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This article, authored by Antje Schmitt in collaboration with India Kandel and Katja Dlouhy, has been published on Mindwise, the blog of the Psychology Department at the University of Groningen. It explores human-animal relations in the workplace. For more information, please click here.

Creativity is essential in managing interpersonal conflict within organizations, yet its drivers remain underexplored. Fousiani, Michelakis, and De Jonge investigated power and gender as key determinants of creativity in interpersonal conflicts at work. Their first study surveyed 226 employees across various organizations, while the second used a conflict simulation with 160 participants in dyads. Both studies examined the impact of relative power (having more power than the other person) on creativity, focusing on how gender influences this relationship. The results revealed a positive link between relative power and creativity in conflict, with a stronger effect among women. Study 2 delved deeper, exploring the distinct dimensions of creativity, such as idea originality and effectiveness. This research provides fresh insights into creativity within organizational conflicts, highlighting the complex interplay of power, gender, and creativity. The findings offer practical implications for organizational leaders and conflict resolution practitioners, emphasizing the critical role of gender dynamics in effective conflict resolution strategies.

This study with 290 self-employed workers shows that individuals‘ engagement in self-care practices positively relates to their well-being. We explored various types of self-care practices and found that physical activities showed the strongest correlation with well-being outcomes. Drawing on the theory of planned behavior, the results further revealed that strong intentions towards practicing self-care positively predicted subsequent self-care practice engagement, even when self-employed workers were faced with entrepreneurial stressors as potential barriers.

This study investigates associations between financial worries, a distressing emotional state prompted by perceived threats to financial resources, and employees’ health and career behaviors. We proposed that financial worries are not only positively related to health complaints, but also positively related to employees’ career exploration. We further explored how financial worries are associated with action crises—internal conflicts about whether to leave one’s job—and how these crises may help explain the relationship between worries and employee outcomes. In a two-month time-lagged study with 321 employees, we observed a positive association between financial worries and health complaints, but no significant association with career exploration. Furthermore, the experience of an action crisis mediated the relationship between financial worries and health complaints. Action crises were positively related to subsequent career exploration, and we established a significant indirect effect of financial worries on career exploration through action crises. This research contributes to a better understanding of the potential health-related and career behavioral outcomes of financial worries by introducing action crisis as a cognitive–emotional mechanism.

What can we learn from older workers about teleworking successfully? A new publication by our team points at five specific tactics that older workers tend to use more than younger workers, with benefits for their work-life balance and productivity during telework. These are (1) setting physical boundaries (e.g. working in a dedicated space at home rather than on the kitchen table), (2) setting digital boundaries (e.g. switching off work-related social media after work time), (2) communicating rules with private contacts (e.g. making agreements when it is ok for kids to interrupt during work time), (4) communicating rules with coworkers (e.g. letting coworkers know when one starts and finishes work so they don't disturb during off-work time), and (5) temporal tactics (setting start and end time for working hours into the personal agenda). Organizations may train (especially younger) workers on these tactics, or encourage intergenerational knowledge sharing on these tactics, in order to maximize the benefits of telework, while minimizing its costs.

People with psychopathic tendencies have impaired empathy and remorse, lie and manipulate, and have bold, egotistical traits. Yet they can sometimes successfully climb the ladder to leadership positions. One reason for this might be that such leaders can “hide behind a mask of sanity,” skillfully managing how they express emotions to shape others’ perceptions positively. In our study, involving 306 teams, we explored how leaders' primary psychopathy and their emotion regulation strategies influence followers’ views of the leader's authenticity and trustworthiness. We discovered that leaders with strong psychopathic traits benefit more from surface acting—feigning emotions rather than truly feeling them—to build follower trust. We also found that for leaders with higher levels of primary psychopathy deep acting - truly experiencing the emotions they display- is a less fruitful strategy because they lack the necessary empathic concern. Displaying naturally felt emotions is also positively linked to follower trust. Overall, our findings suggest that leaders with psychopathic characteristics can manipulate how subordinates perceive them through strategic emotional displays. By carefully controlling their emotional expressions via surface acting, these leaders can exploit their followers’ perceptions to maintain power and control.

Kleine, Schmitt, and Wisse conducted three studies to examine the association between financial stress in entrepreneurs, their intention to quit their businesses., and the role of entrepreneurs‘ affective commitment —the emotional bonds that they formed with their jobs and businesses—as an underlying factor explaining the association between financial stress and quit intentions. The research highlights the crucial role of financial stress as a hindrance stressor in entrepreneurs.

In a study based on 205 employees who engage in human–animal work, we investigated employees’ perceived job demands and resources that are characteristic of human–animal work and relationships with well-being and motivational outcomes. The results revealed that the job demand of animal distress increased employees' emotional exhaustion, while the demand of occupational stigma was not significantly related to exhaustion. The job resources pro-animal impact and human-animal bonds positively predicted employees’ work engagement. However, when employees reported that the animals they were working with experienced distress, the association between human-animal bonds and work engagement was mitigated. We discuss implications for the job demands–resources theory, research on animal distress, and the field of human–animal work, and offer practical implications for employees working with animals.

Artificial intelligence (AI) stands at the forefront of the fourth industrial revolution, where organizations are strategically integrating it as a vital tool to address a diverse range of daily management and work-related challenges. Yet, despite the advantages of AI, employees frequently perceive AI as a double-edged sword with unintended consequences. Kyriaki Fousiani and colleagues investigated how work climate influences employee attitudes toward AI and actual AI use. They found that a competitive climate increases AI acceptance over time (i.e., positive attitude and use), but only when leaders use their power as a responsibility to serve their team rather than as an opportunity to promote their agenda. The results of this study underscore the organizational factors that are required in order for employees to shape favorable attitudes towards AI and actually use AI at work.

Despite the growing body of research on human–animal studies in various disciplines, attempts to systematically include animals in organization studies have been limited. In this article, Kandel, Dlouhy, and Schmitt build on organizational role theory and propose a typology of five roles of animals in human organizations (i.e., animals as commodities, clients, co-workers, companions, and acquaintances) as a framework for analyzing organizational human–animal relations.

We recently published two papers testing fundamental stress processes over time across multiple longitudinal samples. In the first study, we found that employees are more strongly affected by losses in work quality than gains which has relevant implications for how we think about interventions and job redesign. In the second study, we found that employees are resilient to short-term stress pile-up. Although we found consistent support for negative effects of high workload within one day, these effects did not pile up (i.e., accumulate) across days or the work week, lending further support to the importance of recovery experiences.

Psychological abuse by supervisors occurs when employees are subjected to verbal and non-verbal aggression over an extended period (Tepper, 2000). This includes behaviors such as outbursts of anger, ridiculing employees, invading their privacy, falsely blaming them, as well as manipulating, ignoring, and isolating them. International research shows a prevalence of destructive leadership of 13.6% (Schat et al., 2006). It may seem wise for an abused employee to leave as soon as possible or take other actions to end the psychological abuse. However, this is easier said than done due to various barriers that make it difficult, if not impossible, to leave.

Staying employable throughout the course of one’s career has become more important than ever. Whereas adaptability appears to be critical to employability, our understanding of the conditions under which employees’ work-related adaptive behaviour renders them employable in the eyes of their leaders is underdeveloped. We argue that leader-rated employability is contingent on the extent to which employee adaptive behaviours are compatible with leader behaviours that either facilitate or constrain adaptability. Results of a multi-source field study of Dutch leader-subordinate dyads (N = 292) indicate that exploration career role enactment is positively related to leader-rated employability. Moreover, we find support for our complementary fit hypotheses: employee enactment of exploration career roles is positively related to employability evaluations when leader behaviour complements rather than supplements employee exploratory behaviours.

This meta-analysis investigates the relationship between self-construal, conflict management strategies, and face concerns. Using meta-analytic structural equation modeling (MASEM), the study analyzed data from two hundred fifty-four effect sizes based on thirty-three studies. The results showed that individuals with stronger independent self-construal and self-face concerns tend to use forcing, while those with stronger interdependent self-construal and other-face concerns are inclined towards problem-solving and yielding strategies. The study contributes to the understanding of face-negotiation theory and interpersonal conflict resolution.

In May 2023, the EU Cost Action has awarded 70 new Cost Actions, among them the Action LeverAge. Through this Action, Susanne Scheibe and her colleagues from 32 European and international partner countries will receive funding to build a network of work and aging scientists and practitioners to tackle the essential psychological and managerial aspects of the aging, age-diverse workforce – one of Europe’s greatest challenges of the 21th century. The Action will establish five Working Groups focusing on key topics, including work and organizational practices for an age-diverse workforce, successful aging at work, integration of age-diverse workers and knowledge transfer, aging and technology at work, and career development in later life and retirement. The network is open to all interested researchers, practitioners and policy partners who share an interest in the multi-age workforce.

Primary psychopathy in leaders, also referred to as successful psychopathy or corporate psychopathy, is a key determinant of corporate misconduct. In contrast to the general notion that primary psychopaths’ destructiveness cannot be controlled, we posit that psychopathic leaders’ display of self-serving and abusive behavior can be restrained by organizational contextual factors. Specifically, we argue that the positive relationship between leader primary psychopathy on the one hand and self-serving behavior and abusive supervision on the other will be weaker to the extent that the organizational context (clear rules and policies, sanctionability of misconduct, and transparency of behavior) is stronger. Three studies (one experiment, one survey of leader–subordinate dyads, and one survey of teams) showed that clear rules in particular weakened the positive association between leader primary psychopathic traits and their self-serving and abusive behavior.

Delivering bad news is one of the most challenging tasks for leaders. Recently, the popular press has been awash with examples reflecting poor bad news delivery, such as mass layoffs in the IT sector. While many disciplines have been interested in understanding the delivery of bad news, different emphases across disciplines have resulted in independent silos of research that impeded scholarly and practical advancements. In their interdisciplinary review, Claudia Kitz, Laurie Barclay, and Heiko Breitsohl review 685 articles and identified key challenges in the extant literature while they also provide a path forward by showcasing key opportunities. This is, conceptualizing bad news delivery as a dialectic process that unfolds over time can further enhance theoretical insights and practical guidance for effectively managing bad news delivery in the workplace.

On November 24, 2023, our group is organizing the WAOP conference together with colleagues from the HRM-OB department at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Groningen. This yearly conference of the Werkgemeenschap Arbeids- & Organisatie Psychologie brings together academics and practitioners in our field from the Netherlands and its neighboring countries. Join us for an interesting 1-day program of inspiring talks, research sessions, and science--practice cross-talk sessions in the Forum Groningen. More information is available on the conference website. WAOP: https://waop.nl/

The ubiquity of face masks throughout the Covid-19 pandemic has led to questions about their psychological side effects. As face masks cover large parts of a person’s face, many concerns are focused on their potential consequences for emotion perception. Susanne Scheibe, together with her colleagues Felix Grundmann, Bart Kranenborg, and Kai Epstude, recently demonstrated that such concerns may be unwarranted. The authors found no evidence that face masks negatively impact people’s empathy motives (affiliation, cognitive effort) or cognitive (empathic accuracy) and emotional (emotional congruence, sympathy) empathy for dynamic, context-rich stimuli. At the same time, they found support for the idea that empathic processes are motivated.

Her research investigates the effects of conspiracy thinking on psychological contract breach and in turn on prosocial and antisocial work behavior of employees.