Search Results (13)

With the advancement of global economic restructuring and China’s economic transformation, structural employment contradictions have intensified amid increasingly competitive labor markets. The frequent occurrences of “degree devaluation” and talent “downskilling” have made perceived overqualification increasingly prevalent in organizations. This study, based on the Cognitive–Affective Personality System theory, investigates the differential mechanisms through which perceived overqualification drives approach and avoidance job crafting via cognitive and affective pathways. Data from a two-wave survey of 556 Chinese employees produced several key findings: (1) Perceived overqualification significantly enhances approach job crafting while suppressing avoidance job crafting by elevating role breadth self-efficacy (cognitive pathway), demonstrating a proactive breakthrough effect. (2) Perceived overqualification inhibits approach job crafting and exacerbates avoidance job crafting through triggering emotional exhaustion (affective pathway), revealing a passive exhaustion trap. (3) Perceived overqualification exerts a positive and significant overall indirect effect on approach job crafting through the combined mechanisms of cognitive gains from role breadth self-efficacy and affective costs from emotional exhaustion, whereas the overall indirect effect on avoidance job crafting is non-significant. (4) Idiosyncratic deals (i-deals) function as a dynamic boundary mechanism that amplifies the positive impact of role breadth self-efficacy and mitigates the negative effects of emotional exhaustion, while moderating the mediating roles of both pathways. This research develops a dual-path integrated model of perceived overqualification and job crafting by classifying job crafting categories, incorporating cognitive–affective pathways, and introducing i-deals as a contextual element. These findings respond to scholarly demands for elucidating the intricate connections between perceived overqualification and job crafting through integrative perspectives; in addition, they offer theoretical and practical insights for organizations to leverage the potential of overqualified individuals appropriately. Full article

This essay examines a little-known but important installation entitled Insure the Life of an Ant, conceived by artist Mike Malloy and displayed at the O.K. Harris Gallery in New York in April of 1972. This provocative and idiosyncratic piece confronted gallery-goers, who became viewer–participants, with the option of killing or saving a live ant displayed like a sculpture on a pedestal, either by pushing a button or not. The artist made the piece, which can function almost like a psychology experiment, to engender a “moral dilemma”. I explore the particular role of affect in a participatory art installation, distinct from response to inanimate art. I investigate the roles of emotion and reason in dealing with the work; whether ratiocination can be considered an “anti-affect”; and how the tension between competing thoughts and feelings helped create a psychological drama. The essay looks at how an art space can operate as a zone of moral exceptionalism to encourage questionable actions. It also locates the piece in relation to the emergence of a more behaviorist art in the early 1970s, as discussed by critic Gregory Battcock, and the larger notion of postmodernism. Other contexts investigated include art and animal rights and issues of sentience and speciesism; social and military violence, including capital punishment and the Vietnam War; the 1961 Milgram experiment; Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil” as a Nazi war criminal defense; and other works of art involving maltreatment or violence toward both human and non-human animals, including those by Marina Abramović, Marco Evaristti, and Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz. Full article

This study addresses Roger Scruton’s understanding of what he called “moments of revelation”. In two short essays, both entitled “Effing the ineffable”, Scruton framed his discussion of moments of revelation with reference to the medieval Christian mystical discourse. Introducing the medieval discussion of this topic, this study provides an analysis of Scruton’s approach to the theme. In tune with the traditional discourse on revelation, his general aim was to demonstrate that there are ways of revealing important truths about the supernatural, of the world “beyond the window”, that do not require words to be pronounced. He calls our experiences of such phenomena moments of revelation and identifies four different transitory sources of revelation. This study deals with them one by one, after considering whether it is right to label such a revelation transcendental. The four sources of Scruton’s moments of revelation are natural beauty, the beauty of painting, the beauty of music, and personal encounters. The first three examples are connected to his thoughts on art and beauty as a substitute of divine revelation. Perhaps the most surprising of these is the last ones, moments of intersubjective human relationships, “our knowledge of each other”. Relying on both Buber and Levinas, Scruton makes the strong claim that it is in the other that we can experience that world “beyond the window”. His phenomenological exploration of human encounters sheds light on concepts like grace, shekhinah, or real presence and gift. He explains the Christian understanding of the human–divine relationship as well along the lines of the nature of interpersonal human relationship, both of them being in a certain sense, he claims, transcendental. From grace, his account moves forward to self-sacrifice and finally arrives at his idiosyncratic understanding of gratefulness for life. His moments of revelation in art and interpersonal exchange turn out to be, indeed, late and secular versions of the Christian understanding of revelation. In its summary, this study claims that revelation, understood by Scruton as a form of general human experience, allows to catch a glimpse of that which is beyond the window, by the direct, sensually based experience of either the existence of another person or of the beauty of nature and art. Full article

Organizations have come to recognize the importance of their human capital, particularly their top-performing employees, in sustaining their businesses in today’s competitive 21st-century landscape. To reward these few talented employees, organizations offer them preferential treatment in the form of idiosyncratic deals (i-deals). I-deals can effectively improve the performance of recipients, but this is not enough to demonstrate their management effectiveness. We should also measure their functional impact from the perspective of bystanders. This study seeks to explore the functional and dysfunctional impacts of i-deals on bystanders. We collected two-wave leader–employee matching data from sales teams, obtaining a sample of 108 leaders and 546 employees. The results indicate that coworkers’ perceptions of other employees’ i-deals (CPOEID) can provoke either malicious envy, which can lead to negative workplace gossip, or benign envy, which encourages feedback seeking. Developmental HRM practices not only lessen the positive effect of CPOEID on malicious and benign envy but also reduce the indirect effect of CPOEID on negative workplace gossip and feedback-seeking through malicious or benign envy. Our study, which applies social comparison theory, examines the double-edged effects of differentiated HRM practices on coworker interactive behavior. Additionally, our findings demonstrate the complementarity between differentiated and standardized HRM practices. Full article

The essence of knowledge management involves the personalized management of talented employees who possess tacit knowledge. Unfortunately, non-standardized practices can lead to negative knowledge behaviors among coworkers, which can hamper beneficial knowledge interactions. This study aims to explore the underlying mechanism of idiosyncratic deals (i-deals) on knowledge hiding from the bystander perspective. We conducted a two-wave on-site survey of 321 knowledge-based employees in Kunshan Industrial Park, China. During the first wave, employees provided information regarding their perceptions of others’ i-deals and ethical leadership. Two weeks later, employees reported their effort–reward imbalance (ERI), psychological distress, and knowledge hiding behaviors. To test our hypothesis, we used a hierarchical regression analysis with SPSS 26.0 and a path analysis with Mplus 7.4. The results indicate that (a) coworkers’ perceptions of other employees’ idiosyncratic deals (CPOEID) have an indirect effect on knowledge hiding via ERI and psychological distress; (b) ERI and psychological distress serially mediate the relationship between CPOEID and knowledge hiding; and (c) ethical leadership not only reduces the positive effect of CPOEID on ERI but also weakens the serial mediation effects of ERI and psychological distress between CPOEID and knowledge hiding. Our investigation, by using a cognitive-emotional processing system framework, provides a new theoretical perspective on the potential dysfunctionality of differentiated human resource management practices. Furthermore, our findings offer evidence for the compatibility of leadership and policy factors, as ethical leadership lessens the destructive effects of management practices. Full article

Corporate ethics is an important part of corporate sustainable development. Sustainability is not only about the environment but also about the well-being of employees, including job satisfaction (JS), the Psychological contract (PC), etc. Among them, to organize relationships with other stakeholders, the unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB) of employees not only damages the corporate image and reputation but even threatens the sustainable development of the enterprise. In this context, the influencing factors that induce UPB should be analyzed and considered. Based on social exchange theory and social cognitive theory, this research explores how idiosyncratic deals (I-deals) affect employees’ intention to perform UPB through the PC and JS from the viewpoint of employee-organization relationships, and the moderating role of environmental turbulence in it. The research sample was drawn from 377 employees working in China, manufacturing companies. The questionnaire was distributed at two time points. In the first questionnaire, the employees who participated in the survey answered information such as idiosyncratic deals, the PC, JS and environmental turbulence (ET). After 1 month, employees responded to UPB messages. The research hypotheses were tested analytically using SPSS 23.0 and Amos 23.0. The survey showed that I-deals had a beneficial impact on UPB. The psychological contract and JS also mediated the influence on I-deals on UPB. The positive relationship between I-deals and UPB through the chain mediated effect of PC and JS. Moreover, ET positively moderates the relationship between I-deals and UPB, the higher the ET, the stronger the relationship between I-deals and UPB. Conversely, the lower. Full article

In Sweden, local municipalities, working in collaboration with the police, are assigned an important role in community-based crime prevention and the promotion of safer neighbourhoods/cities. The strategies adopted are supposed to be informed by the policies of national advisory bodies, which emphasize surveying the current situation, problem analyses, systematic planning of interventions and evaluation of efforts. This paper reports on a three-year research project that studied local crime prevention/safer community practices in four so-called ‘particularly vulnerable areas’ (PVAs) using meeting observations and stakeholder interviews. The analysis shows that when constructing intervention strategies, the actors involved had to navigate between different organizational logics and found it difficult to demarcate a suitable object for joint efforts. When they were able to find an object to be targeted, such as youth at risk of drug abuse or low-level criminality, they could rely on a collective mindset, but they struggled in situations where a joint effort was not possible, such as when dealing with the risk of aggravated violence or when the operations got close to more organized crime—both elements that form part of the definition of PVAs. This failure may partly be explained by competing logics dominated by idiosyncratic action in line with bureaucratic rules and routines. This finding raises questions about a putative but non-articulated limit to crime prevention and whether a predetermined approach aligns with the prescribed sequence of survey, analysis, intervention planning and evaluation when faced with more brutish violence. Full article

Recent studies have shown that people make more utilitarian decisions when dealing with a moral dilemma in a foreign language than in their native language. Emotion, cognitive load, and psychological distance have been put forward as explanations for this foreign language effect. The question that arises is whether a similar effect would be observed when processing a dilemma in one’s own language but spoken by a foreign-accented speaker. Indeed, foreign-accented speech has been shown to modulate emotion processing, to disrupt processing fluency and to increase psychological distance due to social categorisation. We tested this hypothesis by presenting 435 participants with two moral dilemmas, the trolley dilemma and the footbridge dilemma online, either in a native accent or a foreign accent. In Experiment 1, 184 native Spanish speakers listened to the dilemmas in Spanish recorded by a native speaker, a British English or a Cameroonian native speaker. In Experiment 2, 251 Dutch native speakers listened to the dilemmas in Dutch in their native accent, in a British English, a Turkish, or in a French accent. Results showed an increase in utilitarian decisions for the Cameroonian- and French-accented speech compared to the Spanish or Dutch native accent, respectively. When collapsing all the speakers from the two experiments, a similar increase in the foreign accent condition compared with the native accent condition was observed. This study is the first demonstration of a foreign accent effect on moral judgements, and despite the variability in the effect across accents, the findings suggest that a foreign accent, like a foreign language, is a linguistic context that modulates (neuro)cognitive mechanisms, and consequently, impacts our behaviour. More research is needed to follow up on this exploratory study and to understand the influence of factors such as emotion reduction, cognitive load, psychological distance, and speaker’s idiosyncratic features on moral judgments. Full article

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the economic market and labor contexts worldwide. Brazil has suffered one of the worst social and governmental managements of the COVID-19 crisis, forcing workers and organizations to develop coping strategies. This environment can affect both well-being and performance at work. Sustainable well-being at work refers to different patterns of relationships between performance and well-being. It may include eudaimonic (e.g., Meaning of Work—MOW) or hedonic (e.g., emotions) forms of well-being. This study tests the moderating role of recovery from work stress in the relationship between flexibility i-deals and patterns of sustainable well-being at work in Brazilian teleworkers. We relied on two studies to achieve this objective. In Study 1, conducted during the pandemic’s first outbreak in Brazil (N = 386), recovery experiences moderated the relationship between i-deals and clusters formed by performance and MOW (eudaimonic happiness). In Study 2, conducted during the second outbreak (N = 281), we identified relationships between clusters of emotions (hedonic happiness) and MOW (eudaimonic) with performance. The results supported the idea that recovery experiences moderated the relationship between i-deals and patterns of sustainable well-being at work differently. Our findings have implications for Human Resource Management and teleworkers, especially for employee behaviors to deal with stress. Full article

Traditional Human Resource Management (HRM) focusing on maintaining the status quo is no longer in the spotlight. Sustainable HRM has become the new approach, emphasizing the need to attend to organizational results directed toward reaching different goals and integrating the needs of diverse stakeholders. Moreover, in response to the challenges that organizations face in volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environments, Human Resource (HR) practices can contribute to the development of idiosyncratic deals (negotiation of individual HR practices) that might facilitate employees’ creativity and eudaimonic well-being in the long term and, thus, the sustainability of these organizations. Thus, the aim of this study is to test the mediating role of idiosyncratic deals (i-deals) in the unfolding relationship between HR practices, eudaimonic well-being and creative performance. Using a longitudinal database (three waves), the hypotheses are tested using structural equations modeling. The results support the idea that HR practices function as an antecedent for i-deals. More specifically, i-deals fully mediate the relationship between HR practices and eudaimonic well-being. In turn, i-deals and eudaimonic well-being fully mediate the relationship between HR practices and creative performance, which suggests that, through i-deals, HR practices become more beneficial for both employees and employers. In conclusion, these results are important for sustainable HR development, because HR practices enhance i-deals, which increase well-being, enhancing performance in the long term. Full article

Complementing the traditional focus in work design on “top-down” organizational interventions, research into proactive work behavior suggests that “bottom-up” processes, based on the “micro-emancipatory” actions employees engage in, create more rewarding and meaningful work experiences. Based on current theorizing, this study tests a tripartite model of task self-redesign and positive work-related states of meaning, affective commitment, and work–home enrichment. The interactive effects of three modes of task influence are postulated: (a) the active use of existing potentials for task autonomy; (b) job crafting, as unauthorized and self-organized modifications of task features; (c) the individual renegotiation of tasks through idiosyncratic deals (i-deals) with superiors. Survey data from an occupationally heterogeneous convenience sample of N = 279 German-speaking employees were analyzed, using confirmatory factor analysis and moderated linear regression. The regression results confirmed that task i-deals consistently related to positive experiences, whereas autonomy only related to one, and task crafting had no significant main effect. A significant two-way interaction between i-deals and crafting was found only in relation to affective commitment. Supporting the suggested tripartite model, significant (synergistic) three-way interactions explained the additional variance in all three examined outcomes. These results offer some preliminary insights into the interplay of organizationally designed, individually crafted, and interpersonally negotiated work activities. Task autonomy, task-directed job crafting, and task i-deals appear to fulfill complementary roles in the self-directed creation of positive work experiences. Methodological limitations and further research needs are discussed. Full article

This paper provides an overview of a time-varying Structural Panel Bayesian Vector Autoregression model that deals with model misspecification and unobserved heterogeneity problems in applied macroeconomic analyses when studying time-varying relationships and dynamic interdependencies among countries and variables. I discuss what its distinctive features are, what it is used for, and how it can be analytically derived. I also describe how it is estimated and how structural spillovers and shock identification are performed. The model is empirically applied to a set of developed European economies to illustrate the functioning and the ability of the model. The paper also discusses more recent studies that have used multivariate dynamic macro-panels to evaluate idiosyncratic business cycles, policy-making, and spillover effects among different sectors and countries. Full article

This study deals with the landscape evolution reflected in the changes of land cover in the suburban area of Marathon, Attica, Greece. The study was based on remote sensing images covering the time period between 1945 and 2007. Several other types of data were also used, such as a digital terrain model, historical orthophotos, vegetation maps, geological maps, cadastral maps and aerial photos. These types of data were used in order to create the spatial database for the classification/interpretation of land cover and to identify the land cover changes that occurred during the period in question. The results of this study showed significant land cover changes, especially for the land covered by forests and wetlands with a 47% and a 37% decrease, respectively. The spatial arrangement of the development of residential areas was partially predictable, while the occurrence of land cover changes due to retrogressive vegetation succession appeared rather idiosyncratically throughout the area initially covered by forest. Full article