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The purpose of this paper is to examine how promotion- and prevention-focussed job crafting impacts the motivation of older employees to continue working beyond retirement age. The authors hypothesized that promotion-focussed job crafting (i.e. increasing social and structural job resources, and challenging job demands) relates positively and prevention-focussed job crafting (i.e. decreasing hindering job demands) relates negatively with motivation to continue working after reaching the official retirement age, and that these relationships are sequential mediated by work sense of coherence and burnout.

Data from 229 older employees (mean age=55.77) were analyzed using structural equation modeling.

Promotion-focussed job crafting was positively and prevention-focussed job crafting was negatively related with employees’ work sense of coherence, which was predictive of employees’ burnout, which in turn was predictive of motivation to continue working beyond retirement age.

Despite the cross-sectional study design, the results unfold how promotion- and prevention-focussed job crafting are related with motivation to continue working beyond retirement age through work sense of coherence and burnout.

Given today’s aging and shrinking workforce, older employees working beyond their official retirement age are a necessity for organizations’ functional capability. The results suggest that organizations should encourage employees’ promotion-focussed job crafting and limit prevention-focussed job crafting. Promotion-focussed job crafting facilitates employees’ work sense of coherence, which keeps them healthy and motivates older employees to continue working beyond retirement age.

This study adds to the literatures on job crafting and motivation to continue working beyond retirement age and explicates intervening processes in this relationship.

In the context of occupational health psychology, personality has usually been depicted from the perspective of single traits, dispositions, or their combinations. However, there is a clear need to better understand personality as a whole. For this reason, an integrative framework of personality is presented in order to give a more comprehensive and cohesive picture of how the different personality constructs relate to each other. In recent years, several holistic models of human personality have been presented. For example, such models have been formulated by Dan McAdams (1995), Brian Little (2007), Robert McCrae and Paul Costa Jr. (1999), and Brent Roberts and Dustin Wood (2006). In this chapter, we briefly introduce one of these models, that is, the three-tiered conceptual framework of personality by McAdams and his colleagues (McAdams, 1995; McAdams & Adler, 2006; McAdams & Olson, 2010; McAdams & Pals, 2006). This comprehensive and multifaceted model conceptualizes human personality via a developing pattern of (1) dispositional traits, (2) characteristic adaptations, and (3) constructive life narratives (see Fig. 1). Each of these three levels possesses its own characteristics for describing and understanding personality.

High-involvement work processes (HIWPs) are associated with high levels of employee influence over the work process, such as high levels of control over how to handle individual job tasks or a high level of involvement at team or workplace level in designing work procedures. When implementations of HIWPs are accompanied by companion investments in human capital – for example, in better information and training, higher pay and stronger employee voice – it is appropriate to talk not only of HIWPs but of “high-involvement work systems” (HIWSs). This chapter reviews the theory and practice of HIWPs and HIWSs. Across a range of academic perspectives and societies, it has regularly been argued that steps to enhance employee involvement in decision-making create better opportunities to perform, better utilization of skill and human potential, and better employee motivation, leading, in turn, to various improvements in organizational and employee outcomes.

However, there are also costs to increased employee involvement and the authors review the important economic and sociopolitical contingencies that help to explain the incidence or distribution of HIWPs and HIWSs. The authors also review the research on the outcomes of higher employee involvement for firms and workers, discuss the quality of the research methods used, and consider the tensions with which the model is associated. This chapter concludes with an outline of the research agenda, envisaging an ongoing role for both quantitative and qualitative studies. Without ignoring the difficulties involved, the authors argue, from the societal perspective, that the high-involvement pathway should be considered one of the most important vectors available to improve the quality of work and employee well-being.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate aspects related to difficulty to retain nursing assistants at nursing homes in Sweden related to perceived work environment characteristics.

To reveal aspects related to difficulty to retain nursing assistants, the paper uses the BIKVA model, sense of coherence and New Public Management (NPM). In total, three focus groups with nursing assistants at three nursing homes are interviewed with corresponding individual interviews with their senior managers and users. The purpose is to analyze the situation from the affected group of nursing assistants. The focus of this study is how nursing assistants discuss related to recruit and retain nursing assistants at nursing homes and elderly care and the response from senior management related to those aspects.

The main conclusions are that nursing assistants consider their job as meaningful, but limited latitude and direct involvement in managing their daily tasks in a continuous communication with management affect negatively. Furthermore and combined with wage levels, aspects related to scheduling, working hours, shift work, split shifts and understaffing generate a burdensome and stressful environment affecting the possibility to retain staff in a negative direction.

The research uses a new approach utilizing the BIKVA model, sense of coherence and NPM. The study shows that central in retaining nursing assistants at nursing homes relates to aspects such as wages, staffing, shift work and split shifts and continuous communication between nursing assistants and management.

This study aims to describe nurse leaders’ experiences of work-related well-being and its association with background variables, working conditions, work engagement, sense of coherence and burnout.

An electronic survey design was used. Data was collected between December 2015 and May 2016 with an instrument that included demographic questions and four internationally validated scales: the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale, QPS Nordic 34+, the shortened Sense of Coherence scale and the Maslach Burnout Inventory. Data was analysed using statistical methods.

A total of 155 nurse leaders completed the questionnaire, giving a 44% response rate. Most of them worked as nurse managers (89%). Participants’ work-related well-being scores ranged from 8 to 10. Statistically significant relationships were found between participants’ work-related well-being and their leadership skills, current position, sense of coherence and levels of burnout. In addition, there were statistically significant relationships between work-related well-being and all dimensions of working conditions.

This study underlines the fact that work-related well-being should not be evaluated based on a single factor. The participants’ perceived work-related well-being was high, although almost half of them reported always or often experiencing stress. The results suggest that nurse leaders may have resources such as good leadership and problem-solving skills, supportive working conditions and a high sense of coherence that prevent the experienced stress from adversely affecting their work-related well-being.

In workplace health promotion, enhancing resources are less explored than risk factors. The aim of this paper is to explore the usability of the sense of coherence (SOC) theory to identify considerable and positively perceived work‐related factors and processes.

The study had a salutogenic approach to workplace health promotion. A total of 13 focus group interviews were conducted with hospital employees in Sweden. A deductive analysis was made with the SOC theory as a framework.

Work‐related specific enhancing resources (SER) were identified and analysed into the three components of SOC: comprehensibility, manageability, and meaningfulness. SER's implication in daily performance is explained by employee expressions. Through increased understanding and awareness, SER could contribute to savoring positive experiences, and enhance SOC among employees. Antonovsky's concept Generalized Resistance Resources is suggested to be enlarged based on the expressed significance of concrete daily positive work occurrences to increase one's SOC.

Not all hospital professions were represented in the study. Further studies are required to involve physicians, paramedics, managers, as well as other settings, to compare and complement with additional experiences of workplace resources.

The study presents an opportunity to explore, understand, and foster workplace resources through assistance from the SOC theory. The SER presented in this study may serve as initial examples in workplace discussions about work‐related resources contributing to a sense of coherence.

This study contributes to public health research and workplace health promotion with a salutogenic focus on how to explore enhancing work‐related resources with the assistance of the practical SOC theory.

Shared understandings of curriculum reform within and between the levels of the educational system are suggested to be crucial for the reform to take root. The purpose of this paper is to explore variation in perceived curriculum coherence and school impact among state- and district-level stakeholders.

The participants (n=666) included state- and district-level stakeholders involved in a national curriculum reform in Finland. Latent profile analysis was employed to identify profiles based on participants’ perceptions of the core curriculum’s coherence and the reform’s impact on school development.

Two profiles were identified: high coherence and impact, and lower consistency of the intended direction and impact. State-level stakeholders had higher odds of belonging to the high coherence and impact profile than their district-level counterparts.

The results imply that more attention needs to be paid in developing a shared and coherent understanding particularly of the intended direction of the core curriculum as well as the reform’s effects on school-level development among state- and district-level stakeholders.

The study contributes to the literature on curriculum reform by shedding light on the variation in perceived curriculum coherence and school impact of those responsible for a large-scale national curriculum reform process at different levels of the educational system.

In this paper, we present a conceptual and terminological system – what we term the ‘Comprehensive Integrity Framework’ – capable of applying to both personal and institutional integrity, and to different levels of institutions (including sub-institutions and institutional complexes). We distinguish between three sorts of integrity: consistency-integrity (whether the agent’s acts accord with her claimed values); coherence-integrity (whether the agent’s character and internal constitution accord with her claimed values); and context-integrity (whether the agent’s environment facilitates her living up to her claimed values). We then employ this conceptual system to explore similarities, differences and overlaps between personal and institutional integrity, drawing in particular on moral philosophic work on personal integrity (on the one hand) and on ‘integrity systems’ and public administration approaches to institutional integrity (on the other).

Providing employees with meaning in their work has inspired numerous researchers to study the role of personal meaningful work and its related outcomes. Despite this high level of interest, the theoretical views and methodological approaches used to explore this concept still require refinement and development. Without a comprehensive review of these views and approaches, the concept of meaningful work will remain an ill defined notion. The purpose of this paper is to address this gap with a review of the theoretical and empirical research on meaningful work.

The paper includes a discussion on the concepts of “meaning” and “work”, and its importance and the sources for conceptual confusion, and a synthesis of the common features that form the idea of meaningful work in numerous empirical and theoretical studies.

The paper found meaningful work is derived when the employee has a perfect understanding of the nature and expectations of the task environment (i.e. the work has a clear goal, purpose and value that is connected to the employee), the employee feels a sense of fit or congruence between their own core values and the job requirements and organizational mission and goals, and when perfect understanding exists of how employees’ roles contribute to the purpose of the organization.

As part of an effective HRM strategy, organizations should actively encourage and develop managers’ abilities to redesign jobs and the climate to build enhanced feelings of meaning in work. Furthermore, organizations can promote greater experiences of meaningful work among employees by implementing the “job crafting” concept. Also, the role of top management is to focus on job elements that would possibly change personal needs of employees and hence perceive their jobs to be more meaningful.

Given the limited amount of recent literature focused on defining meaningful work, this paper provides valuable resources to help organizations succeed in their understanding of how to engage in creating meaningful work environment. It also examines the underlying features that constitute the meaningful work concept and offers guidance for future research by presenting the current state of knowledge about meaningful work.