Arianna Costantini

Grit or Honesty-Humility? New Insights into the Moderating Role of Personality between the Health Impairment Process and Counterproductive Work Behavior

It is acknowledged that chronic job demands may be depleting workers’ stamina resulting in burnout conditions and ultimately causing further health problems. This relation, known as health impairment process, has recently been considered as a possible explanation for the emergence of counterproductive work behavior (CWB). The present work aims to examine the role of two personality traits (i.e., Grit and Honesty-Humility) in this process. The results, based on a sample of 208 private service sector employees, confirm the presence of a fully mediated process and show how Honesty-Humility positively moderates the relationship between job demands and exhaustion, whereas Grit has a negative effect on the relation between exhaustion and CWB. Implications for assessment procedure and hiring decisions are discussed.

The career decision-making competence: a new construct for the career realm

Purpose This paper aims to link findings from laboratory-based decision-making research and decision-making competence (DMC) aspects that may be central for career-related decision-making processes. Past research has identified individual differences in rational responses in decision situations, which the authors refer to as DMC. Although there is a robust literature on departures from rational responses focused on heuristics and biases (H&B) in decision-making, such evidence is largely confined to group-level differences observed in psychology laboratories and has not been extended to the realm of career development and workforce behavior. Design/methodology/approach By first introducing the concept of DMC and contextualizing it within organizations and the work environment, the paper outlines a review on recent development concerning debiasing interventions in organizations and provides insights on how these may be effective with regard to organizational performance and individual career development. Findings The contribution presents a perspective to improve knowledge about career decision-making competence (C-DMC) by presenting an approach linking decision-making research to interventions aiming at managing H&B and systematic misperceptions in career processes. Originality/value This contribution is one of the few linking decision-making research to the applied context of organizations and of career competences. Moreover, while some research has treated decision-making skills as traits, this contribution provides support to consider them developable as competencies.

The impact of occupational rewards on risk taking among managers

Managers often have to deal with the financial and ethical risks that companies face. Evidence from risk management research suggests a negative relationship between people’s age and risk taking tendencies. Within such a framework, the present contribution examines how different perceived occupational rewards may mediate or interact with the relationship between age and risk taking of managers at the company level. Our results show that perceived rewards in terms of job security partially mediate the relationship between age and ethical risk taking, while perceived rewards related to job promotion moderate the effect of age on financial risk taking. We further discuss the role of different organizational strategies to preserve an organization’s health.

Framing Workplace Innovation Through an Organisational Psychology Perspective: A Review of Current WPI Studies

In this chapter, we discuss the potential advantages of taking a work and organisational psychology (WOP) perspective on Workplace Innovation (WPI). WPI represents a construct that can be applied at different organisational levels and be considered from multiple inter-related perspectives. Accordingly, this contribution takes a systemic perspective on WPI. Such an approach suggests that multiple disciplines have something to contribute to our understanding of WPI and this chapter aims to show how research in WPI can benefit from a WOP perspective. Accordingly, a main goal of this chapter is to recognize how organisational and work-related dynamics influence the effectiveness of WPI practices, an issue that will be examined by means of recent WPI studies analysed from a WOP perspective. In doing so, we seek to encourage perspectives on WPI and research in WOP to be merged, in order to promote a deeper investigation of the predictors and consequences of WPI, as well as a greater understanding of factors influencing the effectiveness of WPI practices.

Turning bad into good: How resilience resources protect organizations from demanding work environments

ABSTRACT An organization’s survival and its performance are often connected to employees’ well-being, which in intensive work conditions can be compromised by employee exhaustion. To date, the last economic crisis has forced several companies to downsize and leave the remaining employees facing higher job demands and vulnerability toward job exhaustion. The present study investigates whether resilience together with other personal resources can function as a psychological shield through a mediation and/or moderation process that mitigate the emergence of burnout. Based on a sample of employees from three different Italian companies (N = 208), our results confirmed that “resilience resources” (i.e., resilience, self-efficacy, self-regulation) mediated the relationship between job demands, exhaustion, and task performance (i.e., energetic process). These results suggest that organizational environments characterized by challenging demands are likely to foster the development of resilience resources to cope with the emergence of potentially harming processes.

How Do You Manage Change in Organizations? Training, Development, Innovation, and Their Relationships

The article aims to be a reflective paper on the interconnected concepts of training, development and innovation and the potential they have in dealing with change in organizations. We call change both the process through which something becomes different and the result of that process. Change management is the expression used to define the complex of activities, functions, and tools (such as training courses) through which an organization deals with the introduction of something new that is relevant for both its survival and growth. Training and development are labels used to define those educational activities implemented in organizations to empower the competences of workers, employees and managers in the lifelong learning perspective of improving their performance. Consequently, we define competences as those personal characteristics that allow people to be effective in the changing contexts of both workplace and everyday life. They are also necessary in organizational innovation, which is the process of transforming ideas or inventions into goods or services that generate value and for which customers will pay. Training, development, and innovation are three different but interconnected functions by which organizations manage change. What is the state of the art of the literature dealing with these topics? Here, is a critical review on the matter.