Stephan Alexander Böhm

In the digital era, the prevalent integration of new technologies in work processes gives rise to employees’ perceptions of technological insecurity. Such technology-induced strain poses new challenges to occupational health and safety and needs to be better understood in order to be prevented. Based on Conservation of Resources (COR) theory, we investigate to which extent the negative effect of technological insecurity on perceived health depends upon the availability of non-technology-related resources in the workplace. Specifically, we argue that employees who experience two key organizational resources, i.e. organizational support for strengths use and friendship opportunities, are better suited to cope with these modern forms of strain. We hypothesize that those resources reinforce each other in such way that employees’ coping capabilities rise and health issues decrease. For hypothesis testing, time-lagged hierarchical moderated regression analysis is conducted. The study sample consists of 8019 German employees. Results support our assumption that accumulating resources create an intensified buffering effect, which surpasses the additive buffering effects of individual resources. Under the condition of high support for strengths use and high friendship opportunities, technological insecurity does no longer show a negative relationship with employees’ time-lagged health. By using post-stratification weights, these results apply to 33.3 million employees in Germany having access to Information and Communication Technologies.

This paper introduces a multilevel perspective on the relationships of idiosyncratic deals (i-deals) with organizational outcomes (i.e., client satisfaction) and investigates how and under which conditions these relationships manifest. On the basis of contagion theory, we proposed that the positive effects of i-deals will spill over within organizational units (indicated by reduced emotional exhaustion and enhanced collective commitment), which leads to increased customer satisfaction. Moreover, we postulated that the effects of i-deals would be more prominent in units with high age diversity, as i-deals are more important in units where people’s work-related needs are more heterogeneous due to the higher diversity in employee age. A study among 19,780 employees and 17,500 clients of a German public service organization showed support for the contagion model and that i-deals were negatively related to individual emotional exhaustion and subsequently positively related to collective commitment within units and Client satisfaction measured 6 months later. Emotional exhaustion and collective commitment mediated the relationships between i-deals and client satisfaction. Finally, we found that the relationships between i-deals and emotional exhaustion / client satisfaction were more strongly negative in units with high age diversity, rather than in units with low age diversity, indicating the benefits of i-deals within units with high age diversity to reduce emotional exhaustion and enhance client satisfaction.

By modifying the work environments, work routines, and work tasks of employees with health restrictions, organizations can effectively help them continue to perform their jobs successfully. As such, job accommodations are an effective tool to secure the continued employment of aging workers who develop disabilities across their life span. However, while accommodations tackle health-related performance problems, they might create new challenges on the part of the affected employee. Building on the organizational change and accommodations literatures, we propose a theoretical framework of negative experiences during accommodation processes and apply it to qualitative data from group interviews with 73 manufacturing workers at a German industrial company who were part of the company’s job accommodation program. Although problems associated with health-related impairments were mostly solved by accommodation, affected employees with disabilities reported about interpersonal problems and conflicts similar to those that typically occur during organizational change. Lack of social support as well as poor communication and information were raised as criticisms. Furthermore, our findings indicate that discrimination, bullying, and maltreatment appear to be common during accommodation processes. To make accommodation processes more successful, we derive recommendations from the organizational change literature and apply it to the accommodation context. We also emphasize unique characteristics of the accommodation setting and translate these into practical implications.

Growing workforce diversity increases the likelihood that supervisors and subordinates will differ along demographic lines, a situation that has important implications for their relationship quality and individual outcomes. In a sample of 1,253 employees from 54 work-units, we investigate the effects of differences in disability status between supervisors and subordinates on leader-member-exchange (LMX) quality and subsequent performance ratings, and find that incongruence in general is related to lower LMX quality and lower performance. In addition, we propose and find an asymmetrical effect of disability incongruence, such that LMX quality is worse in dyads in which the supervisor has a disability than in dyads in which the subordinate has a disability. Furthermore, we investigate the moderating role of unit-level climate for inclusion on this relationship and find support for a buffering effect of inclusive climates on the negative incongruence-LMX relationship for scenarios in which the supervisor, but not the subordinate, has a disability. We build relevant theory for the relational demography, disability, LMX, and organizational climate literatures by predicting these effects on the basis of status mechanisms. These findings have important practical implications, as they provide companies with a feasible way to manage their diverse workforce.

With the present study, we aim to advance the understanding of the role of leadership in the vocational inclusion of employees with disabilities. We argue that transformational leadership can be an important approach that fits particularly the requirements of people with disabilities because it positively influences their self-concept and consequentially heightens their job performance while it prevents emotional exhaustion. Applying a mixed-methods approach, both qualitative interview and quantitative survey data from employees of an Israeli call center were gathered and analyzed. The interview results indicated that all facets of transformational leadership could be observed in the present context. Moreover, it provides evidence for the assumption that a lack of self-esteem is a key problem with which employees with disabilities deal in daily work. The survey results support the view that transformational leadership can enhance employees' organization-based self-esteem and prevent their emotional exhaustion, thereby also affecting job performance. Theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed.