The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of vagal tone on performance during executive and non-executive tasks, using a working memory and a sustained attention test. Reactivity to cognitive tasks was also investigated using heart rate (HR) and heart rate variability (HRV). Fifty-three male sailors from the Royal Norwegian Navy participated in this study. Inter-beat-intervals were recorded continuously for 5 min...

Humans expect positive events in the future even when there is no evidence to support such expectations. For example, people expect to live longer and be healthier than average1, they underestimate their likelihood of getting a divorce1, and overestimate their prospects for success on the job market2. We examined how the brain generates this pervasive optimism bias. Here we report that this tendency was related...

The investigation of virtues in organizational life has been neglected. Systematic studies of the development and demonstration of virtue have been all but absent in the organizational sciences. This article highlights the potential impact of virtues in organizations, particularly the power of forgiveness to affect individual and collective outcomes. Under conditions of organizational injury and trauma, such as when organizations downsize, leaders have an especially...

A longitudinal study of 308 white-collar U.S. employees revealed that feelings of hope and gratitude increase concern for corporate social responsibility (CSR). In particular, employees with stronger hope and gratitude were found to have a greater sense of responsibility toward employee and societal issues; interestingly, employee hope and gratitude did not affect sense of responsibility toward economic and safety/quality issues. These findings offer an extension...

Research on burnout has considered client interactions solely as depleting, with work recovery possible only while employees are off the job. Drawing on an episodic perspective of work, I argue that there is unaccounted for variability in the nature of a caregiver's client interactions such that some are actually restorative rather than depleting. I outline the foundations of such variability through simultaneous consideration of the...

Scholars have identified benefits of viewing work as a calling, but little research has explored the notion that people are frequently unable to work in occupations that answer their callings. To develop propositions on how individuals experience and pursue unanswered callings, we conducted a qualitative study based on interviews with 31 employees across a variety of occupations. We distinguish between two types of unanswered callings—missed...

In this study we conducted performance assessments in 62 childcare centers and surveyed 232 teachers and aides, to examine the extent to which workers crafted their jobs and how such crafting affected classroom quality. Results show that individual and collaborative job crafting are distinct constructs; work discretion is related to both; and collaborative crafting is positively related to performance, particularly for less experienced teachers. Further,...

We developed and validated a scale to measure job crafting behavior in three separate studies conducted in The Netherlands (total N = 1181). Job crafting is defined as the self-initiated changes that employees make in their own job demands and job resources to attain and/or optimize their personal (work) goals. In Study 1 and 2 the Dutch job crafting scale (JCS) was developed and tested for its...

As the organizational literature on specific proactive behaviors grows, researchers have noted inefficiencies and redundancies in the separate study of different proactive behaviors when their underlying nature, antecedents, processes, and consequences may be similar. We develop a framework designed to generalize across specific manifestations of proactivity, describing the nature, dimensions, situational antecedents, psychological mechanisms, dispositional moderators, and consequences of proactive behavior. We conclude by discussing...

We utilize a qualitative study of 33 employees in for‐profit and non‐profit organizations to elaborate theory on job crafting. We specifically focus on how employees at different ranks describe perceiving and adapting to challenges in the execution of job crafting. Elaborating the challenges employees perceive in job crafting and their responses to them details the adaptive action that may be necessary for job crafting to...