Ute Stephan, Jun Li and Jingjing Qu
Past research on self-employment and health yielded conflicting findings. Integrating predictions from the Stressor-Strain Outcome model, research on challenge stressors and…
Abstract
Purpose
Past research on self-employment and health yielded conflicting findings. Integrating predictions from the Stressor-Strain Outcome model, research on challenge stressors and allostatic load, we predict that physical and mental health are affected by self-employment in distinct ways which play out over different time horizons. We also test whether the health impacts of self-employment are due to enhanced stress (work-related strain) and differ for man and women.
Design/methodology/approach
We apply non-parametric propensity score matching in combination with a difference-in-difference approach and longitudinal cohort data to examine self-selection and the causal relationship between self-employment and health. We focus on those that transit into self-employment from paid employment (opportunity self-employment) and analyze strain and health over four years relative to individuals in paid employment.
Findings
Those with poorer mental health are more likely to self-select into self-employment. After entering self-employment, individuals experience a short-term uplift in mental health due to lower work-related strain, especially for self-employed men. In the longer-term (four years) the mental health of the self-employed drops back to pre-self-employment levels. We find no effect of self-employment on physical health.
Practical implications
Our research helps to understand the nonpecuniary benefits of self-employment and suggests that we should not advocate self-employment as a “healthy” career.
Originality/value
This article advances research on self-employment and health. Grounded in stress theories it offers new insights relating to self-selection, the temporality of effects, the mediating role of work-related strain, and gender that collectively help to explain why past research yielded conflicting findings.
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The purpose of this paper is to develop a model of employee innovative behavior conceptualizing it as distinct from innovation outputs and as a multi-faceted behavior rather than…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to develop a model of employee innovative behavior conceptualizing it as distinct from innovation outputs and as a multi-faceted behavior rather than a simple count of “innovative acts” by employees. It understands individual employee innovative behaviors as a micro-foundation of firm intrapreneurship that is embedded in and influenced by contextual factors such as managerial, organizational and cultural support for innovation. Building from a review of existing employee innovative behavior scales and theoretical considerations the authors develop and validate the Innovative Behavior Inventory (IBI) and the Innovation Support Inventory (ISI).
Design/methodology/approach
Two pilot studies, a third validation study in the Czech Republic and a fourth cross-cultural validation study using population representative samples from Switzerland, Germany, Italy and the Czech Republic (n=2,812 employees and 450 entrepreneurs) were conducted.
Findings
Both inventories were reliable and showed factorial, criterion, convergent and discriminant validity as well as cross-cultural equivalence. Employee innovative behavior was supported as comprising of idea generation, idea search, idea communication, implementation starting activities, involving others and overcoming obstacles. Managerial support was the most proximal contextual influence on innovative behavior and mediated the effect of organizational support and national culture.
Originality/value
The paper advances the understanding of employee innovative behavior as a multi-faceted phenomenon and the contextual factors influencing it. Where past research typically focuses on convenience samples within a particular country, the authors offer first robust evidence that the model of employee innovative behavior generalizes across cultures and types of samples. The model and the IBI and ISI inventories enable researchers to build a deeper understanding of the important micro-foundation underpinning intrapreneurial behavior in organizations and allow practitioners to identify their organizations’ strengths and weaknesses related to intrapreneurship.
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Tatiana Iakovleva, Lars Kolvereid and Ute Stephan
This study proposes to use the Theory of Planned Behaviour to predict entrepreneurial intentions among students in five developing and nine developed countries. The purpose is to…
Abstract
Purpose
This study proposes to use the Theory of Planned Behaviour to predict entrepreneurial intentions among students in five developing and nine developed countries. The purpose is to investigate whether entrepreneurial intention and its antecedents differ between developing and developed countries, and to test the theory in the two groups of countries.
Design/methodology/approach
A total of 2,225 students in 13 countries participated in this study by responding to a structured questionnaire in classrooms. Structural equation modelling was used to analyse the data.
Findings
The findings indicate that respondents from developing countries have stronger entrepreneurial intentions than those from developed countries. Moreover, the respondents from developing countries also score higher on the theory's antecedents of entrepreneurial intentions – attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioural control – than respondents from developed countries. The findings support the Theory of Planned Behaviour in both developing and developed countries.
Research limitations/implications
The findings strongly support the Theory of Planned Behaviour. The measure of subjective norms used, a multiple‐item index encompassing the views of other people and motivation to comply with these, seems to have advantages over other measures of this concept.
Practical implications
Developing countries need to focus on the development of institutions that can support entrepreneurial efforts. At the same time, developed economies may need to accept that entrepreneurial intentions are dependent on the dynamism of an economic environment and possibly on risk‐perceiving behaviours.
Originality/value
While multiple‐country studies on entrepreneurship in developing and developed countries have been called for, no previous study has compared entrepreneurial intentions between developing and developed countries. The inclusion of developing countries provides a unique quasi‐experimental setting in which to test the theory.
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Lien Le Monkhouse, Bradley R. Barnes and Ute Stephan
The paper aims to further extend our understanding by assessing the extent to which two prominent cultural values in East Asia i.e. face saving and group orientation drive…
Abstract
Purpose
The paper aims to further extend our understanding by assessing the extent to which two prominent cultural values in East Asia i.e. face saving and group orientation drive consumers’ perceptions of luxury goods across four East Asian markets.
Design/methodology/approach
A multi‐methods research approach was adopted consisting of: an expert panel of close to 70 participants, group discussions with five extended East Asian families, personal interviews with eight East Asian scholars, a pilot test with over 50 East Asian graduate students and a multi‐market survey of 443 consumer respondents in Beijing, Tokyo, Singapore and Hanoi.
Findings
The authors extend previous conceptual studies by empirically investigating the impact of these two cultural values on the perception of luxury among East Asian societies. Specifically the study reveals that across all four markets face saving has the strongest influence on the conspicuous and hedonistic dimensions of luxury, group orientation meanwhile is the strongest predictor of the quality, extended self and exclusivity dimensions of luxury. Collectively these two cultural values significantly influence East Asian perceptions of luxury. Overall, the findings reiterate the importance of understanding different cultural values and their influence across different East Asian societies.
Practical implications
The findings have important implications for managers of western luxury branded goods that are seeking to penetrate East Asian markets or seek to serve East Asian consumers. Specifically, to assist with developing suitable brand positioning, products, services, communications and pricing strategies.
Originality/value
This study contributes to our understanding of the subject by exploring the impact of face saving and group orientation on the perception of luxury goods across four East Asian countries. Several directions for future research are suggested.
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Muhammad Zeshan, Shahzil Talha Khatti, Fiza Afridi and Olivier de La Villarmois
This paper aims to show the role of employees’ self-regulation in defining the effect of job demands on employees’ burnout. Moreover, the paper also highlights the importance of a…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to show the role of employees’ self-regulation in defining the effect of job demands on employees’ burnout. Moreover, the paper also highlights the importance of a high-performance work system (HPWS) on the relation between job demands and employee self-regulation.
Design/methodology/approach
Data has been collected from public sector hospital nurses through a survey strategy following a time-lagged approach. This data has been analysed to validate the measure and to test the hypotheses through structural equation modelling.
Findings
Results of this study indicate that job demands affect employees’ burnout through adaptive regulation (recovery) and maladaptive regulation (self-undermining). Adaptive regulation minimizes while maladaptive regulation supports this effect. Moreover, results also highlight the role of HPWS in mitigating the negative impact of job demands on adaptive regulation.
Practical implications
This study serves as a guide for managers to minimize the burnout of their subordinates in the face of increasing job demands. This study also emphasizes the use of HPWS in organizations so that the burnout of the employees may be decreased by increasing adaptive self-regulation or recovery.
Originality/value
This study enriches the literature on the job demand resource theory by showing how employee job demands, employee self-regulation (psychological processes) and HPWS (organizational processes) collaborate to determine the extent of job burnout of employees.
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Stephan Lukosch and Till Schümmer
During oral exams at the German distance learning university, we noticed that students fear that they will be faced with questions that they have not anticipated. In our opinion…
Abstract
During oral exams at the German distance learning university, we noticed that students fear that they will be faced with questions that they have not anticipated. In our opinion, this is mainly because students have no chance to train and thereby gather positive experiences with exam situations as they are distributed all over Germany and thus it is difficult for them to meet each other. In this paper, we present a design space of 23 learning gadgets, i.e. tools that support collaborative learning, to allow collaborative exam preparation in peer‐based distributed student groups. We discuss this design space according to eight dimensions of the concept of FLOW (Csikszentmihalyi, 1991) that constitutes enjoyable situations. Two of the learning gadgets were implemented and integrated in the CURE environment, a web‐based collaborative learning platform that was developed to support different collaborative learning scenarios, e.g. collaborative exercises or virtual seminars. We discuss these learning gadgets in more detail and show how they promise an enjoyable collaborative exam preparation.
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It is analyzed whether working from home improves or impairs the job satisfaction and the work–life balance and under which conditions.
Abstract
Purpose
It is analyzed whether working from home improves or impairs the job satisfaction and the work–life balance and under which conditions.
Design/methodology/approach
Blocks of influences on job satisfaction and work–life balance – personal traits, job characteristics, skills and employment properties – are estimated separately and in combination. To select the variables, the least angle regression is applied. The entropy balancing approach is used to determine causal effects. The study investigates whether imbalances are determined by private or job influences, whether firm-specific regulations and the selected control group affect the results and whether it only takes place during leisure time.
Findings
No clear effects of remote work on job satisfaction are revealed, but the impact on work–life balance is generally negative. If the imbalance is conditioned by private interests, this is not corroborated in contrast to job conditioned features. Employees working from home are happier than those who want to work at home, job satisfaction is higher and work–life balance is not worse under a strict contractual agreement than under a nonbinding commitment.
Originality/value
A wide range of personality traits, skills, employment properties and job characteristics are incorporated as determinants. The problem of causality is investigated. It is analyzed whether the use of alternative control and treatment groups leads to different results. The empirical investigation is based on new German data with three waves.
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This experiment investigates the effect of cultural adaptation by American business people on their trustworthiness as perceived by Chinese Indonesians. The sample consists of 140…
Abstract
This experiment investigates the effect of cultural adaptation by American business people on their trustworthiness as perceived by Chinese Indonesians. The sample consists of 140 Indonesian professionals born and raised in Indonesia, who read one of the four stories that differ in degrees of Americans’ cultural adaptation: none, moderate, high using English, and high using the native (i.e., Indonesian) language. The results show that there is no difference among the four adaptation levels on disconfirmation of the adaptor’s stereo types. The high adaptation using English condition is perceived to be more situationally caused than is the high adaptation using the native language condition, which in turn is perceived to be more situationally caused than is the moderate adaptation condition, and the high adaptation using English condition is perceived to be more situationally caused than is the no adaptation condition. The high adaptation using the native language and the high adaptation using English conditions are perceived to be trustworthier than is the moderate adaptation condition, which in turn is perceived to be trustworthier than is the no adaptation condition; these results contradict the findings of some earlier studies but are consistent with those in the cases of Americans adapting to Thais and Japanese in Pornpitakpan (1998), to People’s Republic of China Chinese in Pornpitakpan (2002b), and to Malaysians in Pornpitakpan (2004). Marketing implications are discussed.