Antje Schmitt

University of Groningen | RUG · Organizational Psychology

This article introduces the special issue on how entrepreneurs influence their social environment. The purpose of this special issue is to illustrate recent research exploring some of the unresolved questions relating to and uncovering connections between entrepreneurs' characteristics, actions, and experiences with their social environment. First,...

The rise of home‐based teleworking and the ageing of the workforce constitute two major trends impacting the future of work. Managing these trends well requires a good understanding of how worker age and telework intersect and which mechanisms link age and telework outcomes. We integrated perspectives of boundary theory and the lifespan model of se...

Self-employed workers face numerous demands, including high uncertainty, workload, and personal responsibility for business success, that have the potential to jeopardize their well-being. This study integrates aspects of the conservation of resources (COR) theory, the theory of planned behavior (TPB), and the literature on intention–behavior gaps...

Financial worries, a distressing emotional state prompted by perceived threats to financial resources, are particularly prevalent among employees during economic downturns. This study investigates associations between financial worries and employees’ health and career behaviors, drawing on conservation of resources theory and the self-regulation li...

Prior research has highlighted various psychological benefits and detriments associated with human–animal work, i.e., work that is substantially focused on living animals. However, systematic research that identifies both demands and resources across various occupations in this domain of work has been limited. To address this issue, we build on job...

Anxiety levels are said to be at all-time highs among students in high schools and universities. Because of such previous findings, we set out to study anxiety in learning situations in eight German university lectures and one German high school. Unexpectedly, we barely found any anxiety-provoking learning situations, and even fewer students endors...

One primary reason why entrepreneurs abandon their entrepreneurial goals is due to pressing financial difficulties. In one experimental and two field studies, we investigated the relationship between entrepreneurs’ financial stress and their intention to quit their businesses. In line with the challenge–hindrance stressor (CHS) framework, all three...

Based on the job-demands resources theory, we examine whether leadership behavior affects followers' work engagement in the context of remote work during times of crisis, and how this effect can be explained. We focus on consideration leadership and its impact on followers' engagement under conditions of enforced remote work during the COVID-19 pan...

Despite the growing body of research on human–animal studies in various disciplines, attempts to systematically include animals in organization studies have been limited. In this article, we build on organizational role theory and propose a typology of five roles of animals in human organizations (i.e., animals as commodities, clients, co-workers,...

According to transactional stress theory (TST), the extent to which entrepreneurs cope with errors by engaging in error damage control or ruminating about disengaging from their business goals depends on whether they interpret action errors as predominantly challenging or threatening. Using latent profile analysis (LPA), the current study investiga...

Work-related self-efficacy has been found to predict outcomes such as daily work motivation and performance. However, the way in which self-efficacy changes within workdays and how such changes emerge remain unclear. This study integrates research on work events with a self-regulation perspective to explain changes in daily self-efficacy. We argue...

The concept of a professional skills and abilities mindset denotes beliefs that professional skills and abilities are either malleable (growth mindset) or are uncontrollable and difficult to change (fixed mindset). Based on the career construction theory, we argue that employees’ professional skills and abilities mindset represents an indicator of...

This study investigates the role of sensory processing sensitivity (SPS) as a predictor of employees’ proactive work behavior. SPS is a multidimensional concept that depicts differences in people’s sensory awareness, processing, and reactivity to internal and external influences. Based on research on SPS as grounded in a heightened sensitivity of t...

Thriving at work has been defined as employees’ joint sense of vitality and learning. Based on the socially embedded model of thriving at work, we examine several competing operationalizations of thriving at work. We hypothesize effects of (a) composite thriving, (b) separate vitality and learning scores, and (c) the interaction between vitality an...

Thriving at work has been defined as employees’ joint sense of vitality and learning. Based on the socially embedded model of thriving at work, we examine several competing operationalizations of thriving at work. We hypothesize effects of (a) composite thriving, (b) separate vitality and learning scores, and (c) the interaction between vitality an...

Previous research has shown that after-work free-time activities can enhance employees’ work engagement and positively affect their general well-being and health. This study investigates whether the anticipation of an after-work free-time activity boosts employees’ work engagement. Building on the conservation of resources (COR) theory, we assumed...

The current study seeks to shed light on social-cognitive resources that mitigate master students’ experience of dysfunctional career-related worry before graduation. Based on the career self-management model (CSM; Lent & Brown, 2013 ), we investigate concurrent and time-lagged direct and mediated relationships between career planning, career-relat...

Career exploration refers to the exploration of the environment and the self with the aim of gathering career-related information. On the basis of Lent and Brown's (2013) model of career self-management (CSM), the current meta-analysis examined the antecedents and outcomes of career exploration among college students (K = 109, N = 34,969 students)....

Special issue call for papers. The deadline for submission of manuscripts is September 30, 2022.

This study investigates the relationship between leaders’ neuroticism and their evaluation of the desirability of followers’ proactive behaviour. We argue that leaders high in neuroticism are likely to evaluate follower proactivity as less desirable and that this relationship is amplified when followers are low in conscientiousness and agreeablenes...

Although work events can be regarded as pivotal elements of organizational life, only a few studies have examined how positive and negative events relate to and combine to affect work engagement over time. Theory suggests that, to better understand how current events affect work engagement (WE), we have to account for recent events that have preced...

This chapter presents an overview of research findings on the antecedents of entrepreneurs’ psychological well-being (PWB). We take account of personal, behavioral, and contextual antecedents of entrepreneurs’ PWB. Specifically, we outline how prevailing well-being theories integrate these perspectives and explain the processes that enhance or dimi...

Negative affective states are natural experiences in our daily professional life. There is a general tendency to see negative affect as maladaptive, as a form of negative experience that is preferably to be avoided. In reality, however, the effects of negative affect at work are more complex. Although negative affect may have clear disadvantages, t...

Although work events can be regarded as pivotal elements of organizational life, only a few studies have examined how positive and negative events relate to and combine to affect work engagement over time. Theory suggests that to better understand how current events affect work engagement (WE), we have to account for recent events that have precede...

BACKGROUND The growing demand for the development of leadership skills among medical students is widely recognized. For leadership development to occur, awareness of the organisational and social context and the impact of this context on personal and group functioning and well-being is essential. However, this social context awareness is largely ba...

Professional Identify Formation is regarded as fundamental to medical education. It involves a process of socialisation where knowledge is often acquired unconsciously via social interaction. Concrete teachings to support and mediate this socialisation process are difficult to implement, because of the implicit nature of the transferred knowledge....

Anger is a fundamental negative activating state that may occur in the process of goal pursuit when goals are blocked or frustrated. We investigate when and why anger during goal pursuit may positively or negatively relate to goal achievement. Drawing upon action regulation theory and the literature on affective consequences, we develop and test a...

This study focuses on the identification of business opportunities when entrepreneurs' perceived level of environmental uncertainty changes. We suggest that within persons, exploration mediates this relationship and entrepreneurial self-efficacy moderates whether entrepreneurs explore more or less with increasing uncertainty. To test our moderated...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of information and communication technology (ICT) use for employees by exploring affective ICT events and their relation to employee recovery. We conducted two daily diary studies with knowledge workers in Germany. In study 1 (N = 153), we followed a qualitative approach by developing a taxonomy...

Anhand von theoretischen Ansätzen wird dargestellt, warum der Ruhestandsprozess als Herausforderung für den Einzelnen gilt. Zudem werden empirische Erkenntnisse der zentralen Faktoren zusammengefasst, die den Übergang und eine erfolgreiche Anpassung an die neue Lebensphase determinieren. Zu empirisch bisher bestätigten Faktoren gehören mitunter das...

Schmitt, A., Rosing, K., Zhang, S. X., & Leatherbee, M. (2017). A Dynamic Model of Entrepreneurial Uncertainty and Business Opportunity Identification: Exploration as a Mediator and Entrepreneurial Self-Efficacy as a Moderator. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice.

Unfinished work tasks have been identified as a significant job-related stressor in recent occupational stress research. Extending this research, we examine how and when not finishing one’s tasks by the end of the work week affects work-related rumination at the weekend. Drawing on control theory, we examined competence need satisfaction as a media...

Researchers have neglected dynamic effects of proactive behavior on occupational well-being. We investigated effects of change in personal initiative over six months on changes in emotional engagement and exhaustion over the following six months. Based on the control-process theory on affect, we hypothesized that changes in positive and negative mo...

Research Question: Past research discussed several mechanisms by which positive work events (PWE) might affect well-being outcomes. Theoretical argumentations emphasized potential resource-draining and resource-enhancing as well as appraisal processes. However, previous findings suggested that there might be some boundary conditions for the benefic...

According to conservation of resources model and control theory, routinized task behavior that develops through repeated execution under stable circumstances helps employees to deal with demanding aspects of their jobs. In two studies, we investigated whether routinized task behavior predicts momentary levels of energy. In the first study, 328 empl...

Proaktives Arbeitshandeln ist ein selbststartendes und zukunftsorientiertes Verhalten, mit dem Ziel, Veränderungen frühzeitig herbeizuführen. Die Entwicklung und Verfolgung von proaktiven Zielen hängt wesentlich von motivationalen Faktoren der Mitarbeiter ab, die im Zusammenhang mit folgenden Fragen stehen: Kann ich eigentlich proaktiv handeln, tra...

Based on a lifespan perspective on work design, person-environment interaction and fit theories, models of successful aging at work, and role theory, we review research on the role of worker age in relationships between work characteristics and occupational well-being. We first focus on interaction effects of work characteristics and age on occupat...

Research on business growth has been criticized for methodological weaknesses. We present a mediated moderation growth model as a new methodological approach. We hypothesized that small business managers’ age negatively affects business growth through focus on opportunities. We sampled 201 small business managers and obtained firm performance data...

This study aims to investigate the role of daily vitality as an energy-based mechanism through which sleep quantity and quality relate to proactive behavior. In addition, we propose that daily self-efficacy forms a contingency condition in that self-efficacy facilitates the translation of vitality into proactive behavior. We conducted a 7-day diary...

This study explores the role of work engagement as an affective–motivational mechanism through which transformational leadership may relate to proactive behaviour. In line with a resource-based approach (Hobfoll, 1989), we hypothesize that employees only invest resources provided through work engagement into proactivity when job strain is low. Unde...

Purpose Affective events theory (AET) highlights the importance of work events as antecedents of distinct emotions, attitudes, and work behavior. However, few attempts have been made to systematically classify positive and negative work events. The aim of this study was to develop a comprehensive taxonomy of affective work events to provide a commo...

This study investigates the relationship between outcome responsibility and employees' well-being in terms of emotional exhaustion. Outcome responsibility is a job demand implying that employees' decisions at work have high material and/or nonmaterial consequences. Previous research indicates that outcome responsibility can have both positive and n...

Based on activation theory and appraisal theory, this study examines the curvilinear relationship between time pressure and work engagement. Further, we argue that this curvilinear relation holds only if time pressure is not induced by unreasonable or unnecessary tasks. We tested our hypotheses in a heterogeneous sample of 191 employees. Results of...

Identifying business opportunities under high uncertainty is an important skill for entrepreneurs. This study aims at extending our knowledge on how to improve individual-level business opportunity identification under conditions of uncertainty. Based on a longitudinal field study of 121 start-up entrepreneurs, we tested the role of exploration as...

Mobile technology, with both its ever-improving connectivity and the capabilities of mobile terminals, has revolutionized the way we can work (and lead our private lives). Basically, connectivity through mobile devices and the ability they provide to work at any place and any time can be a double-edged sword: on the one hand, it can open up importa...

Most theoretical frameworks in entrepreneurship emphasize that entrepreneurial passion drives entrepreneurial effort. We hypothesize that the reverse effect is also true, and investigate changes in passion as an outcome of effort. Based on theories of self-regulation and self-perception, we hypothesize that making new venture progress and free choi...

This study addresses the question whether a specific, work-related form of optimistic thinking has motivational consequences in terms of work engagement above and beyond general optimism over time. A specific form of optimistic thinking is focus on opportunities. Focus on opportunities is a future-oriented belief that describes how many plans, goal...

The authors investigated generativity – the concern in establishing and guiding the next generation – as a mediator of the relationship between family business owners' age and succession in family businesses. Data came from 155 family business owners in Germany from different industries between the ages of 26 and 83 years. Results showed that age w...

This study investigated within-person relationships between daily problem solving demands, selection, optimization, and compensation (SOC) strategy use, job satisfaction, and fatigue at work. Based on conservation of resources theory, it was hypothesized that high SOC strategy use boosts the positive relationship between problem solving demands and...

This two-year study with 122 business owners examined the link between affective well-being and task-oriented as well as relationship-oriented personal initiative (PI). We tested two complementary models explaining the link between well-being and PI: (1) broaden-and-build theory and (2) self-regulation as limited resource approach. In line with cur...

The concept of focus on opportunities describes how many new goals, options, and possibilities employees believe to have in their personal future at work. In this multi-sample, multi-method study, the authors investigated relationships between focus on opportunities and general and daily work engagement and the moderating role of focus on opportuni...

The goal of this study was to examine cultural differences in the value of family involvement in German and Chinese small businesses due to their differences in collectivism/individualism. Our analyses, based on a sample of 562 Chinese and German owners, showed that family involvement — measured as the number of family members that work in the busi...

On the basis of self-regulation theories, the authors develop an affective shift model of work engagement according to which work engagement emerges from the dynamic interplay of positive and negative affect. The affective shift model posits that negative affect is positively related to work engagement if negative affect is followed by positive aff...