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The purpose of this study is to clarify why business travel has ambivalent effects on occupational well-being. We examine associations between business travel, career satisfaction and turnover intentions, as well as the mediating role of functional and dysfunctional coping strategies.

We collected four waves of data across three months from 676 employees (n = 147 business travelers who traveled for work at least once during the study period; n = 529 non-travelers) working in various industries and managerial positions.

Consistent with expectations, the greater the extent of business travel, the higher both career satisfaction (mediated by higher emotional and instrumental support, positive reframing, and substance use, and lower venting and self-distraction, denial and self-blame, and behavioral disengagement) and turnover intentions (mediated by higher active coping and planning, venting and self-distraction, behavioral disengagement, and lower positive reframing).

Findings reveal that business travel presents an ambivalent psychological experience and point to the importance of obtaining and using a coping portfolio in this context.

This study addresses functional and dysfunctional coping as unexplored mediating mechanisms between business travel, career satisfaction, and turnover intentions and provides new insights for research and practice on business travel.

The concept of workforce agility has become increasingly popular in recent years. However, defining it has sparked much discussion and ambiguity. Recognizing this ambiguity, this paper aims to inductively develop a behavioral taxonomy of workforce agility.

The authors interviewed 36 experts in the field of agility and used concept mapping and the critical incident technique to create a behavioral taxonomy.

The authors identified a behavioral taxonomy consisting of ten dimensions: (1) accepting changes, (2) decision making, (3) creating transparency, (4) collaboration, (5) reflection, (6) user centricity, (7) iteration, (8) testing, (9) self-organization, and (10) learning.

The authors’ research contributes to the literature in that it offers an inductively developed behavioral taxonomy of workforce agility with ten dimensions. It further adds to the literature by tying the notion of workforce agility to the performance literature.

The authors’ results suggest that it might be beneficial for companies to take all workforce agility dimensions into account when creating an agile culture, starting agile projects, integrating agility into hiring decisions or evaluating employee performance.

This paper uses an inductive approach to define workforce agility as a set of behavioral dimensions, integrating the scientific as well as the practitioner literature on agility.

As the workforce is aging and becoming increasingly age diverse, successful aging at work has been proclaimed to be a desirable process and outcome, as well as a responsibility of both workers and their organizations. In this chapter, we first review, compare, and critique theoretical frameworks of successful aging developed in the gerontology and lifespan developmental literatures, including activity, disengagement, and continuity theories; Rowe and Kahn’s model; the resource approach; the model of selective optimization with compensation; the model of assimilative and accommodative coping; the motivational theory of lifespan development; socioemotional selectivity theory; and the strength and vulnerability integration model. Subsequently, we review and critically compare three conceptualizations of successful aging at work developed in the organizational literature. We conclude the chapter by outlining implications for future research on successful aging at work.

We develop a conceptual model, based on person-environment fit theory, which explains how employee age affects occupational strain and well-being. We begin by explaining how age directly affects different dimensions of objective and subjective P-E fit. Next, we illustrate how age can moderate the relationship between objective P-E fit and subjective P-E fit. Third, we discuss how age can moderate the relationships between P-E fit, on one hand, and occupational strain and well-being on the other. Fourth, we explain how age can impact occupational strain and well-being directly independent of P-E fit. The chapter concludes with implications for future research and practice.

In the context of demographic and economic changes, helping mature age job seekers find employment is imperative. The purpose of this paper is to examine mature age job seekers’ proactive personality as a moderator of the relationship between age and job search intensity; and to examine job search self-efficacy as a mediator of this moderation effect. It was hypothesized that the generally negative relationships between age and job search self-efficacy and intensity are weaker among job seekers with a more proactive personality.

In total, 188 job seekers between 40 and 64 years completed an online questionnaire. Data were analyzed using structural equation modeling.

Consistent with previous research, age was negatively related to job search intensity. Proactive personality was positively related to job search intensity and moderated the relationship between age and job search intensity. Extending previous research, proactive personality also positively predicted job search self-efficacy and moderated the relationship between age and job search self-efficacy which, in turn, positively predicted job search intensity.

Potential limitations of the study include the cross-sectional design, sample selectivity, and the omission of possibly important control variables.

Practitioners, organizations, and societies concerned with helping mature age job seekers find employment could provide additional support to those with a less proactive personality and low job search self-efficacy.

This study extends previous research by showing that mature age job seekers’ job search self-efficacy mediates the moderating effect of proactive personality on the relationship between age and job search intensity.

In many countries, both the number of older people in need of care and the number of employed caregivers of elderly relatives will increase over the next decades. The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which perceived organizational, supervisor, and coworker support for eldercare reduce employed caregivers’ strain and weaken the relationship between eldercare demands and strain.

Survey data were collected from 100 employed caregivers from one organization.

Results showed that eldercare demands were positively related to strain, and perceived organizational eldercare support (POES) was negatively related to strain. In addition, high POES weakened the relationship between eldercare demands and strain.

The cross-sectional design and use of self-report scales constitute limitations of the study.

POES is a resource for employed caregivers, especially when their eldercare demands are high.

This research highlights the relative importance of different forms of perceived support for reducing employed caregivers’ strain and weakening the relationship between eldercare demands and strain.

Researchers in the field of occupational stress and well-being are increasingly interested in the role of emotion regulation in the work context. Emotion regulation has also been widely investigated in the area of lifespan developmental psychology, with findings indicating that the ability to modify one’s emotions represents a domain in which age-related growth is possible. In this chapter, we integrate the literatures on aging, emotion regulation, and occupational stress and well-being. To this end, we review key theories and empirical findings in each of these areas, summarize existing research on age, emotion regulation, and stress and well-being at work, and develop a conceptual model on how aging affects emotion regulation and the stress process in work settings to guide future research. According to the model, age will affect (1) what kinds of affective work events are encountered and how often, (2) the appraisal of and initial emotional response to affective work events (emotion generation), and (3) the management of emotions and coping with affective work events (emotion regulation). The model has implications for researchers and practitioners who want to understand and facilitate successful emotion regulation and stress reduction in the workplace among different age groups.

In this chapter, the authors consider the role of time for research in occupational stress and well-being. First, temporal issues in studying occupational health longitudinally, focusing in particular on the role of time lags and their implications for observed results (e.g., effect detectability), analyses (e.g., handling unequal durations between measurement occasions), and interpretation (e.g., result generalizability, theoretical revision) were discussed. Then, time-based assumptions when modeling lagged effects in occupational health research, providing a focused review of how research has handled (or ignored) these assumptions in the past, and the relative benefits and drawbacks of these approaches were discussed. Finally, recommendations for readers, an accessible tutorial (including example data and code), and discussion of a new structural equation modeling technique, continuous time structural equation modeling, that can “handle” time in longitudinal studies of occupational health were provided.

The purpose of this paper is to report the first empirical test of the recently proposed ambidexterity theory of leadership for innovation (Rosing et al., 2011). This theory proposes that the interaction between two complementary leadership behaviors – opening and closing – predicts team innovation, such that team innovation is highest when both opening and closing leadership behaviors are high.

Multi-source survey data came from 33 team leaders of architectural and interior design firms and 90 of their employees.

Results supported the interaction hypothesis, even after controlling for leaders’ transformational leadership behavior and general team success.

The relatively small sample size and the cross-sectional design are potential limitations of the study. The findings provide initial support for the central hypothesis of the ambidexterity theory of leadership for innovation.

The results suggest that organizations could train team leaders’ ambidextrous leadership behaviors to increase team innovation.

Identifying ways to facilitate organizational innovation is important, as it contributes to employment and company growth as well as individual and societal well-being.

This multi-source study contributes to the literatures on leadership and innovation in organizations by showing that ambidextrous leadership behaviors predict team innovation above and beyond transformational leadership behavior.