Michal Biron

University of Haifa | haifa · School of Business Administration

Although it is commonly assumed that alcohol consumption has a significant impact on employee absenteeism, the nature of the alcohol–absence relationship remains poorly understood. Proposing that alcohol impairment likely serves as a key mechanism linking drinking and work absence, we posit that this relationship is likely governed less by the amou...

Although studies have found evidence that certain workplace conditions in North American enterprises may serve as risk factors for alcohol and illicit drug use, little is known regarding the generalizability of these findings to enterprises in other countries. To address this gap, we collected data from a random sample of 569 blue-collar workers em...

Job burnout and depression have been generally found to be correlated with one another. However, evidence regarding the job burnout–depression association is limited in that most studies are cross-sectional in nature. Moreover, little is known about factors that may influence the job burnout–depression association, other than individual or organiza...

Past research reveals inconsistent findings regarding the association between aversive workplace conditions and absenteeism, suggesting that other, contextual factors may play a role in this association. Extending contemporary models of absence, we draw from the social identity theory of attitude-behavior relations to examine how peer absence-relat...

Drawing from social identity and social influence theory, we propose that the absence-related norms of an individual’s work-based referent others will have a significant effect on the likelihood of excessive absence behavior. We then develop and test a model of the social mechanisms potentially underlying the relationship between referent absence n...

The third edition of The Global Human Resource Management Casebook provides a wide range of international teaching cases exploring contemporary human resource management (HRM) challenges. Each case focuses primarily on one country and illustrates a critical HRM issue confronting managers and HRM practitioners. This real-world application provides s...

Presenteeism refers to working despite ill health that might otherwise warrant sickness absence. Estimated to cost tens of millions of dollars in lost productivity, the concept has attracted the attention of different academic disciplines, policymakers, and practitioners interested in mitigating the problem. Although a topic of significant interest...

Research on gender differences in adaptability to changing work conditions has revealed equivocal evidence. We provide a new perspective to this stream by proposing a model, grounded in theory of social information processing, that takes into account individuals’ responses to important others in their environment – namely, supervisors (for non-mana...

Purpose Much of what we know about work from home (WFH) is based on data collected in routine times, where WFH is applied on a partial and voluntary basis. This study leverages the conditions of mandatory WFH imposed by COVID-19 lockdowns to shed new light on factors that relate to well-being and performance among employees who WFH. Specifically, t...

The COVID‐19 pandemic has accelerated trends of globalization and digitalization, making geographically dispersed teams a common practice in firms. Despite benefits derived from the members' diversity, such teams are also prone to trust deficiency. Advancing prior research, this study focuses on links between multiple referents of trust. We draw on...

Purpose The purpose of this study is to offer a model explicating telework as a dynamic process, theorizing that teleworkers continuously adjust – their identities, boundaries and relationships – to meet their own needs for competence, autonomy and relatedness in their work and nonwork roles. Design/methodology/approach This study uses the lens of...

An organization’s capacity to sustain a crisis, and to benefit from work-from-home (WFH) arrangements in routine times, is dependent on its employees’ ability to successfully adjust to WFH conditions. The COVID-19 pandemic, which forced vast numbers of employees worldwide to WFH, provides an unprecedented opportunity to identify factors that facili...

Increasingly, organizations find that they need to be more flexible and innovative in responding to unexpected and emergent human resource (HR) issues affecting their members, such as outbreaks of infectious diseases (e.g., COVID-19) forcing massive transition to remote work, changes in industry landscape altering learning and development, and poli...

Sensory Processing Sensitivity (SPS) is a personality trait that is characterized by a strong emotional response (Aron & Aron, 1997). The predominant SPS approaches focus on the potential of the environment to affect high-SPS individuals to develop a stronger response to either positive or negative stimuli. Two studies were aimed to explore how the...

Research on gender differences in the effects of non-cognitive traits and behaviours on pay is rather scant and focuses largely on the big five personality traits. To address this gap, we consider the equivocal findings regarding the direct associations of intrinsic motivation, self-efficacy, and networking with pay, arguing for gender differences...

Past research has mainly examined differences between employees working under conventional versus teleworking arrangements or high-intensity versus low-intensity teleworking. Yet because many workers combine days worked from the office with days worked from home (part-time telework), it may be more appropriate to examine within-individual variation...

Despite empirical data suggesting that commuting accidents are a major problem worldwide, research on employee behaviour while commuting by car is scant. In particular, our understanding of the antecedents of unsafe commuting behaviour is limited mainly to demographic variables and work-related physical stressors. Our study addressed this lacuna by...

Person–environment fit has been found to have significant implications for employee attitudes and behaviors. Most research to date has approached person–environment fit as a static phenomenon, and without examining how different types of person–environment fit may affect each other. In particular, little is known about the conditions under which fi...

Organizations are increasingly opting to offer alternative career paths to the traditional managerial ladder (particularly, a technical ladder). Although research has mainly focused on differences between the managerial and technical paths with regard to rewards and prestige, our study focuses on gaps between employees’ actual (current) and preferr...

This study takes an integrative, multidimensional approach to study the role of work in civilians’ lives during continuous unsafe circumstances. Two hundred ninety-four individuals working and living in northern Israel completed a survey following the Second Lebanon War (July-August, 2006). Attendance work routine (i.e., reporting to work as usual)...

Status inconsistency is a situation in which there is an objective or subjective mismatch between, for example, a person’s education and his/her income. This mismatch may transform into status enhancement, wherein rewards exceed one’s human capital, or into status detraction, wherein one’s human capital exceeds one’s rewards. Although status incons...

This study attempts to identify factors influencing knowledge continuity (KC), the passing of knowledge from a departing employee to his or her successor. Considering the perspectives of both the departing employee and the successor, we examine how employee perceptions of KC quality are affected by two normative influences: organizational knowledge...

Previous research on diagnosis of distress among patients with physical ailments has focused on physicians who specialize in the treatment of chronic illness. This study explores family physicians' accuracy in diagnosing patients' emotional distress. Questionnaires were administered to family physicians (N=61) and their patients (N=496) immediately...

This Academy of Management, Human Resources Division, Ambassadors' Programme special issue presents a collection of empirical papers examining workplace diversity and inclusion in a global context. We introduce this topic raising three overarching challenges: to develop more context-specific definitions of diversity and inclusion; to include dimens...

This paper adopts the concept of status inconsistency from the wider sociological literature in order to explain one of the social psychological processes possibly underlying the linkage between organizational demography and occupational stress. In doing so, we review the methodological and theoretical difficulties that arise in applying status inc...

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Although several studies confirm that perceptions of status inconsistency (a situation in which there is a mismatch between, for example, a person’s education and his/her income) have detrimental effects on employees’ attitudes and behavior, individual differences in perceptions of status inconsistency have not been studied. To address this gap, th...

Past research has devoted little attention to the role of work routine (i.e., adherence to a consistent pattern of attending work in a regular, predictable manner) in civilians' lives during wartime. The current study offers competing theoretical arguments on how work routine and gender combine to moderate the association between primary appraisal...

The focus of the current study is to gain insight in the effect of perceived status inconsistency. Perceived status inconsistency is a situation in which there is a mismatch between the status employees assume they should acquire and the status they really obtain. Drawing from the effort-reward imbalance model (ERI; Siegrist, 1996), our study advan...

Does status inconsistency make employees ill? Status inconsistency, absenteeism and HRM practices Does status inconsistency make employees ill? Status inconsistency, absenteeism and HRM practices The focus of the current study is to gain insight in the effect of perceived status inconsistency. Perceived status inconsistency is a situation in which...

Purpose Prior research has yielded mixed results regarding the relationship between performance and turnover intentions. Drawing from social exchange theory, the purpose of this paper is to propose that the performance‐turnover intentions association may be contingent upon individuals' exchange relationships with their supervisor and co‐workers. D...

Drawing from job demands−resources theory (Demerouti et al., 2001), this article investigates the effect of psychological flexibility, relative to surface and deep acting, in the relationship between day-level emotional demands and exhaustion. A total of 170 not-for-profit service workers first filled in a questionnaire and then completed a diary s...

Models of job stress suggest a causal process whereby exposure to job stressors increases employees' need for recovery, which in turn has an impact on subjective health complaints (e.g., Sluiter, van der Beek, & Frings-Dresen, 1999). The current study advances past research by investigating the association between need for recovery and health-relat...

Work-related stressors, including high demands and low control, play a significant role in the aetiology of diabetes. Nevertheless, most studies focus on main effects, and few consider individual differences that may moderate the stress–health association. Drawing from the Job Demands–Control-–Support (JDC-S) model, this study addresses this gap by...

Although it is commonly assumed that perceptions of equity at work have a significant impact on employee absenteeism, our understanding of the equity–absence relationship is limited in that (1) little is known about equity concepts other than procedural and distributive justice; and (2) for the most part, research has overlooked variables likely to...

Hoewel de interesse in performance management de laatste jaren aanzienlijk gestegen is, heeft onderzoek tot nu toe overwegend inconsistente resultaten over de effectiviteit ervan opgeleverd. Inconsistenties die samenhangen met onvoldoende begrip van de factoren die de effectiviteit van de performance management-systemen zouden kunnen vergroten. In...

While interest in performance management has increased considerably in recent years, research has revealed inconsistent results about its effectiveness. Inconsistencies may be related to insufficient understanding of the factors likely to enhance the effectiveness of performance management systems. The current study seeks to address this issue by i...

We conceptualize empowerment initiatives as varying in terms of intensity – or the degree to which the intervention is rhetorical (aiming to influence employees' sense of control at work, what we refer to as surface empowerment) as opposed to actual (aiming to influence the actual degree of employee job authority, what we refer to as deep empowerme...

Although studies have found evidence that certain workplace conditions in North American enterprises may serve as risk factors for alcohol and illicit drug use, little is known regarding the generalizability of these findings to enterprises in other countries. To address this gap, we collected data from a random sample of 569 blue-collar workers em...

Psychological Flexibility and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)Overview of Acceptance and Commitment TrainingIntroducing ACT in the WorkplaceResearch on Psychological Flexibility and ACT in the WorkplaceReferences

Perceived organizational ethical values refer to employees’ beliefs concerning what practices are acceptable or appropriate in their organization (Trevino, 1990). Previous work suggests that these perceptions can be a significant factor in employee behavior, with normative influence often assumed to be the underlying mechanism (Peterson, 2002). The...

Reports an error in "Alcohol consumption and workplace absenteeism: The moderating effect of social support" by Samuel B. Bacharach, Peter A. Bamberger and Michal Biron ( Journal of Applied Psychology , 2010[Mar], Vol 95[2], 334-348). The R-square estimates for models 4 and 5 of Table 2 on page 343 are incorrectly reported. The correct R-square val...

We integrate psychological and socio-structural perspectives on empowerment by examining: a) the impact of actual structural empowerment initiatives (as opposed to perceptions of such empowering acts) aimed at enhancing employee influence over which tasks to perform (as opposed to how to perform them) on employee well-being and performance, b) the...

Based on recent findings that post-retirement adjustment may be influenced by the conditions leading up to the decision to retire, we examine the impact of individual agency in the retirement decision on problematic drinking behavior, as well as the extent to which such an effect may itself depend upon the valence of the pre-retirement work experie...

Based on recent findings that post-retirement adjustment may be influenced by the conditions leading up to the decision to retire, we examine the impact of individual agency in the retirement decision on problematic drinking behavior, as well as the extent to which such an effect may itself depend upon the valence of the pre-retirement work experie...

Recognizing the potential conflict between operational pressures on the one hand and concerns with employee wellbeing on the other, we examine whether and how service employees' job discretion may be enhanced without harming operational efficiency. We first generate a dimensional framework for the analysis of managerial-enacted empowerment, and the...

We used a national sample of 100 Israeli enterprises to examine the prevalence and distribution of employee substance-related workplace problems, as well as the prevalence and distribution of alternative programs/policies aimed at addressing such problems among Israeli workplaces. Although 29% of the responding firms reported having handled one or...

Drawing from social identity and social influence theory, we propose that the absence-related norms of an individual's work-based referent others will have a significant effect on the likelihood of excessive absence behavior. We then develop and test a model of the social mechanisms potentially underlying the relationship between referent absence n...

Perceptions of organizational ethics refer to employees beliefs concerning ethical values and practices existing in their organizations (Trevino, 1990). Previous work suggests that these perceptions can be a significant factor in shaping employee behaviors (e.g., Peterson, 2002), with normative influence often assumed to be the underlying mechanism...