Laurenz L Meier

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at University of Neuchâtel

Does work-family conflict predict strain, does strain predict work-family conflict, or are they reciprocally related? To answer these questions, we used meta-analytic path analyses on 33 studies that had repeatedly measured work interference with family (WIF) or family interference with work (FIW) and strain. Additionally, this study sheds light on...

Cross-lagged models are by far the most commonly used method to test the prospective effect of one construct on another, yet there are no guidelines for interpreting the size of cross-lagged effects. This research aims to establish empirical benchmarks for cross-lagged effects, focusing on the cross-lagged panel model (CLPM) and the random intercep...

There is sample evidence that work conditions affect employees' well-being. Losses in work quality (increased job stressors and reduced job resources) are thought to be related to deteriorations in well-being, whereas gains in work quality (reduced job stressors and increased job resources) are believed to improve well-being. The way most previous...

Studies investigating the stressor–strain relation using daily diary designs have been interested in within-person deviations that predict well-being outcomes on the same day. These models typically have not accounted for the possibility of short-term accumulation (i.e. previous stressor experiences having a lasting effect and affecting strain on s...

In this editorial, we discuss approaches to the empirical test of gain and loss cycles as described within Hobfoll's conservation of resources theory (COR). We present COR theory's basic assumptions about gain and loss cycles and critically discuss typical empirical studies that aim at testing these assumptions. We highlight conceptual and empirica...

Objective Despite extensive research on occupational stress and impaired recovery, the reverse effects of lack of recovery on work conditions remain largely underexplored. Methods Panel questionnaire data from N = 4’322 Swiss workers were collected annually across 12 years. Lack of detachment, sleeping problems, vitality, and changes in working co...

Most research regarding social comparisons on social media has been limited demonstrating their effects on mental health, without explaining the underlying motivational mechanics. It appears that individuals are often motivated to reduce uncertainty about the self. Social media may serve as a tool to access diagnostic information through social com...

Empathy plays a crucial role in the workplace, associated with positive outcomes, including helping behavior and task performance. While most studies have treated empathy as a unidimensional and trait-like characteristic, empathy is best understood as a two-dimensional construct, encompassing stable and fluctuating aspects. Considering this concept...

Zahlreiche Klassifikationsmöglichkeiten gesundheitsfördernder Maßnahmen im Arbeitskontext wie z. B. die Unterscheidung personenbezogener und bedingungsbezogener Maßnahmen oder die Einordnung als primäre, sekundäre oder tertiäre Prävention beziehen sich auf die inhaltliche Ausrichtung der Verfahren. Darüber hinaus lassen sich gesundheitsfördernde In...

Rédigé par quinze contributrices et contributeurs actives et actifs dans l'administration, le barreau et/ou l'enseignement, l'ouvrage a pour but de présenter les principaux défis et normes légales relatifs au télétravail.

Research on workplace incivility principally has focused on targets’ reactions to uncivil behaviours. Moreover, incivility’s consequences have been separately investigated for targets and observers. In the present diary study (N = 164), we examined the short-term effects of experienced incivility on targets’ angry mood, depressive mood, and self-es...

Zusammenfassung Die technischen und kulturellen Entwicklungen der digitalen Transformation machen Arbeit quasi immer und überall verfügbar. Indem digitales Arbeiten flexibler wird, steigt die Integration unserer Lebensbereiche und die Grenzen zwischen Arbeits- und Privatleben beginnen zu verschwimmen. Digitale Arbeit kann in Abhängigkeit von der In...

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...

Implying an offense to self, appraising a stressor as indicating a lack of consideration by others should have effects beyond its stressfulness per se. In Stress-as-Offense-to-Self theory (SOS), such stressors are called “illegitimate stressors.” We assessed situations appraised as stressful in two diary studies (N1 = 117, N2 = 137). Outcome variab...

This study examines the effects of appreciation and illegitimate tasks on affective well-being. As empirical results often refer to inter-individual effects but are interpreted in terms of intra-individual effects, we try to disentangle the two. In longitudinal multilevel structural equation models with data of 308 participants, appreciation predic...

Work interruptions are contemporary job stressors that occur frequently in the workplace. Theories on work interruptions and the stressor–strain relationship over time suggest that work interruptions should have a lagged negative effect on well-being. However, we argue that continued changes in work interruptions may also be important for employees...

Objectives To investigate the relationship between teamwork and clinical performance and potential moderating variables of this relationship. Design Systematic review and meta-analysis. Data source PubMed was searched in June 2018 without a limit on the date of publication. Additional literature was selected through a manual backward search of rele...

Stress is related to goals being thwarted. Arguably, protecting one’s self, both in terms of personal self-esteem and in terms of social self-esteem, is among the most prominent goals people pursue. Although this line of thought is hardly disputed, it does not play the prominent role in occupational health psychology that we think it deserves. Stre...

This study used an experience sampling design to examine the spillover effects of experienced workplace incivility from organizational insiders (coworkers and supervisors, respectively) and organizational outsiders (patients and their visitors) on targets' work‐to‐family conflict and to test the mediating effect of burnout and the moderating effect...

Airbnb, Mobility, Uber, économie de partage ou de plateforme, intermédiation numérique, Big data, intelligence artificielle, réalité virtuelle, cloud computing, internet des objets, usine intelligente, robots … La Révolution 4.0, comme on l’appelle, ou la quatrième révolution industrielle, est en marche et nous serions, pour certains, à l’aube d...

This study analyzed the effects of work interruptions as a stressor and appreciation of employees by supervisors as a resource with regard to four parameters of well-being, postulating main effects and interactions. Using latent moderated structural equation modeling, we analyzed longitudinal data on 208 employees at seven different companies who c...

Illegitimate tasks are tasks that violate norms about what an employee can reasonably be expected to do. Representing a relatively recent stressor concept, illegitimate tasks have been linked to strain, but so far have been assessed only by self-report. The current multisource study investigates to what extent supervisors’ assessments of illegitima...

With the mounting evidence that employees’ work experiences spill over into the family domain and cross over to family members, it is important to understand the underlying mechanism through which work experiences affect the family domain and what factors may alleviate the adverse impact of work stress. Expanding previous research that mainly focus...

Justice is a core fundamental theme for individuals in organizations. This study suggests that believing that the world is just where one gets what one deserves, and deserves what one gets, is an important personal resource that helps maintain wellbeing at work. Further, it suggests that personal belief in a just world, but not general belief in a...

Core self-evaluations (CSE) might account for relative gains in job resources across time, especially in situations when these individual differences affect behavior that is relevant for development of job resources. This longitudinal study tests CSE as an individual resource that predicts relative gain in job resources and job satisfaction among j...

Aims: The main aim of this longitudinal study was to test the Job Demand-Control-Support (JDCS) model and to analyze whether changes in psychosocial job characteristics are related to (changes in) burnout. Background: Previous studies on the effects of JDCS variables on burnout dimensions have indicated that the iso-strain hypothesis (i.e., high jo...

Research in occupational health psychology has tended to focus on the effects of single job characteristics or various job characteristics combined into 1 factor. However, such a variable-centered approach does not account for the clustering of job attributes among groups of employees. We addressed this issue by using a person-centered approach to...

Background Effectively managing patient safety and clinicians’ emotional exhaustion are important goals of healthcare organizations. Previous cross-sectional studies showed that teamwork is associated with both. However, causal relationships between all three constructs have not yet been investigated. Moreover, the role of different dimensions of t...

Previous research has shown that work–privacy conflict (WPC) is associated with musculoskeletal pain (MSP), but the processes involved are unclear. This study simultaneously tested strain and sleep problems as mediators in three mediation paths (WPC →strain→MSP; WPC →sleep problems→MSP; and WPC →strain→sleep problems→MSP). Total mediation (includin...

Previous research showed that psychological detachment from work during leisure time is beneficial and that reflecting on negative aspects of work is detrimental for employees’􏰀well- being. However, little is known about the role of positive reflection about work during leisure time. In the present research, we examined the effects of positive work...

Antecedents of affective versus cognitive components of daily job satisfaction were compared. According to the affective events theory, the affective component should relate more strongly to state affect and affective work experiences than the cognitive component. In multilevel regression analyses of 280 daily reports from 40 participants, within-p...

Illegitimate tasks, a recently introduced occupational stressor, are tasks that violate norms about what an employee can reasonably be expected to do. Because they are considered a threat to one's professional identity, we expected that the daily experience of illegitimate tasks would be linked to a drop in self-esteem and to impaired well-being. W...

A growing body of research supports the vulnerability model of low self-esteem and depression, which states that low self-esteem is a risk factor for depression. The goal of the present research was to refine the vulnerability model, by testing whether the self-esteem effect is truly due to a lack of genuine self-esteem or due to a lack of narcissi...

Scholars have hypothesized that experiencing incivility not only negatively affects well-being, but may even trigger further antisocial behavior. Previous research, however, has focused mainly on the relation between incivility and well-being. Thus, little is known about the behavioral consequences of incivility. With this in mind, we conducted an...

Aims: To investigate the role of clinician burnout, demographic, and organizational characteristics in predicting subjective and objective indicators of patient safety. Background: Maintaining clinician health and ensuring safe patient care are important goals for hospitals. While these goals are not independent from each other, the interplay betwe...

Job satisfaction is a person's overall evaluation of his or her job as favorable or unfavorable. Both personal characteristics such as traits and situational characteristics such as work stressors affect people's job satisfaction. Job satisfaction is related to many factors that are important for human resource management, such as performance, coun...

High self-esteem often predicts job-related outcomes, such as high job satisfaction or high status. Theoretically, high quality jobs (HQJs) should be important for self-esteem, as they enable people to use a variety of skills and attribute accomplishments to themselves, but research findings are mixed. We expected reciprocal relationships between s...

Illegitimate tasks represent a task-level stressor derived from role and justice theories within the framework of " Stress-as–Offense-to-Self " (SOS; Semmer, Jacobshagen, Meier, & Elfering, 2007). Tasks are illegitimate if they violate norms about what an employee can properly be expected to do, because they are perceived as unnecessary or unreason...

The field of organizational behavior is very much concerned with process—the temporal sequence by which conditions, events, and states unfold. Such processes are implied in tests of mediation and more complex causal chains. The popular approach of analyzing data from cross-sectional designs with complex statistics is not particularly helpful in und...

Background: Impaired well-being and high work-family conflict are critical issues among GPs. This research examined an understudied psychosocial risk factor for these outcomes, namely GPs' perception that they invest more in the relationship with their patients than what they receive in return (i.e. lack of reward in their relationship with patien...

Although previous studies have linked workplace incivility with various negative outcomes, they mainly focused on the long-term effects of chronic exposure to workplace incivility, whereas targets' short-term reactions to incivility episodes have been largely neglected. Using a daily diary design, the current study examined effects of daily workpla...

A growing body of longitudinal studies suggests that low self-esteem is a risk factor for depression. However, it is unclear whether other characteristics of self-esteem, besides its level, explain incremental or even greater variance in subsequent depression. We examined the prospective effects of self-esteem level, instability (i.e., the degree o...

The current study examined interactive effects among personality and job stressors in predicting employees' engagement in counterproductive work behavior (CWB) defined as behavior that harms organizations or people in organizations. Survey data were collected from 932 employees and results showed significant negative relationships of agreeableness,...

Theory, constructs, and research with regard to individual work– family boundary management dynamics are reviewed with the goal of promoting a greater understanding and integration of the existing literature. The article begins by noting trends that have contributed to interest in the topic, and then outlines major theoretical perspectives on bound...

In occupational health research, aspects of psychological well-being, including depressive symp-toms, have mainly been considered as an outcome. In this research, we examined the role of depressive symptoms as a moderator in the relationship between interpersonal conflict at work and psychological and physical well-being. We assumed that people wit...

In occupational health research, aspects of psychological well-being, including depressive symptoms, have mainly been considered as an outcome. In this research, we examined the role of depressive symptoms as a moderator in the relationship between interpersonal conflict at work and psychological and physical well-being. We assumed that people with...

We examined the reciprocal prospective relations between self-esteem and work conditions and outcomes, including justice at work, support at work, work stressors, job satisfaction, job success, and counterproductive work behavior. Data came from two independent longitudinal studies, including five assessments over an 8-month period (N = 663, age 16...

The goal of the present research was to examine antecedents of uncivil behaviour towards coworkers and supervisors. Based on Spector’s model (e.g., Spector & Fox, 2005a), we investigated the role of work characteristics (lack of reciprocity in the relationship with one’s organization), personality (narcissism), and work-related anger simultaneously...

The present study investigated short-term effects of daily social exclusion at work on various indicators of sleep quality and tested the mediating role of work-related worries using a time-based diary study with ambulatory assessments of sleep quality. Ninety full-time employees participated in a 2-week data collection. Multilevel analyses reveale...

Illegitime Aufgaben sind Bestandteil des „Stress-as-Offense-to-Self“-Konzepts, das an der Universität Bern entwickelt wurde. Es geht von der Annahme aus, dass viele Situationen vor allem dadurch Stress auslösen, dass sie Ausdruck mangelnder Wertschätzung sind und damit den Selbstwert bedrohen. Illegitime Aufgaben sind definiert als Aufgaben, die ma...

Our research examined short-term within-person effects of relationship and task conflict on angry mood and somatic complaints. We assumed that conflicts of both kinds would be prospectively related to both indicators of impaired well-being, that the effect of relationship conflict would be stronger than the effect of task conflict, and that the eff...

Previous research has clearly shown that work stressors are positively related to counterproductive work behavior (CWB). Most of these studies, however, used cross-sectional designs, which limits insight into the direction of effects. Nevertheless, it has been assumed that work stressors have a causal effect on CWB, but the role of CWB as an antece...

Emma and Harry both work in the service sector. They have normal jobs and spend five days a week, from Monday to Friday, at their workplace. It is Monday morning and they are about to start their working week. Emma has fully recovered from the weekend and, in light of the forthcoming interesting day at work, feels vigorous and lively. This is also...

Objectives: Illegitimate tasks refer to tasks that do not conform to what can appropriately be expected from an employee. Violating role expectations, they constitute "identity-stressors", as one's professional role tends to become part of one's identity. The current study investigated the impact of illegitimate tasks on salivary cortisol. We anal...

Previous research supports the vulnerability model of low self-esteem and depression, which states that low self-esteem operates as a prospective risk factor for depression. However, it is unclear which processes mediate the effect of low self-esteem. To test for the mediating effect of rumination, the authors used longitudinal mediation models, wh...

Previous workplace research on narcissists has mainly focused on their performance or their role as leaders. However, little is known about their reaction to work stressors. The current study examined the moderating role of narcissism in the relationship between lack of reciprocity (feeling under-benefited) and irritation. Based on the notion that...

We investigated age differences in instability, contingency, and level of self-esteem from age 13 to 72 years, using data from 1386 individuals who participated in a diary study over 25 days. Instability and contingency of self-esteem decreased from adolescence to old age, whereas level of self-esteem increased. Big Five personality traits predicte...

There is evidence that daily negative events at work enhance fatigue. In contrast, positive events may trigger processes that increase, but also processes that decrease, energetic resources. Accordingly, results regarding a main effect of positive events on fatigue have been mixed. However, a clearer pattern between positive events and fatigue can...

A literature review of studies analyzing work-family conflict and its consequences was conducted, and 427 effect sizes were analyzed meta-analytically. Work-family conflict was analyzed bidirectionally in terms of work interference with family (WIF) and family interference with work (FIW). We assessed 3 categories of potential outcomes: work-relate...

Research concerning the association between stress at work and body mass index (BMI) has mainly focused on two models (ie, job demand-control and effort-reward imbalance) as predictors and mostly been cross-sectional. The aim of our study is to extend previous research in two ways. First, social stressors - in the sense of social conflict and animo...

Illegitimate tasks represent a new stressor concept that is specifically tied to feeling offended. Tasks are legitimate to the extent that they conform to norms about what can reasonably be expected from a given person, and they are illegitimate to the extent that they violate such norms. Illegitimate tasks therefore are conceived as offending one'...

IntroductionIndividual Differences and Stress Experiences: Basic MechanismsWhat Makes Stressors Stressful? The Role of Goals and Aspirations in the Stress ProcessVulnerable VS. Resilient PersonsResponse Tendencies and CopingFinal CommentsReferences

Diathesis-stress models of depression suggest that low self-esteem and stressful events jointly influence the development of depressive affect. More specifically, the self-esteem buffering hypothesis states that, in the face of challenging life circumstances, individuals with low self-esteem are prone to depression because they lack sufficient copi...

This research examines the moderating roles of self-esteem level and self-esteem instability in the relationship between perceived unfair treatment and depressive mood. Based on the assumption that unfairness is a threat to one's social standing and self-esteem, the authors proposed that individuals with highly fragile self-esteem (i.e., the combin...

In this study, the comprehensive value research by Schwartz (e.g. 1992) was linked to Fiske's relational models theory (RMT, e.g. Fiske, 1991). A sample of 297 people answered the personal values questionnaire (PVQ), the modes of relationship questionnaire (MORQ) and the relationship profile scale (RPS) in a web-based online survey. As hypothesized...

Deficits in emotion-regulation skills have widely been shown to be associated with poor emotional adjustment. However, it is still unclear whether these deficits are a cause or a consequence of poor adjustment. The purpose of the present research was to clarify the reciprocal effects between these 2 concepts. In 2 studies (Ns = 446 and 635), self-r...

The Job Demand-Control model postulates that job control attenuates the effects of job demands on health and well-being. Support for this interactive effect is rather weak. Conceivably, it holds only when there is a match between job control and individual characteristics that relate to exercising control options, such as locus of control, or self-...

Forgiveness is often assumed to be adaptive for psychological adjustment following interpersonal transgressions. Three hundred and forty seven individuals who had experienced a recent interpersonal transgression were surveyed on four occasions over the course of six weeks. Forgiveness was assessed with scales measuring interpersonal avoidance and r...