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This chapter explores a common, but typically overlooked urban practice: smoking outside the workplace. This activity is analysed as an attempt to create marginal spaces of brief retreat from the acceleration and agitation of the workplace. By talking to smokers about what drives them into the street, and capturing smokers photographically, we discover that these people are seeking moments of breakaway from the dominating involvement of the commercial city. The practices we observe in this chapter are typical of what Erving Goffman refers to as ‘away’ activities: strategies for briefly escaping from the absorption of all-consuming social situations. We conclude by asking whether these urban pauses could be stretched to a point where they challenge the compulsion of the overwrought rhythmic order of the capitalist city.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of employees’ trait rumination on the variability of their state rumination and the continuing influence on their negative affect at home.

A time-lagged experience sampling method was used for the data collection from full-time employees in the hotel industry. The hypotheses were tested with multilevel modeling using a random coefficient modeling approach.

Hotel employees who are high in trait rumination generally show high levels of state rumination and greater within-person variability in state rumination over time. Additionally, the negative effects of workplace state rumination can last until employees come home and the next day before going to work. Furthermore, employees who are high in trait rumination are more likely to be influenced by state rumination, as they experience more negative affect after arriving home.

Rumination has been shown to decrease hotel employee overall well-being. The findings of this study provide suggestions for remedial measures that can be taken by hotel organizations to help employees address ruminative thinking.

Drawing on response styles and work/family border theories, this study contributes to the rumination literature by considering both trait rumination and state rumination in a broader context. For a comprehensive understanding of the dynamic temporal characteristics of state rumination, this study considers the net intraindividual variability of state rumination as the outcome of trait rumination.

Within the theoretical frameworks of conservation of resources and job demands-resources (JD-R), the study aims to examine how sleep deficit could be negatively related to creativity at work by depleting critical resources of creativity.

The survey data were collected from 368 individuals nested in 40 teams at a call center. The authors conducted multilevel analysis to test the proposed hypotheses to account for the hierarchical nature of the data while simultaneously estimating the effect of predictors at different levels on individual-level outcomes and maintaining the predictors' level of analysis.

Through the data, the study presents how the depletion of resource, that is, emotional exhaustion, functions as a mediating mechanism that connects sleep deficit to creativity at work. Further, the study presents that higher job demands can worsen the negative effects of resource depletion on creativity at work because they further deplete resources needed for creative behaviors. Specifically, when sleep-deprived, those working in a high-task-interdependence climate are likely to experience emotional exhaustion more severely than do those in a low-task-interdependence climate. Also, the relationship between emotional exhaustion and creativity is more negative for managers than for non-managers because of managers' higher job demands.

By presenting sleep deficit-linked inhibitors of creativity at work, the authors highlight the importance of securing sufficient sleep and affective resources when designing jobs and HR practices in organizations.

This paper addresses the call for attention to examining the mechanisms through which sleep deficit affects employee creative behavior.

The purpose of this study was to examine a moderated mediation model of job dissatisfaction and workplace social support in the relationship between work–life conflict and turnover intentions.

Data were collected in a cross-sectional survey of 220 police investigation officers. Partial least squares structural equation modeling was applied for data analysis.

Empirical findings of study indicate that work–life conflict enhances employee turnover intentions by creating job dissatisfaction. However, workplace social support buffers this effect and reduces turnover intentions by weakening the effect of work–life conflict on job dissatisfaction.

This study contributes to personnel management and organizational psychology literature by explaining how workplace social support can affect the mediating process of job dissatisfaction through which the relationship between work–life conflict and turnover intentions is determined. The limitations are related to external validity, single source data and cross-sectional nature of data.

Organizational leaders and practitioners can take insights from the findings of this study that if workplace social support prevails at a level greater than work–life conflict, it will nullify or suppress the effect of work–life conflict on turnover intentions by reducing job dissatisfaction.

The originality value of this study is that it has addressed the scarcity of testing boundary conditions of the indirect effect of work–life conflict on turnover intentions through job dissatisfaction.

This study examines how and under what conditions jobs involving surface acting as key employee performance requirements induce work–family conflict (WFC) and thus negatively impact employees' family lives. Drawing from stress theories, the authors modeled emotional exhaustion as a mediator and trait anxiety and education level as moderators in the surface acting–WFC relation.

Applying the time-lagged design, the authors collected data from 203 service sector employees whose jobs involved frequent interactions with customers. The authors assessed surface acting, trait anxiety and level of education at time 1, emotional exhaustion at time 2 and WFC at time 3 with a three-week time lag between each wave.

The study results confirmed that surface acting drained the emotional energies of the employees who on reaching homes were not able to attend to their family needs, thus experiencing WFC. The authors also found that employees who were high in trait anxiety and education level suffered most from emotional exhaustion and WFC.

To mitigate the harmful effects of surface acting, organizations should ensure that their employees who must perform surface acting have sufficient time off from their roles, such as regular breaks, free evenings and vacations to prevent emotional exhaustion. The authors further recommend hiring only those customer care candidates who have low tendencies to be anxious while interacting with customers.

This study integrates and extends both the emotional labor and WFC literature. This research answers the earlier calls for research on the effects of personality on WFC. Contrary to the expectation, the study reveals that a higher level of education does not buffer the impact of emotional exhaustion on WFC; it rather intensifies the harmful effect of emotional exhaustion on WFC.

Social media fatigue (SMF) has been widely recognized; however, previous studies have included various concepts into a single fatigue construct. Fatigue has typically been explored from the stressor-strain-outcome (SSO) or stimulus-organism-response (SOR) perspectives. To further investigate SMF, the authors split it into the two constructs of exhaustion and disinterest. Furthermore, the authors introduced the concept of emotional labor and identified rules that may affect surface and deep acting strategies.

The authors designed and conducted a survey to collect data from social networking platform users.

Results from 364 users of social networking platforms supported most of the authors' hypotheses. First, most of the display rules affect the choice of deep or surface acting. Second, both types of acting lead to exhaustion, but only surface acting leads to disinterest. Third, discontinuance intention is affected by both types of fatigue.

This study contributes to SMF research by adding more antecedents (deep and surface acting) based on the emotional labor perspective and showing the impacts of communication rules on emotional labor. In addition, this study also distinguishes disinterest-style fatigue from exhaustion.

The annual holiday party is a long-standing tradition in many organizations, yet academic research has largely left the holiday party unexamined. The present study sheds light on this significant social event by exploring what factors help differentiate successful events from less successful ones.

First, the authors developed a taxonomy of characteristics of good holiday parties using a critical incident technique in which stories of holiday party experiences were analyzed following a mixed-method approach. Second, the authors quantitatively examined the relationships between these characteristics and three outcomes, including perceived organizational support, positive interpersonal interactions, and experienced fun.

The critical incident analysis revealed 11 key characteristics that distinguish good from bad holiday parties. Primary findings from the quantitative study are that games and activities, music, good food, and notable positive leader behavior are key characteristics of more successful events.

As the data were obtained using a traditional survey methodology, further research would be valuable that adopts an experience sampling methodology to capture employee experiences, perceptions, and feelings about holiday parties in real-time before, during, and after an event has occurred.

From an event planning standpoint, this research provides a framework for designing holiday parties and provides evidence as to which features matter most. From a strategic leadership perspective, this research signals that different features of holiday parties can influence different outcomes.

Beyond merely identifying important characteristics, this research provides a framework for further research on holiday parties and identifies theories that can be used in future research to explore the mechanisms that influence how and under what conditions holiday parties impact employees’ experiences at work.

Being different from others can be stressful, and this may be especially salient for newcomers during organizational socialization when they may be expected to fit in. Thus, drawing on conservation of resources theory, the authors examine the effects of newcomers' individual differentiation on their subsequent emotional exhaustion.

The authors test a multiple mediation model with data from 161 UK graduates collected at three times using structural equation modeling.

The results largely support the hypotheses, identifying individual differentiation as a motivational resource associated with the proactive behavior of changing work procedures. In turn, changing work procedures links with the personal resource of positive affect, which facilitates the relational resource of social acceptance and predicts lower emotional exhaustion. Individual differentiation predicts lower social acceptance also, but not via monitoring as anticipated.

The results provide novel insights into the effects of individual differentiation on emotional exhaustion in the context of organizational socialization. The study highlights that, while newcomers high in individual differentiation face depletion of the relational resource of social acceptance, they can still adjust well and avoid emotional exhaustion through changing work procedures to foster positive affect.

Successful knowledge transfer (KT) between younger and older workers (YW and OW, respectively) is critical for organizational success, especially in light of the recent surge in employment volatility among the youngest and oldest segments of the workforce. Yet, practitioners and scholars alike continue to struggle with knowing how best to facilitate these exchanges. The qualitative study offers insight into this phenomenon by exploring how KT unfolds in YW/OW dyads.

The authors performed a reflexive thematic analysis of semistructured interviews with two samples of blue- and white-collar younger/older workers from the USA (N = 40), whereby the authors interpreted the “lived experiences” of these workers when engaged in interdependent tasks.

The analysis, informed by social exchange theory and exchange theories of aging, led to the development of the knowledge transfer process model in younger/older worker dyads (KT-YOD). The model illustrates that, through different combinations of competence and humility, KT success is experienced either directly (by workers weighing the perceived benefits versus costs of KT) and/or indirectly (through different bases of trust/distrust perceived within their dyads). Further, humility in dyads appears to be necessary for KT success, while competence was insufficient for realizing KT success, independently.

In exposing new inner workings of the KT process in YW/OW dyads, the study introduces the importance of humility and brings scholars and organizations a step closer toward realizing the benefits of age diversity in their workplaces.

Drawing from affect as social information (AASI) theory, this study examines how the relationship between perceived passion, quality of the presenter and investment intention is influenced by emotional labor engaged in by the presenter. This study clarifies and deepens the understanding of how passion influences entrepreneurial success by studying the role of emotional labor in the relationship between passion and investment decisions.

This study tested the moderated mediation effects between perceived presenter passion and investor intention to invest using data from 62 presenters' and 169 judges' responses from the 31 judges during a business plan (or “pitch”) competition.

Results confirmed a positive indirect effect of perceived passion on intention to invest, as mediated by the investor's evaluation of the quality of the presenter. Emotional labor moderated the relationship such that low levels of emotional labor engaged in by the presenters strengthened the mediated relationship between perceived passion, quality of the presenter and intention to invest.

The findings suggest that the authenticity of passion (as measured by the degree of emotional labor engaged in by the presenter) influences this dynamic, such that displays of passion that are perceived as being authentic are more likely to lead to an investment decision. Using AASI, this study conceptualized and tested quality of the presenter as an important intervening variable that can help explain the lack of coherent findings. The results supported this conceptualization, providing empirical evidence for the oft-quoted adage “invest in people, not ideas.”