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The ubiquity of smartphones has changed how people communicate, work and entertain. In view of conservation of resources theory and the positive spillover effect, this study explores the effect of non-work-related instant messaging (IM) in the workplace on daily task performance.

The authors use the experience sampling method to collect day-level data from 75 employees over a period of 10 workdays. Multilevel path analysis is used to test the hypotheses.

Non-work-related IM exerts a significant negative indirect effect on daily task performance through diminished cognitive engagement. This negative indirect effect disappears when social support is high, thereby showing the function of social support as a neutralizer of the detriment of non-work-related IM on daily task performance.

The findings suggest that organizations can neutralize the harm of non-work-related IM in the workplace by promoting social support perceived by employees.

This study advances the technology and management literature by developing and testing a balanced perspective on the ambivalent effect of workplace smartphone use that considers social and cognitive resource implications.

The purpose of this paper is to integrate job demands–resources theory and the episodic process model to examine the relationships between episodic cognitive mechanisms (i.e. cognitive interference and attentional pull), work engagement and performance. It is hypothesized that an episode characterized by less cognitive interference and more attentional pull (i.e. attraction toward the work activity) is associated with the highest levels of work engagement and job performance. Additionally, it is hypothesized that episodic challenge/hindrance job demands boost/diminish the positive relationship between episodic job resources and work engagement.

Using experience sampling methodology, 48 employees used their smartphones to complete surveys three times a day for one week, resulting in 266 observations.

Results of multilevel analyses suggest that episodic hindrance job demands (but not challenge job demands) moderate the positive relation between job resources and work engagement.

This study is unique in that it captures fluctuating cognitive processes (i.e. attentional pull and cognitive interference) that take place during work activities.

Research has largely shown that supervisors' negative emotions lead to subordinates' negative emotions and detrimental work outcomes, but recent studies are showing that supervisor negative emotions may yield both negative and positive subordinate behaviours. Drawing on the work–home resources model, this research sought to unpack the interpersonal, cross-domain effects of supervisor negative emotions on subordinate cognitive work engagement and family undermining through subordinate perceived leader effectiveness and self-efficacy to manage work and life.

To test the relationships, confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modelling were conducted on time-lagged dyadic data collected from 372 supervisor–subordinate pairs.

Results revealed that supervisor negative emotions led to higher levels of subordinate cognitive work engagement and family undermining.

Supervisor negative emotions had unintended consequences on subordinates' work and family outcomes – they enhanced subordinates' cognitive work engagement (positive work outcome) but also increased subordinates' family undermining (negative family outcome). Future studies could benefit from a diary study with a within-subject design since emotions are known to fluctuate in a day.

This research provides supervisors with insights about the consequences of their negative emotions on their subordinates, calls upon organisations to provide cognitive regulation training, and encourages subordinates to develop self-efficacy in managing their work and life.

This study is among the first to incorporate self-efficacy to manage work and life as a personal resource and subordinate family undermining as an outcome of supervisor negative emotions, which enhances understanding of the resource allocation and loss processes between supervisors and subordinates.

This study investigates how attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in entrepreneurs functions through coping schema to affect entrepreneurship-related cognitions. It is proposed that the resource-induced coping heuristic (RICH) bridges the conceptual gap between pathological cognitive executive control/reward attributes and cognitive resources, specifically entrepreneurial alertness, cognitive adaptability and entrepreneurial intent.

With data from 581 entrepreneurs, this study utilizes partial least squares structural equation modeling for analysis. Additionally, a two-stage hierarchical component modeling approach was used to estimate latent variable scores for higher-order constructs.

Findings indicate the RICH mediates the relationships ADHD has with alertness, cognitive adaptability and entrepreneurial intent.

The RICH is introduced as a mechanism to explain how ADHD indirectly influences entrepreneurial alertness, cognitive adaptability and entrepreneurial intent.

Attentive to task-related information is the prerequisite for task completion. Comparing the cognition between attentive readers (AR) and inattentive readers (IAR) is of great value for improving reading services which has seldom been studied. To explore their cognitive differences, this study investigates the effectiveness, efficiency and cognitive resource allocation strategy by eye-tracking technology.

A controlled user study of two types of task, fact-finding (FF) and content understanding (CU) tasks was conducted to collect data including answer for task, fixation duration (FD), fixation count (FC), fixation duration proportion (FDP), and fixation count proportion (FCP). 24 participants were placed into AR or IAR group according to their fixation duration on paragraphs related to task.

Two types of cognitive resource allocation strategies, question-oriented (QO) and navigation-assistant (NA) were identified according to the differences in FDP and FCP. In FF task, although QO strategy was applied by the two groups, AR group was significantly more effective and efficient. In CU task, although the two groups were similar in effectiveness and efficiency, AR group promoted their strategies to NA while IAR group sticked to applying QO strategy. Furthermore, an interesting phenomenon “win by uncertainty”, which implies IAR group may get correct answer through uncertain means, such as clue, domain knowledge or guess, rather than task-related information, was observed.

This study takes a deep insight into cognition from the prospect of attentive and inattentive to task-related information. Identifying indicators about cognition helps to distinguish attentive and inattentive readers in various tasks automatically. The cognitive resource allocation strategy applied by readers sheds new light on reading skill training. A typical reading phenomenon “win by uncertainty” was found and defined. Understanding the phenomenon is of great value for satisfying reader information need and enhancing their deep learning.

The authors contribute to the literature by contrasting the cognitive with a contextual view on learning and development to address preconceptions about aging in order to broaden employers’ views on learning and performance across the working life and careers of their employees. The authors furthermore identify a number of opportunities that exist to support and sustain learning capability and performance in older workers. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The authors conducted a selective literature search to identify literature that best exemplifies both the cognitive and contextual view.

Age-related declines in performance are observed on very specific and limited tasks, unlikely to be encountered in the workplace. Due to its focus on assessing limits and age differences, such studies will not normally take experience, job and personal resources into account – these are more likely to be present in the workplace. The authors find that much of the more applied evidence suggests older workers can perform at a similar level to their younger colleagues – when the workplace or training context does not restrain them from using their own strategies and resources to complete tasks.

The current overview of research that is more representative of the more cognitive view outlines a number of issues regarding the transferability as well as generalisability of these well publicised findings. Many of the laboratory-based cognitive ageing research focuses on “testing the limits” of cognitive processing and efficiency. This paradigm is not compatible with the specific tasks and learning that takes place in the workplace, which led us to a more contextual view.

The authors provide several starting points for broader and more inclusive training and development, particularly the role of supervisory practices, climate, self-efficacy and learning competency, resources and strategies.

Taking a more contextual view may foster a re-evaluation of how inclusive current managerial practice, policies and current development initiatives are. Distinguishing job and personal resources can help in identifying the aspects that can be influenced by workers themselves and those aspects that are the primary responsibility of organisations and their managers.

This study aims to explore how different involvement levels within a single television program influence recall of cognitive vs affective advertisements aired during that television program.

Two studies of 2 (program involvement: high vs low) × 2 (advertisement involvement: cognitive vs affective) between subject design were conducted; one study was for cognitive program and other study was for affective program. Existing scales were used after conducting reliability and validity tests.

The influence of different levels of involvement with a television program on recall of cognitive and affective advertisements was found. Specifically, recall of cognitive advertisement was found to be higher when involvement with television program is low than when involvement with program is high. Recall of affective advertisement was found to be lower when involvement with program is low than when involvement with program is high.

Results indicate that cognitive advertisements are recalled more at point of low involvement with program, whereas affective advertisements are recalled at point of high involvement with program. The implications are in the field of understanding and making advertisement airing decisions.

When the television program progresses, the story tends to build, and hence, the involvement increases. Therefore, involvement level with the program at initial point and later point can vary. This study identified the possibility of cognitive advertisement being recalled more at initial point of a television program, i.e. at low involvement, and affective advertisement being recalled more at the later point of the same television program, i.e. at high involvement.

As they say, “Change is the only constant.” Thriving and surviving during a period of extraordinary collision of technological advances, globalization, and climate change can be daunting. At any given point in one’s life, a transition can be interpreted in terms of the magnitude of change (how big or small) and the individual’s ontological experience of change (whether it disrupts an equilibrium or adapts an emergent way of life). These four quadrants represent different ways to live in a highly dynamic and complex world. We share the resulting four-quadrant framework from a quantitative and a mixed methods study to examine responses to various ways we respond to transitions. Contingent upon these two dimensions, one can use a four-quadrant framework to mobilize resources to design a response and hypothesize a desired outcome. Individuals may find themselves at various junctions of these quadrants over a lifespan. These four quadrants provide “requisite variety” to navigate individual ontology as they move into and out of fluid spaces we often call instability during a time of transition. In this chapter, we identified social, cognitive, psychological, and behavioral factors that contribute to thriving transition experiences, embracing dynamic stability. Two new constructs were developed, the first measures the receptivity to change, Transformation Quotient (TQ) and second measures the range of responses to transitions from surviving to thriving, Thriving Transitional Experiences (TTE). We hope our work will pave the way for Thriving to become a “normal” outcome of experiencing change by transforming the lexicon and expectation of engaging with transitions.

Education depends on high-quality teachers who are committed to professional development and do not get burned out. The purpose of this paper was to investigate how job demands and resources can affect the health and cognitive development of teachers using the Demand-Induced Strain Compensation model.

A cross-sectional sample of 120 teachers in vocational education was used to investigate the proposed relationships and hypotheses with Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression method.

In terms of teacher health and development, significant main effects were found for several predictors. Autonomy was significantly and negatively related to emotional exhaustion. Autonomy, emotional supervisor and colleague support were significantly and positively related to teachers’ development. However, little support was found for matching hypotheses, suggesting that matching demands and resources do not offer more explanatory power for occupation outcomes than other types of interaction effects.

More powerful analyses techniques like structural equation modeling could be used in future research with a larger sample size. A second limitation is common method variance.

Schools in vocational education should provide sufficient job resources, such as autonomy and emotional support, but possibly also put a limit on teacher task variety.

Job demands and resources have until now mainly been related to negative outcomes such as poor health and ill-being, while the relationship with learning has also been hypothesized and is therefore meaningful to examine. In addition, it was investigated whether interaction effects of matching demands and resources, better explain these outcomes.