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The aim of the present study is to give insights into the interplay between leadership, well‐being and occupational success by examining the indirect effect of transformational leadership on subjective occupational success mediated by work engagement.

A gender‐sensitive approach was applied in order to reveal possible differences in the relations and to deduce gender‐specific recommendations. Data were retrieved from 530 women and 602 men. The participants were questioned on their leader's behavior, their work engagement, and occupational success.

Results show significant positive relations between transformational leadership, work engagement, and subjective occupational success for men and women. Work engagement is found to partially mediate the relation between transformational leadership and subjective occupational success. A significantly higher mediation effect was found for women, although the mediation is present in both gender groups.

Both for men and women transformational leadership training, as well as interventions promoting work engagement, are promising approaches for the enhancement of occupational success.

The findings advance the understanding of how leaders enhance employees' occupational success and provide gender‐specific insights into the mediating mechanism of work engagement regarding this relation.

New developments in concepts and approaches to job stress should incorporate all relevant types of resources that promote well-being and health. The success resource model of job stress conceptualizes subjective success as causal agents for employee well-being and health (Grebner, Elfering, & Semmer, 2008a). So far, very little is known about what kinds of work experiences are perceived as success. The success resource model defines four dimensions of subjective occupational success: goal attainment, pro-social success, positive feedback, and career success. The model assumes that subjective success is a resource because it is valued in its own right, triggers positive affect and emotions (e.g., pleasure, cf., Weiss & Cropanzano, 1996), helps to protect and gain other resources like self-efficacy (Hobfoll, 1998, 2001), has direct positive effects on well-being (e.g., job satisfaction, cf., Locke & Latham, 1990) and health (Carver & Scheier, 1999), facilitates learning (Frese & Zapf, 1994), and has an energizing (Locke & Latham, 1990, 2002) and attention-directing effect (Carver, 2003), which can promote recovery by promoting mental detachment from work tasks in terms of absence of job-related rumination in leisure time (Sonnentag & Bayer, 2005).

The model proposes that success is promoted by other resources like job control (Frese & Zapf, 1994) while job stressors, like hindrance stressors such as performance constraints and role ambiguity (LePine, Podsakoff, & LePine, 2005), can work against success (Frese & Zapf, 1994). The model assumes reciprocal direct effects of subjective success on well-being, health, and recovery (upward spiral), and a moderator effect of success on the stressor–strain relationship. The chapter discusses research evidence, measurement of subjective occupational success, value of the model for job stress interventions, future research requirements, and methodological concerns.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the potential effects of empowering leadership on followers’ subjective career success through psychological empowerment, protean career orientation, and career commitment.

Full-time employees working in the USA were recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Participants answered surveys at three separate points over a six-week period (n=261). Structural equation modeling and bootstrapping were used to verify the indirect effect of empowering leadership on career satisfaction controlling for common method variance and growth need strength.

Empowering leadership was positively related to followers’ subsequent psychological empowerment, which in turn predicted protean career attitudes and career commitment, but only career commitment had a significant relationship with career satisfaction.

Empowering leadership behaviors focus on potentially career-enhancing factors, including providing followers with the confidence, inspiration, and authority to assume control of their work lives. Empowering leaders benefit their followers’ careers, and psychological empowerment and career commitment may be important mechanisms in the empowering leadership-career success relationship when their effects are considered simultaneously. Employees’ development of a protean career orientation has less direct effect on subjective career success than simple commitment to a career.

Empowering leadership has been overlooked in career literature. The findings advance the understanding of how empowering leader behaviors could help employees’ subjective career success in a serial mediation model. Additionally, the study empirically demonstrates that psychologically empowered employees are more likely to engage in protean career actions and navigate their own career goals.

Building on the “Stress-as-Offense-to-Self” theory, this study investigates appreciation as a predictor of job satisfaction over time, mediated by subjective success and feelings of resentment towards one's organization.

Analyses are based on a three-wave study with two-month time intervals, with a sample of 193 employees from six Swiss organizations.

Double mediation by subjective success and feelings of resentment was confirmed; no mediation was found in a reversed mediation model. Results highlight the importance of appreciation for employees' feelings of success and job satisfaction, but also for affect related to the organization as a whole.

Organizations should recognize the role of appreciation in satisfaction, affective reactions toward the organization, and information about one's standing. Appreciation can be expressed in multiple ways; it not only increases job satisfaction but also helps employees to validate their judgments about their own performance.

Appreciation is a promising resource for employee well-being. The present study is one of few focusing on appreciation as a resource in its own right, rather than as part of broader constructs, such as social support. Our results not only confirm the importance of appreciation but also shed light on mechanisms through which it may exert its influence. They complement a multilevel analysis based on the same data showing an association of appreciation with different indicators of well-being on the interpersonal as well as the intrapersonal level.

Drawing from the conservation of resources theory and the success resource model of job stress, the authors investigated the role of leader behaviours in the context of leader-member exchanges (LMXs) as a driver of leaders' job-related well-being and recovery. Specifically, they hypothesised positive affect and perceived competence as potential mechanisms enhancing leaders' job satisfaction and psychological detachment.

Daily diary data were collected from 85 leaders over five consecutive working days (376 daily observations) and analysed using multilevel path analyses.

Leader LMX behaviours were positively associated with leaders' positive affect and perceived competence at work at the person and day levels. Additionally, results provided support for most of the assumed indirect effects of leader LMX behaviours on leaders' job satisfaction and psychological detachment via positive affect and perceived competence.

Leadership development activities should raise leaders' awareness of the relevance of resourceful interactions with followers for leaders' own well-being. Organisations should create a working environment that facilitates high-quality exchanges amongst their members. The current trend towards increasing digital and less face-to-face collaboration may pose a risk to this important resource source for leaders.

These findings emphasise the day-to-day variation in leadership behaviours and that leaders' engagement in high-quality leader-follower interactions has the potential to stimulate a resource-building process for the benefit of leaders themselves.

In our 8th volume of Research in Occupational Stress and Well Being, we offer eight chapters that examine theoretical, conceptual, and methodological advances to job stress research. Our lead chapter, by Christopher Rosen, Chu-Hsiang Chang, Emilija Djurdjevic, and Erin Eatough, provides a thorough review of conceptual and empirical research examining occupational stress and performance. They review and critique theories that help to explain the workplace stressor–performance relationship and they develop an eight-category taxonomy of workplace stressors. Finally, they evaluate how well contemporary research has dealt with limitations and weaknesses previously identified in earlier research.

Research has shown accountability can produce both positive and negative outcomes. Further, because of inherent environmental uncertainty, perceptions of organizational politics often interact with accountability to produce negative effects. However, using uncertainty management theory, the purpose of this paper is to argue that employees can use proactive voice to exercise control in the ambiguity of highly accountable and political environments.

This two sample study of graduate school alumni (n=211) and insurance employees (n=186) explored the three-way interaction of felt accountability×politics perceptions×proactive voice on work performance, job satisfaction, and job tension.

As hypothesized, high levels of felt accountability and politics were most strongly associated with favorable outcomes when coupled with increased voice behavior. Conversely, felt accountability and politics were related to negative outcomes in settings associated with low proactive voice. Results supported in Sample 1 were then constructively replicated in Sample 2.

All employees are held accountable to some degree, and all work in potentially political settings. Often, these environmental features are dictated to employees, leaving only employee reactions in direct control. One possible response is voice. As demonstrated in the present research, employees who engage in proactive voice appear to exercise some degree of control over their environment, resulting in more positive outcomes than their less active counterparts.

The present research extends understanding regarding the effects of accountability in organizations by demonstrating that contextual factors (e.g. politics) and individual difference variables (e.g. in levels of proactive voice) differentiate favorable vs unfavorable outcomes of accountability.

Drawing from both the transactional theory of stress and the conservation of resources theory, this paper sets out to investigate the role of demand-specific challenge and hindrance appraisal of emotional demands, as well as time pressure and perceived goal progress within the challenge–hindrance framework.

For this research, 91 employees provided daily diary data for one working week. Focusing on within-persons effects, multilevel moderated mediation models using multilevel path analyses were applied.

Both emotional demands and time pressure exert positive effects on work engagement when people expect resource gain (challenge appraisal), independent of actual resource gain (achievement). Furthermore, results show that goal progress buffers negative effects of perceived blocked resource gain (hindrance appraisal) on both emotional and motivational well-being.

This research proposes an extension and refinement of the challenge–hindrance stressor framework to explain health-impairing and motivational processes of emotional demands and time pressure, combining reasoning from both appraisal and resource theory perspectives. The study identifies demand-specific challenge and hindrance appraisals as mediators linking demands to emotional and motivational well-being, emphasizing the influence of goal progress as a resource on these relations.

In 2006, Saks (2006) published one of the first empirical studies of the antecedents and consequences of employee engagement. Since then dozens of studies on engagement have been published and most of them have used the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES) to measure work engagement. The purpose of this paper is to revisit Saks (2006) to try and address some issues that have arisen during the last ten years and to assess the generalizability of his findings and model using the UWES measure of work engagement and single-item measures of job and organization engagement.

Additional analyses was conducted using the data from Saks (2006) including measures of each job characteristic, the use of the UWES measure of work engagement, and single-item general measures of job engagement and organization engagement. In addition, a review of engagement research was conducted as well as research that used Saks’ (2006) measures of job engagement and organization engagement.

The results indicate that skill variety is the main job characteristic that predicts job engagement. The results of the analysis using the UWES measure of work engagement found that job characteristics and perceived organizational support are significant predictors of work engagement, and work engagement predicts job satisfaction, organizational commitment, organizational citizenship behavior and intentions to quit and mediates the relationship between the antecedents and the consequences. Similar results were found using the single-item measures of job engagement and organization engagement. A review of the engagement literature indicates general support for the Saks (2006) model of the antecedents and consequences of employee engagement and for his measures of job and organization engagement. A revised and updated model is provided with additional antecedents and consequences.

The results indicate that organizations can drive employee engagement by focusing on skill variety as well as providing social support, rewards and recognition, procedural and distributive fairness, and opportunities for learning and development. In addition, organizations can assess employee engagement more frequently and easily by using single-item measures of job and organization engagement.

This paper provides an update and revision of the Saks (2006) model of employee engagement and suggests that the main findings are similar when using the UWES measure of work engagement and single-item general measures of job engagement and organization engagement.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how women managers in Lebanon account for their career satisfaction and construct their career success.

A review of literature along with a survey‐based quantitative approach is adopted for understanding the perception of the Lebanese Arab women to their career success. The questionnaire was administered to women participants in managerial and executive roles in different occupational sectors.

The findings suggest that despite the glass ceiling that the Lebanese women managers face, they perceived themselves as successful. However, their success was mainly attributed to their satisfaction with the subjective rather than the objective aspects of their careers.

The value of this paper is three‐fold. First, and in view of the Western focus of similar research, this study contributes to the understudied area of research of women managers and their careers in the Arab Middle East. Second, through empirical research stemming from Lebanon, this paper confirms the salience of the glass ceiling in the non‐traditional Middle Eastern research locale. Third, it challenges the widespread notion that the subjective and the objective dimensions of career success are correlated. Although the findings cannot be generalized to the entire Middle‐Eastern Arab region, they demonstrate important differences in the concept of self‐perceived subjective and objective career success.