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Purpose – The paper aims to demonstrate the efficacy of the qualitative occupational stress diary as a means by which to attain additional depth of insight into the way people experience stress, to foster individual reflection and self‐assessment, and as an aid to the development of context sensitive interventions. Design/methodology/approach – Using a free response format, a critical incident diary was completed by 15 clerical workers, employed in a higher education organisation, over five consecutive working days. Findings – The factors constituting causes and consequences of occupational stress were cognitively framed differently from one day to the next and it is unlikely that these insights would have been attained had we employed a series of preformed quantitative response scales. The diary facilitated self‐reflection and was reported to have cathartic qualities. Research implications/limitations – There is a need for context specific, tailored intervention measures. Accumulation of corroborating descriptions of how people respond to specific stressors will contribute to the development of such measures. The work reported now needs to be extended to larger groups and over longer periods to identify the most frequently used coping strategies, and which are most efficacious in a given situation. Practical implications – The qualitative occupational stress diary is a simple but powerful self‐reflective tool, which may lead to therapeutic outcomes. Originality/value – A growing number of researchers are critical of the practical influence of quantitative measures of occupational stress and coping. The study illustrates how the qualitative occupational stress diary might usefully complement traditional methods for research and intervention purposes.

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.

Research on coping at work has tended to adopt a between-person perspective, producing inconsistent findings on well-being outcomes. This focus on interindividual differences is in contrast to many theories that position coping as process, hence, as an intraindividual process that unfolds over time in response to job stressors and appraisals. The authors propose that focusing more on the within-person coping processes and integrating them with learning perspectives has the potential to advance our understanding. More specifically, coping behavior and well-being can be seen as an outcome of current and past learning processes. In this chapter, the authors discuss three mechanisms that explain how coping processes can produce positive versus negative effects on well-being, and how coping can be integrated into a learning framework to explain these pathways. First, the stress process entails encoding and evaluation of the situation and, as a consequence, deployment of suitable coping behavior. Over and above the efforts that have to be invested to understand the stressful situation, the coping behavior itself also requires time and energy resources. Second, coping behavior likely co-occurs with learning processes such as reflection, exploration, and exploitation. These learning processes require further time and cognitive resources. Third, although coping behaviors and their accompanying learning processes have the potential to drain resources at the within-person level, they can also build up interindividual coping resources such as a broader repertoire and coping flexibility. These between-level differences equip employees to deal with future stressors.

Setbacks and failures are part of organizational life. While a recent body of literature pointed to the importance of recovery, resilience, and learning from failure in responding to and dealing with setback events, the setback itself and its underlying dimensions remain underexplored. However, how severe employees perceive a setback to be plays an integral role in how successfully they handle these events. Taking an event-oriented perspective on work-related setbacks, this study defines setback severity as the setback event’s novelty, disruptiveness, and criticality. Based on the current literature and prior operationalizations, the authors introduce and validate a three-dimensional measure of setback severity. The exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses provide support for the proposed three-dimensional model. Further analyses show that disruptiveness and criticality are significantly related to identity threat, emotional exhaustion, trauma, turnover intention, and thriving, while novelty is only related to turnover intention and thriving. The implications of the setback severity measure are discussed along with recommendations for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to preliminary explain the possibly complicated moderating effects of job resources. The paper specifies the missing link between job demand and burnout by focusing on the coping strategy argument.

The paper preliminary supports the mediated moderation model of the missing link by a large sample cross‐sectional survey.

The two coping strategies as mediators for the relationship between emotional demands and exhaustion are supported. Strong supports for the moderation effect of emotional intelligence on the relationship between emotional demands and the two coping strategies are found. Some support for the moderation of supervisor support on the relationship between deep acting and exhaustion are found.

The paper contributes to the job demands‐control‐support and job demands‐resources models, as the proposed model helps to explain the inconsistent results for the buffering effect of job resources found in the literature. It also contributes to the literature of emotional intelligence, as it provides clear evidence of its importance in handling emotional demands.

Deep acting is important. An organization may take more efforts in training employees to equip them with it. Emotional intelligence is also a vital resource and so organizations may benefit if they engage in relevant selection and training practices.

Emotional intelligence, an individual ability, is empirically demonstrated to be an important type of job resources that can buffer the negative effect of job demands on employee well‐being.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to highlight recent research addressing theories of female offending and the context of female perpetrated homicides. Women have often been omitted in research and theory development, thus gendered interventions and treatments lag behind. Additionally, female perpetrated homicides are rare, consequently research examining the context of the events and the events leading up to the homicide are inadequate.

Design/methodology/approach – The approach is to examine the historical research on female offenders, the context of female violent offenses particularly homicide offenses, and emerging theories of gendered experiences into criminal activities for women.

Findings – Findings indicate that gender matters when explaining theories of female offending and when examining the context of female perpetrated homicides.

Originality/value – Females have different life events from males, and these life events create distinct pathways into criminal offending, including the ultimate offense of homicide. Based on these differences, theory development as well as intervention and prevention strategies must be designed that are gender specific.

‘Q. Why the Caymans? You could have gone anywhere. You had a lot of money. You could have gone to Paris, the Bahamas?

The connection between employees’ well-being and performance, although widely studied in organizational psychology, has received much less attention from HRM scholars. The purpose of this paper is to extend the literature by examining the impacts of the multidimensional structure of well-being consisting of psychological, social and health dimensions on employees’ task and contextual performance.

The authors collected data from 281 employees from the New Zealand service sector using a questionnaire survey. Factor analysis was used to determine items that form various facets of well-being and performance constructs. Hierarchical regression analyses were conducted to test the well-being – performance relationship.

The findings show that different facets of well-being differentially contribute to employees’ task and contextual performance. Specifically, the facets of happiness and trust were positively associated with both task and contextual performance, while the effects of life satisfaction and work life balance on task and contextual performance were insignificant. Moreover, work intensification was only associated with task performance, in contrast, job satisfaction and over commitment were only related to contextual performance.

The implications of these findings are two-fold. For researchers, a review and overhaul of the conceptualization and operationalization of well-being in HRM studies is long overdue. For managers, improvements to employees’ job performance and the organization’s health can result from simultaneously enhancing multiple dimensions of employees’ well-being.

This study provides new insights into the complex relationship between well-being and performance by incorporating a multidimensional and multifaceted perspective of well-being and highlighting the distinctive effects of various facets of well-being on different types of employees’ performance.