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Technology has always inspired social change, but its scale and complexity have begun to bewilder even the politicians and policymakers. Several recent national foresight studies point to a need for socio‐organizational or “soft” technologies to help Europe manage change and respond to major new economic opportunities. Research is required in fields such as neuro‐linguistic programming, the psychology of knowledge management and the ergonomics of the man‐machine interface. “Electronic pets” showed that we can learn to love machines – now the challenge is to embed technology in such a way as to marry science with society.

Recent research has found that a technique called feedforward interviewing (FFI) can be used to develop employees on the job. Currently the mechanisms and boundary conditions of the FFI-performance relationship are unexplored. Using a positive psychology framework, the purpose of this paper is to discuss how FFI supports the creation of personal and relational resources, and explores the contextual and environmental limits to the effectiveness of the technique.

Through a review of the literature as well as examination through appropriate theoretical lenses, moderators of FFI are proposed and the implications for the effectiveness of the technique are examined.

The FFI model explored in this paper is rooted in broaden and build theory as well as other theories from the positive psychology literature. Design recommendations and future research directions are discussed.

Through a scholarly review of the literature, the potential for the effective use of a new developmental technique is explored. Direct guidance on how to apply FFI in organizations is given.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the possibility of curvilinear patterns of relationships between workplace affective commitment and in‐role performance, organizational citizenship behaviors and burnout. As most commitment theories assume strictly linear relations with these outcomes, demonstrating that these positive associations do not hold above some ceiling point in the commitment continuum is potentially important for research and practice.

The possibility of nonlinear relations was examined in a sample of 273 hospital employees.

The results yielded strong support for the authors' hypotheses. Indeed, most of the relations observed (ten of 15) between affective commitment foci and work outcomes were curvilinear, revealing a ceiling to the positive association between commitment and outcomes. Although these results vary in strength across work outcomes and commitment targets, they reveal that affective commitment has negative associations with employee productivity and psychological health at extreme levels.

Methodologically, these results illustrate the need to systematically explore the true nature of relations among constructs, even in areas where it is assumed to be well known. Practically, these results suggest that, ultimately, moderate levels of commitment may be more beneficial than extremely high levels.

In this study, the situation strength theory (SST) has been applied to assess the predictability of empowering leadership (EL) in explaining intrapreneurial behaviour (IB) under the strong situation effect of job autonomy (JA).

The proposed theoretical framework was assessed using cross-sectional survey data from 237 engineers employed in Pakistan's automotive firms. Covariance-based structural equation modelling (CB-SEM) was used to analyse the survey data.

The study's results revealed a positive relationship of EL with JA and IB. Drawing from the conceptualisation of SST, JA serves as an organisational strong situation by offering sufficient cues and significantly intensifies the relationship between EL and IB.

The study contributes by establishing the requirement of strong organisational situations for nurturing IB in organisations. The study's outcomes are useful for academia, practitioners and industry to identify strong situations for employees' organisational behavioural outcomes like IB to dampen the personality impacts of employees on organisational processes. Hence, the study offered a major shift or an alternative in existing human resource practices, from personality assessments to creating cues from strong situations for fostering human behaviours. This will impact organisational human resource management scope during talent management, selection, promotion and employment.

The present study is novel from the IB investigation due to situational response in organisations, as assessed by employees. The study contributes towards SST by extending its epistemology to explain IB as an outcome of EL. The present study offers important empirical evidence for the role of the strong organisational situation of JA.