Jari J Hakanen

Finnish Institute of Occupational Health | FIOH · Modern Work and Leadership

This study investigated the relationship between work engagement, workaholism, and mental well-being of individuals and their intimate partners. This association was explored in the context of Indonesian dual-earner couples, using the Spillover-Crossover Model (SCM). The study examined how work-to-family spillover (i.e. work-to-family conflict and...

Studies published on the validity of the Burnout Assessment Tool (BAT), a novel burnout instrument, have gained traction in the literature over recent years. The BAT has been successfully shown to be equivalent across representative samples when modeled as a second-order/higher-order model. However, this specification is not free of criticism and t...

Background Job boredom has been generally associated with poorer self-rated health but the evidence is mainly cross-sectional and there is a lack of a holistic mental health approach. We examined the temporal relationships between job boredom and mental health indicators of life satisfaction, positive functioning, anxiety, and depression symptoms....

Applying job demands–resources theory, this quasiexperimental, three-wave study investigated whether work engagement can be increased via an eLearning intervention aiming to increase job crafting behavior. Furthermore, proposing a refinement to job demands–resources theory, that is, adding “a health enhancement process,” this study also investigate...

Job boredom refers to an unpleasant state of passiveness at work that has been found to negatively relate to self‐reported health. To date, however, the relation between job boredom and physiological indicators of health has not been examined. The present study investigates whether job boredom relates to dysfunction in autonomic nervous system (ANS...

Boredom at work is perceived to result from lacking job stressors as opposed to exhaustion that is a response to excessive job stressors. Employee boredom and exhaustion have thus been considered as antithetical states, and yet they are found to be positively related. It is therefore unclear how boredom and exhaustion manifest among workers. We bui...

Digitalization adds demands to contend with technological developments for both employees and organizations. At the same time, technological changes transform work to become more intensive and hectic. This study examined determinants of technological well-being after digitized work. Technological well-being was operationalized as Digi-downshifting...

Job crafting is a concept of increasing interest to human resource management (HRM), as it involves employees re-designing their jobs to maintain and increase their person-job fit. Job crafting is seen as an individual’s self-focused approach to his/her work, and the way other people influence and are influenced by these behaviors is understudied....

Objective: Despite decades of burnout research, clinical validated cut-off scores that discriminate between those who suffer from burnout and those who don't are still lacking. To establish such cut-off scores, the current study uses a newly developed questionnaire, the Burnout Assessment Tool (BAT) that consists of four subscales (exhaustion, men...

We aimed to identify different, both balanced and imbalanced, effort–reward profiles and their relations to several indicators of employee well-being (work engagement, job satisfaction, job boredom, and burnout), mental health (positive functioning, life satisfaction, anxiety, and depression symptoms), and job attitudes (organizational identificati...

Unlabelled: Given that millions of employees switched to mandatory telework during COVID-19, and as teleworking practices are likely to continue, it is essential to understand the potential impact of mandatory and non-flexible teleworking practices on employee well-being. Drawing on Conservation of Resources theory, we find support for resource ga...

Self-management in Finnish working life – where and who experience it? Recently, self-management has been presented as a solution to higher motivation, agility, and innovativeness. Despite increased interest in the topic, many of the theoretical claims have yet to be studied quantitatively. This research aims to illuminate where and who experiences...

Objectives Novel information about the relationships between farmers’ job demands, lack of resource, burnout, and ill health is reported based on testing the so-called “health impairment process” of the Job Demands─Resources Model (JD-R) on a representative sample of Finnish dairy farmers. The aim was to find out whether two different job demand fa...

What individuals themselves may do to enhance their identification with their employer organization? Does being socially courageous promote such formation of identity? If so, does this process occur because those who are socially courageous also proactively foster positive relationships and collaboration amongst co-workers and thus enhance social r...

The United Nations’ World Happiness Report has ranked Finland as the happiest country for three consecutive years. In this research, we employed thematic analysis to analyze Instagram posts (N = 650) tagged with the hashtag “#happy” produced by Finnish-speaking users (#onnellinen in Finnish) during 2018, the first year that Finland gained the title...

Objectives: This study investigated how occupational well-being evolved across different phases, before and during the COVID-19 outbreak in the Finnish population. Whereas studies have suggested that certain demographic groups (eg, young, female) are more at risk during COVID-19, less is known whether the effects of such demographic factors may va...

Compassion is in high demand within organizational research, with important implications for leadership, well-being, and productivity. However, thus far only meditation-based interventions have been implemented to increase compassion in organizations. Our aim was to explore whether compassion could be increased among managers through improving thei...

Background: Identifying the most significant risk factors for physician burnout can help to define the priority areas for burnout prevention. However, not much is known about the relative importance of these risk factors. Aims: This study was aimed to examine the relative importance of multiple work-related psychosocial factors in predicting bur...

There is no consensus on whether burnout constitutes a depressive condition or an original entity requiring specific medical and legal recognition. In this study, we examined burnout–depression overlap using 14 samples of individuals from various countries and occupational domains (N = 12,417). Meta-analytically pooled disattenuated correlations in...

Background: COVID-19 pandemic has changed work life profoundly and concerns of employees' mental well-being have risen. Organizations have taken rapid digital leaps and started to use new collaborative tools such as social media platforms overnight. Objective: Our study investigated how professional social media communication has affected work e...

Työn tuunaaminen on työntekijälähtöistä työn sisällön ja työtapojen kehittämistä. Työn tuunaamisen avulla työntekijät voivat säädellä työnsä psykososiaalisia voimavaroja ja vaatimuksia ja edistää työhyvinvointiaan, työn imua. Työn imusta puolestaan koituu erilaisia terveyshyötyjä. Vaikka työn tuunaamiseen perustuvia kehittämisvalmennuksia on h...

Job resources are known to be key drivers of work engagement, but surprisingly, little is known about the relative importance of specific job resources in comparison to one another. We investigated the relative importance of eight job resources both cross-sectionally and over a 3-year time period. We hypothesized that job resources at the task leve...

BACKGROUND COVID-19 pandemic has changed work life profoundly and concerns of employees’ mental well-being have risen. Organizations have taken rapid digital leaps and started to use new collaborative tools such as social media platforms overnight. OBJECTIVE Our study investigated how professional social media usage has affected work engagement be...

Objective A consensual definition of occupational burnout is currently lacking. We aimed to harmonize the definition of occupational burnout as a health outcome in medical research and reach a consensus on this definition within the Network on the Coordination and Harmonisation of European Occupational Cohorts (OMEGA-NET). Methods First, we perform...

Despite ample interest in the potential consequences of work engagement over the last two decades, the question of whether work engagement predicts proximal and more distal career-related outcomes has gained surprisingly little attention. Using Conservation of Resources (COR) theory and a sustainable careers framework, the aim of this study was to...

Job crafting is theorized to operate via changes that employees make to their work designs, yet this critical mechanism has remained scarcely tested. This study examined whether job crafting facilitates changes in two types of challenge demands, namely workload and job complexity, and hindrance demands and whether these changes explain why job craf...

In this study, we provide insights on how servant leadership may promote employee performance. We investigate whether the associations between increases in servant leadership and employees’ task and adaptive performance are mediated by changes in the two antipodes of employee well-being: work engagement and burnout. We utilized a two-wave survey da...

The United Nations’ World Happiness Report has ranked Finland as the happiest country for three consecutive years. In this research, we employed thematic analysis to analyze Instagram posts (N = 650) tagged with the hashtag “#happy” produced by Finnish-speaking users (#onnellinen in Finnish) during 2018, the first year that Finland gained the title...

Job crafting describes proactive employee behaviors to improve the design of their work and working conditions, and to adapt their job to better suit their abilities and needs. During organizational changes, employees may use job crafting to adjust to the changes in their work and protect their well-being and motivation, i.e., work engagement. Howe...

We formulated a harmonized definition of occupational burnout concept and experts from 29 countries consensually approved it. Official medical vocabulary should integrate this concept and its definition. This will reduce the semantic confusion associated with this concept, improve the quality of evidence on this outcome, and stimulate the research...

Work engagement is expected to result from job resources such as autonomy. However, previous results have yielded that the autonomy–work engagement relationship is not always particularly strong. Whereas previous longitudinal studies have examined this relationship as an average at a specific point in time, this study examined whether this relation...

The aim of this study was to investigate the measurement invariance of the Burnout Assessment Tool (BAT) across seven cross-national representative samples. In this study, burnout was modeled as a second-order factor in line with the conceptual definition as a syndrome. The combined sample consisted of 10,138 participants from countries in Europe a...

It is important for organizations to identify the drivers for effective collaboration in contemporary teams, such as self-managed ad hoc teams. Therefore, we aimed to investigate (1) the influence of team task engagement and mastery experiences on collective efficacy beliefs and (2) the temporal relationship between team task engagement and task pe...

The aim of this study was to investigate the relative importance of four job demands and five job resources for employee vitality, i.e., work engagement and exhaustion, in three different employment groups: permanent, temporary and temporary agency workers. We employed data from the sixth European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS) collected in 2015...

Emotional demands are an inevitable feature of human services, and suggested to be a defining antecedent for workers’ stress and ill health. However, previous research indicate that emotional demands can have a favorably association to certain facets of human service workers’ motivation and well-being. Furthermore, recent research report that the e...

The research project and its objectives This report presents the key outcomes, conclusions and recommendations of the Personnel as a strategic resource (PSR) research project. This project is part of the ARTTU2 Research Programme coordinated by the Association of Finnish Local Regional Authorities. The project was implemented in 2016 –2018 by a con...

Objective: The aim was to investigate differences in the levels of work engagement across demographic and work- and organization-related factors, and their relative importance for work engagement. Methods: The study was based on a sample of 17 498 male and 17 897 female employees from the sixth European Working Conditions Survey collected in 201...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effectiveness of a job resources-based intervention aimed at proactively increasing work engagement and team innovativeness during organizational restructuring using a person-centered approach. Design/methodology/approach The intervention was conducted in two organizations: two departments se...

Upwork is the world's largest online labor market platform connecting clients with freelance professionals from various disciplines ranging from administrative support to web development. This study documents the main findings of the Upworkers in Finland survey conducted in December 2017. The survey targeted all freelancers listed on the platform w...

Background: Being involved in an artistic intervention is related to employeesinterest to do work tasks in other ways and to develop new professional skills. These proactive changes, job crafting, that employees make to their work conditions increase work-related well-being, work engagement. Methods: This two-wave quasi-experimental intervention st...

In this chapter, Hakanen and Pessi discuss servant leadership from the perspectives of compassion and compassionate leadership in organizations. The chapter introduces the core features of servant leadership and how in the roles of a leader and a servant, managers can demonstrate and practise compassion. In the chapter, three Finnish research and i...

Aim This study aims at investigating the nomological validity of the Copenhagen Psychosocial Questionnaire (COPSOQ II) by using an extension of the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model with aspects of work ability as outcome. Material and methods The study design is cross-sectional. All staff working at public dental organizations in four regions of...

Job crafting refers to the proactive actions employees take to redesign their jobs in order to get a better fit with their competencies, expectations, and wishes. So far, little is known about job crafting's underlying mechanisms. In this study, we examine how two different states of affective well-being (workaholism and work engagement) relate to...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine cross-level effects of team-level servant leadership on job boredom and the mediating role of job crafting. Cross-level moderating effects of team-level servant leadership were also investigated. Design/methodology/approach This longitudinal study employed a multilevel design in a sample of 237 emp...

The current study introduces an ultra-short, 3-item version of the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale. Using five national samples from Finland (N = 22,117), Japan (N = 1,968), the Netherlands (N = 38,278), Belgium/Flanders (N = 5,062), and Spain (N = 10,040) its internal consistency and factorial validity vis-à-vis validated measures of burnout, workah...

Objectives: Dentistry is characterized by a meaningful but also stressful psychosocial working environment. Job satisfaction varies among staff working under different organizational forms. The aim of this study was to identify (i) to what extent crucial psychosocial work environment characteristics differ among occupations in general public denta...

This paper tests and confirms the cross-cultural equivalence of the Servant Leadership Survey (SLS) in eight countries and languages: The Netherlands, Portugal, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Spain, Turkey and Finland. A composite sample consisting of 5201 respondents from eight countries that all filled out the SLS was used. A three-step approach was ad...

We used and integrated the circumplex model of affect (Russell, 1980) and the conservation of resources theory (Hobfoll, 1998) to hypothesize how various types of employee well-being, which can be differentiated on theoretical grounds (i.e., work engagement, job satisfaction, burnout, and workaholism), may differently predict various job crafting b...

PurposeTraditionally, employee well-being has been considered as resulting from decent working conditions arranged by the organization. Much less is known about whether employees themselves can make self-initiated changes to their work, i.e., craft their jobs, in order to stay well, even in highly demanding work situations. The aim of this study wa...

Burnout is a response to prolonged stressors at work, and is defined as a chronic syndrome including exhaustion, cynicism, and reduced professional efficacy. The 40 years of research on burnout have yielded thousands of studies on its measurement, antecedents, correlates, and consequences. However, most of these studies have used a cross-sectional...

The aims of this study were twofold: first, to investigate whether both individual and team work engagement are associated with team members' perceived team performance, and, second, to explore whether shared job crafting within teams moderates the relationship between work engagement and team members' perceived team performance. Data were collecte...

Building upon the Conservation of Resources (COR) theory, this longitudinal study examined whether job crafting behaviors (i.e. increasing structural and social job resources and increasing challenges) predict less job boredom and more work engagement. We also tested the reverse causation effects of job boredom and work engagement on job crafting a...

The Copenhagen Psychosocial Questionnaire (COPSOQ II) includes scales for measuring 'workplace social capital'. The overall aim of this article is to evaluate the content validity of the following scales: horizontal trust, vertical trust and justice based on data from cognitive interviews using a think-aloud procedure. Informants were selected to a...

Purpose – Job boredom is an amotivational state at work, where employees lack interest in their work activities and have difficulties concentrating on them. Although recent research suggests that job boredom may concern a wide range of industries, studies investigating the experience and its emergence in white-collar work are scarce. Thereby the pu...

This longitudinal study systematically examines the various roles played by the personal resource "sense of coherence" (SoC) in the motivational process described by the job-demands-resources model. SoC captures the extent to which people perceive their life as comprehensible, manageable and meaningful, and there is evidence of its influence in man...

This longitudinal study examined the consequences of job crafting on two important employee outcomes: psychological capital (PsyCap) as a work-related personal resource and work engagement as an indicator of employee well-being. The study also tested the reverse causation effects of PsyCap and work engagement on job crafting. It used a three-wave,...

To investigate the long-term relationships between work engagement, workaholism, work-to-family enrichment, and work-to-family conflict (WFC). We used structural equation modeling and the three-wave 7-year follow-up data of 1580 Finnish dentists to test our hypotheses. Work engagement and work-to-family enrichment mutually predicted each other, and...

Using the stability and change model, conservation of resources theory and the job demands-resources model, this study aimed to determine: (1) the extent to which work engagement and job resources can be explained by a component reflecting stability and a component reflecting change in these constructs, and (2) the strength and direction of the rel...

The present study investigated the factor structure of the 10-item version of the Dutch Work Addiction Scale (DUWAS). The DUWAS-10 is intended to measure workaholism with two correlated factors: working excessively (WE) and working compulsively (WC). The factor structure of the DUWAS-10 was examined among multi-occupational samples from the Netherl...

Objective: To investigate the correlates of job boredom in 87 Finnish workplaces (N = 11,468) and to examine the associations between job boredom, health outcomes, and job attitudes. Methods: We applied the Dutch Boredom Scale to measure job boredom. Hierarchical logistic regression analysis and odds ratio estimates were used for further examina...

Objective: To investigate developmental paths in multisite musculoskeletal pain (MPS) and depressive symptoms (DPS) and the effects of job demands (JD), job resources (JR), optimism and health-related lifestyle on these paths. We expected to find four trajectories--Low Symptoms, High Pain, High Depression and High Symptoms--and hypothesised that h...

We applied a person-centred approach to study the relationship between burnout and depressive symptoms at baseline and over seven years. We examined how the symptom clusters and trajectories are related to the baseline sociodemographic and psychosocial work characteristics. At baseline, burnout and depressive symptoms clustered into three groups: l...

This cross-sectional study examines whether job burnout (exhaustion) and work engagement are associated with the clinical productivity of dentists measured by the amount of paid procedure fees in a single month. We conducted an OLS regression analyses of data on dentists working at municipal health centers in Finland (N = 269; response rate 37%). T...

The aim of this study was to investigate the conditions under which job-related exhaustion may transmit (cross over) from dentists to dental nurses and vice versa. We conducted a cross-sectional survey study among 470 Finnish dentist-dental nurse dyads and used moderated structural equation modelling analyses. We found no support for the direct cro...

Using a two-wave 10-year longitudinal design, this study examined the motivational process proposed by the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model. The aim was to examine whether work engagement acts as a mediator between job resources (i.e. supervisory relations, interpersonal relations and task resources) and personal resources (self-esteem) on the on...

"East is East and West is West and Never The Twain Shall Meet:" work engagement and workaholism across eastern and western cultures this article compared the mean levels of work engagement and workaholism across two cultures (East Asia and Western Europe) using a latent variable approach. Data were collected in Western Europe in the Netherlands (N...

To investigate the change trajectories of positive and negative moods and their relationship to work ability, self-rated health, and life satisfaction in a three-wave 13-year follow-up study. The data, consisting of Finnish firefighters (n = 360), were collected via questionnaires in 1996, 1999, and 2009. Four distinct mood trajectories were identi...

Työn imun ja ystävällisyyden siirtyminen työpareilla vaikutus on runsasta ja toistuvaa (Bakker & Xant-hopoulou, 2009; Hakanen, Perhoniemi & Bakker, 2012). Lääkärin ja hoitajan tiivis yhteistyö on tavallista terveydenhuollossa, mutta erityisen tiivistä se on suun terveydenhuollossa. Hammaslääkäri ja hammashoitaja työskentelevät useimmiten päivit-täi...

Objective In this study, we hypothesized that dentist' interpersonal resources (good cooperation with one's assistant) together with their personal resources (optimism) buffer the negative effects of emotional dissonance (a demand that occurs when there is a difference between felt and displayed emotions) on job performance (in-role and extra-role...