Documents Journal of Business and Psychology 2 results

This study investigated the environmental antecedents and daily consequences of playful work design (PWD), a proactive strategy that employees use to enhance their engagement in daily work tasks. Grounded in the Job Demands-Resources theory, we present a robust process model, testing playful organizational climate (job resource) and PWD (bottom-up behavioral strategy) as predictors of daily engagement, mediated by the satisfaction of the need for competence. Our research involved 209 employees from diverse occupational settings who completed daily questionnaires over 12 consecutive working days. After a series of multilevel confirmatory factor analyses (MCFA) to establish multilevel construct validity, we constructed a 2–1-1–1 multilevel structural equation model (MSEM), incorporating all hypothesized paths. The data partially supported our hypotheses. At the employee level, it was found that a playful organizational climate did not directly predict engagement but indirectly through the behavioral enactment of playful work design. Furthermore, a playful climate did not transfer its effects through the satisfaction of the need for competence. This effect occurred only when PWD was also included as a mediator, underscoring the vital role of employees' concrete behavioral strategies in linking organizational climate to engagement. At the within-person level, it was observed that on days when employees infused their work with more playfulness and competition, they reported feeling more competent and engaged as a result.

"The COVID-19 pandemic and outbreak response represent a global crisis that has affected various aspects of people's lives, including work. Speculation is rife about the impact of the crisis on employees. Countries and organizations worldwide have categorized some work as essential and, by extension, other work as nonessential. This study aims to investigate the impact of the pandemic by examining the relationship between work disruptions (at time 1) and general distress (at time 2) through various work stressors, contrasting the experiences of employees in essential versus nonessential work. For employees with essential jobs, there is a significant indirect effect of work disruptions on general distress through hindrance stressors. This relationship is not found for employees with nonessential jobs. The general distress of these employees is more strongly affected by disruptions through social stressors (here, social isolation). Hence, this study demonstrates how general distress is affected in different ways for employees conducting essential work and those conducting nonessential work. We further highlight the importance of considering social stressors in this relationship, especially for nonessential work. Organizational change communication quality mitigates the relationship between isolation and general distress for employees with nonessential jobs, but not for those with essential jobs."