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Institute
The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered health-related anxiety in ways that undermine peoples’ mental and physical health. Contextual factors such as living in a high-risk area might further increase the risk of health deterioration. Based on the Social Identity Approach, we argue that social identities can not only be local that are characterized by social interactions, but also be global that are characterized by a symbolic sense of togetherness and that both of these can be a basis for health. In line with these ideas, we tested how identification with one’s family and with humankind relates to stress and physical symptoms while experiencing health-related anxiety and being exposed to contextual risk factors. We tested our assumptions in a representative sample (N = 974) two-wave survey study with a 4-week time lag. The results show that anxiety at Time 1 was positively related to stress and physical symptoms at Time 2. Feeling exposed to risk factors related to lower physical health, but was unrelated to stress. Family identification and identification with humankind were both negatively associated with subsequent stress and family identification was negatively associated with subsequent physical symptoms. These findings suggest that for social identities to be beneficial for mental health, they can be embodied as well as symbolic.
The ability to respond appropriately to employees' work-related well-being requires leaders to pay attention to their employees' well-being in the first place. We propose that leaders' stress mindset, that is, the belief that stress is enhancing versus debilitating, may bias their perception of employees' well-being. We further propose that this judgment then influences leaders' intention to engage in or refrain from health-oriented leadership behavior, to express higher performance expectations, or to promote their employees. We expect this process to be stronger if leaders strongly identify with their team, increasing their perceived similarity with their employees. In three experiments (N1 = 198, N2 = 292, N3 = 250), we tested the effect of participants' stress mindset on their intention to show certain leadership behaviors, mediated by their perception of employee well-being (emotional exhaustion, somatic symptoms, work engagement) and moderated by their team identification. Our findings largely support the association between stress mindset and the perception of well-being. The results for the proposed mediation and the moderating function of identification were mixed. Overall, the results emphasize the critical role of leaders' stress mindset and may, thus, improve health promotion in organizations by helping leaders to adequately recognize employees' well-being and respond appropriately.
The social identity approach to stress proposes that the beneficial effects of social identification develop through individual and group processes, but few studies have addressed both levels simultaneously. Using a multilevel person–environment fit framework, we investigate the group-level relationship between team identification (TI) and exhaustion, the individual-level relationship for people within a group, and the cross-level moderation effect to test whether individual-level exhaustion depends on the level of (in)congruence in TI between individuals and their group as a whole. We test our hypotheses in a sample of 525 employees from 82 teams. Multilevel polynomial regression analysis revealed a negative linear relationship between individual-level identification and exhaustion. Surprisingly, the relation between group-level identification and exhaustion was curvilinear, indicating that group-level identification was more beneficial at low and high levels compared with medium levels. As predicted, the cross-level moderation of the individual-level relationship by group-level identification was also significant, showing that as individuals became more incongruent in a positive direction (i.e., they identified more strongly than the average team member), they reported less exhaustion, but only if the group-level identification was average or high. These results emphasize the benefits of analyzing TI in a multilevel framework, with both theoretical and practical implications.
Defensive decision making occurs when the decision-maker does not choose the option that is in the best interest of an organization or client but instead chooses a less effective but lower risk alternative that protects him or her in case something goes wrong. Such decisions are widespread across occupations and sectors and cause substantive damage to organizations. In a first step, we developed a scale to measure defensive decision making and test its validity. The scale covers two distinct but related dimensions: avoidance and approach. In a subsequent, two-wave study, we examined the antecedents of defensive decision making using conservation of resources theory as a theoretical lens. An environment characterized by higher psychological safety can reduce resource depletion and diminishes defensive decision making. In contrast, job insecurity can result in a threat to personal resources, which increases the likelihood that employees choose defensive decisions.
Practitioners points:
People engage in defensive decision making as a means to protect their own resources from exhaustion.
Organizations can reduce the number of defensive decisions by enhancing situational resources such as psychological safety.
The short and preliminarily validated scale we developed can be used to make defensive decisions visible in organizations.
Despite the increasing interest in leaders’ health-promoting behavior, the employees’ role in the effectiveness of such behavior and the mechanisms underlying how such leadership behavior affects their well-being have largely been ignored. Drawing on implicit leadership theories, we advance the health-oriented leadership literature by examining employees’ ideals, that is, their expectations regarding such leader behavior, as a moderating factor. We propose that higher expectations increase the association between actual health-oriented leader behavior and employee-rated leader-member relationships (LMX) and health-oriented behaviors by employees, which, in turn, positively relate to their well-being (here: exhaustion and work engagement). We tested our theoretical model in three studies, using a cross-sectional design (Study 1, N = 307), a two-wave time-lagged design (Study 2, N = 144) and an experimental design (Study 3, N = 173). We found that the effect of actual health-oriented leader behavior on LMX is contingent on employees’ ideal health-oriented leader behavior. Yet, for employees’ self-care behavior, the proposed moderation was only significant in Study 1. High expectations strengthened the relationship between actual health-oriented leader behavior with LMX and self-care behavior, which, in turn, were associated with less exhaustion and more work engagement (only LMX), supporting most of our mediation hypotheses. Our results highlight the pivotal role of employees’ expectations regarding leaders’ health support and help in building practical interventions with regard to leaders’ health promotion.