Perceptions of Social Context and Intention to Quit: The Mediating Role of Work Engagement and Interpersonal Strain

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Thanks for giving me the opportunity to read the article "Perceptions of Social Context and Intention to Quit: The Mediating Role of Work Engagement and Interpersonal Strain" focused on the role of Perceptions of the Social Context (PoSC) and Work Engagement as personal resources that can create healthy and productive organizations. I think the topic is interesting for the journal.
The work is well structured and organized both from a theoretical and methodological point of view.
Here are some minor revisions in the hope that they will be useful to strengthen the work:
- Is it possible to have more detailed information about the participants, educational qualifications, jobs, background, etc.?
- Could the authors include additional information on the validity of the instruments?
- From a methodological point of view it would be important to know if the instruments were all administered at the same time, predictors and outcomes.

Author Response

Responses to Reviewers' comments

R1

Thank you very much for your feedback and useful suggestions. Please, see below how we have addressed your specific comments.

Is it possible to have more detailed information about the participants, educational qualifications, jobs, background, etc.?

Based on your suggestion, we have added further information about participants’ characteristics in Materials and Methods section.

Could the authors include additional information on the validity of the instruments?
PoSC scale has been previously used in several studies (for example Borgogni, Dello Russo, Petitta, & Latham, 2010, Borgogni, Dello Russo, & Latham, 2011, Consiglio, Borgogni, Alessandri, & Schaufeli, 2016) with good validity. Also, Johns in the paper “Advances in the treatment of context in organizational research” published in Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior (2018), mentions the Perceptions of Social Context Scale di Borgogni and colleagues as a new measure to tap perceptions of workplace social context.

The Interpersonal Strain at Work Scale (ISW) has been previously validated and inserted in the paper appendix: Borgogni, L., Consiglio, C., Alessandri, G., & Schaufeli, W. B. (2012). “Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater!” Interpersonal strain at work and burnout. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 21(6), 875-898.

The Utrecht Work Engagement Scale, UWES-9 version, has been validated in this paper: Schaufeli, W. B., Bakker, A. B., & Salanova, M. (2006). The measurement of work engagement with a short questionnaire: A cross-national study. Educational and psychological measurement, 66(4), 701-716.

Finally, the Intention to quit Scale has been validated by Firth, Mellor, Moore and Loquet’s (2004).

From a methodological point of view it would be important to know if the instruments were all administered at the same time, predictors and outcomes.

Participants completed a questionnaire which included all the scales used. Then, the instruments were all administered at the same time.

Reviewer 2 Report

This research is value additive and has its merits but following areas need careful improvements/revisions before further processing;

1. This study is purely from the Psychology domain and makes no mention of works place Sustainability. Considering the journal's nature, add a subsection of work place sustainability under the introduction to make your study more useful for the audience.
2. Author claim that POSC has a positive impact on work engagement and negative impact on personal strain. However, what if the perception of supervisor and colleague is negative towards an employee? Did the study not accounted for the negative perception effects?
3. I think figure 1 of proposed theoretical framework shall come after the hypotheses development.
4. Results and discussion section should be separated from the conclusion section. Besides, Conclusion section needs to be further extended with the practical implications of this research for various corporate stakeholders, i.e; administrators, peers, managers, customers, and society. 
5. The research should also provide feasible directions for future line of research in this domain.
6. Most of the references are quite old. Add/replace some studies from 2019-2020 to present a fresh perspectives of state-of-the-art in this research field.
7. The research instrument (questionnaire) is missing. Include the research instrument in appendix.

Author Response

Responses to Reviewers' comments

R2

Thank you very much for your feedback and useful suggestions. Please, see below how we have addressed your specific comments.

1. This study is purely from the Psychology domain and makes no mention of works place Sustainability. Considering the journal's nature, add a subsection of workplace sustainability under the introduction to make your study more useful for the audience.

Thank you very much for this useful suggestion that enriches our paper. Based on your recommendations, we have added a subsection of workplace sustainability under the introduction. We specifically referred to psychology of sustainability and sustainable development, a new primary prevention approach that promotes well-being in workplace (Di Fabio, 2017; Di Fabio & Peiró, 2018).

2. Author claim that POSC has a positive impact on work engagement and negative impact on personal strain. However, what if the perception of supervisor and colleague is negative towards an employee? Did the study not accounted for the negative perception effects?

The PoSC construct only measures positive behaviors, so we can only know, in which strength, if the positive behaviors measured with respect to management, supervisor and colleagues impact the interpersonal strain or if they can be considered as protective factors.

There are other scales in the reading that measure negative perceptions. We have considered  the use of these scales for the future developments of this study.

3. I think figure 1 of proposed theoretical framework shall come after the hypotheses development.

As you suggested, we have inserted figure 1 after the hypotheses (page 13).

4. Results and discussion section should be separated from the conclusion section. Besides, Conclusion section needs to be further extended with the practical implications of this research for various corporate stakeholders, i.e; administrators, peers, managers, customers, and society. 

We have separated Discussion section from the Conclusion section.

We have enriched the conclusion section by adding the practical implications.

5. The research should also provide feasible directions for future line of research in this domain.

As you suggest, we have added possible future lines of research in this domain in the conclusion section.

6. Most of the references are quite old. Add/replace some studies from 2019-2020 to present a fresh perspectives of state-of-the-art in this research field.

As you suggest, we have added some more recent references (as for example Di Fabio, 2017; Di Fabio & Peiró, 2018; Di Fabio & Rosen, 2018; Ekhsan, 2019; Alam & Asim, 2019; Manuti, & Giancaspro, 2019; Xiong & Wen, 2020, and have delete some references from the 80s (as Bluedorn, 1982, Good, Sisler, & Gentry, 1988).

7. The research instrument (questionnaire) is missing. Include the research instrument in appendix.

Thank you for your suggestion. However even if we consider a reasonable request we decide to not include them. In particular the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES-9 version, Schaufeli, Bakker, & Salanova, 2006), Intention to quit Scale (Firth, Mellor, Moore, & Loquet, 2004), and Interpersonal Strain at Work Scale (ISW - Borgogni, Consiglio, Alessandri, & Schaufeli, 2012) have been previously validated and entirely published in the quoted articles.

In reference to PoSC Scale, although it has been widely used in the literature in numerous studies (for example Borgogni, Dello Russo, Petitta, & Latham, 2010, Borgogni, Dello Russo, & Latham, 2011, Consiglio, Borgogni, Alessandri, & Schaufeli, 2016; Johns, 2018 ), a publication showing the scale in its entirety has not yet been published, and at the moment it is under revision. We, therefore, prefer to wait for this publication.

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Considerable revision has been incorporated. Manuscript is accepted.