culture. We discuss theoretical and practical implications and delineate directions for future research. (PsycINFO Database Record