Sharon K Parker

Curtin University · Faculty of Business and Law

Researchers have proposed that leader support helps employees behave proactively at work. Leader support can facilitate the opportunities for employees to bring about change, as well as their motivation to do so. Nevertheless, empirical studies have shown mixed effects of leader support on employees’ proactive behavior. In this study, to reconcile...

High-quality work design is a key determinant of employee well-being, positive work attitudes, and job/organizational performance. Yet, many job incumbents continue to experience deskilled and demotivating work. We argue that there is a need to understand better where work designs come from. We review research that investigates the factors that inf...

In this article we take a big picture perspective on work design research. In the first section of the paper we identify influential work design articles and use scientific mapping to identify distinct clusters of research. Pulling this material together, we identify five key work design perspectives that map onto distinct historical developments:...

Individual work performance has been a central topic for scholars over the past century. There is a mass of research on performance but it is embodied in a variety of disconnected literatures each using their own set of constructs and theoretical lenses. In this paper, we synthesize this disparate literature to better understand individual work per...

It has long been recognized that work design affects individual learning and development, and an emerging body of evidence supports this long-held idea. Nevertheless, there is much scope to develop this perspective further. In the mainstream work design literature, work design is mostly considered as a vehicle for motivation and health, rather than...

This is an open-access article (copy and paste the link below) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10596011241278556 Although team processes are conceptualized as temporal phenomena, our theoretical understanding of their unfolding over time is underdeveloped, particularly when “zooming in and out” into their dynamics using different tempor...

Background: Health and Social Care (HSC) workers face psychological health risks in the workplace. While many studies have described psychological injuries in HSC workers, few have examined the determinants. Previous research has primarily focused on hospitals, lacking systematic reviews of community-based settings. Objective: To systematically...

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Introduction The objective of this parallel group, randomised controlled trial is to evaluate a community health navigator (CHN) intervention provided to patients aged over 40 years and living with chronic health conditions to transition from hospital inpatient care to their homes. Unplanned hospital readmissions are costly for the health system an...

How can entrepreneurs protect their wellbeing during a crisis? Does engaging agility (namely, opportunity agility and planning agility) in response to adversity help entrepreneurs safeguard their wellbeing? Activated by adversity, agility may function as a specific resilience mechanism enabling positive adaption to crisis. We studied 3,162 entrepre...

The phenomenon “help anyone, if helped by some” is known as generalized reciprocity. Most research has considered generalized reciprocity from the perspective of social exchange theory, focusing on an obligated to process. In this study, we apply interaction ritual chain (IRC) theory to theorize that individuals can pay it forward based on their pr...

Past research has predominantly regarded (private) socialization-oriented social media (SoSM) use at work as a counterproductive behavior and has thus focused more on its dark side. However, given the prevalence of social media in today’s work life and the various affordances this technology can have, social media might have important bright sides....

Stereotypes about women's workplace behaviours result in their contributions either being ignored and not rewarded to the same extent as their male counterparts. In this novel series of studies, we show that team member adaptivity - adaptation that occurs within the context of interdependence (e.g., change effecting how we work with others) is a st...

An essential overview of Job Design and relevant research.

An up-to-date and concise overview of the science of job rotation.

An concise and up-to-date overview of the job enrichment literature.

Objectives This study gives an overview of the impact of FIFO work on workers’ mental health before and during COVID-19, using three comparison samples as well as norm data. It provides a timely update on FIFO workers' mental health and how it has been impacted during COVID-19. Method Comparisons are conducted with three participant samples, namel...

Examining the Raine cohort study, we tested the trait continuity hypothesis by examining the extent that young adults' (25-29 years old) self-reported HEXACO personality can be statistically predicted from multi-dimensional parental temperament ratings collected in infancy (1-2 years old). The study incorporated a lagged design (two waves), a large...

We obtained free-text descriptions of liked and disliked others provided by 441 panel members (aged 24–26; 35 % male), who also completed the HEXACO PI-R in an online survey. Free-text descriptions were coded for HEXACO trait content by three judges. In line with the ‘three nightmare traits’ framework, we expected and found that language describing...

BACKGROUND The Health eLiteracy for Prevention in General Practice (HeLP-GP) trial is a primary healthcare-based behavior change intervention for weight loss in overweight and obese Australians from lower socioeconomic areas. Individuals from these areas are known to have low levels of health literacy and are particularly at risk for chronic condit...

Background The Health eLiteracy for Prevention in General Practice trial is a primary health care–based behavior change intervention for weight loss in Australians who are overweight and those with obesity from lower socioeconomic areas. Individuals from these areas are known to have low levels of health literacy and are particularly at risk for ch...

A concise overview of the job enlargement literature including cutting edge scholarship.

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

Skill utilization is a critically important enacted job characteristic that is assumed to change over time. Building on work design process theory, we investigate the role of goal orientations (performance-approach, performance-avoid, and learning orientation) in gradually shaping job performance change patterns through their impact on skill utiliz...

Proactivity at work is generally assumed to be preceded by positive motivational states with positive outcomes for employees. However, recent perspectives suggest downsides to proactive behavior, including that it can be driven by negative emotions or experienced as depleting for employees. Bringing these previously disconnected ideas together, we...

Objectives To evaluate a multifaceted intervention on diet, physical activity and health literacy of overweight and obese patients attending primary care. Design A pragmatic two-arm cluster randomised controlled trial. Setting Urban general practices in lower socioeconomic areas in Sydney and Adelaide. Participants We aimed to recruit 800 patien...

Fly-in, fly-out (FIFO) workers are exposed to demanding work schedules (including extended rosters, long shifts, and night work) which may contribute to the high levels of psychological distress they report. However, existing evidence is inconsistent. To address these issues, we developed a model of FIFO work schedules and formulated three hypothes...

Large distances between work and home require many workers to stay away from home for work over extended periods. An extreme case of such work is fly-in-fly-out (FIFO) work. FIFO work requires workers to stay, over a fixed number of days or weeks, in remote employer-arranged accommodation. Given the disruptive nature of this work arrangement, it is...

It is difficult and sometimes impossible for organizations to design jobs that fit all employees due to increased complexity and uncertainty in the workplace. Scholars have proposed that employees can make changes to their jobs themselves by engaging in job crafting. Job crafting is defined as self-initiated change that employees make in their work...

The COVID-19 pandemic forced many workers globally to work from home, suddenly, and often without choice, during a highly uncertain time. Adopting a longitudinal, person-centered approach, we explored patterns of change in employees’ psychological distress over three months following the early phase of the pandemic. We investigated how change in di...

We respond to commentaries on our 2020 article ‘Automation, algorithms, and beyond: Why work design matters more than ever in a digital world’ and report on research on the topic since that publication. A top-down work design perspective on digital technologies appears even more important than ever yet still neglected, as suggested by recent studie...

online supplement file for Stephan, U., Zbierowski, P., Pérez-Luño, A., Wach, D., Wiklund, J., Alba Cabañas, M., Barki, E., Benzari, A., Bernhard-Oettel, C., Boekhorst, J.A., Dash, A., Efendic, A., Eib, C., Hanard, P.-J., Iakovleva, T., Kawakatsu, S., Khalid, S., Leatherbee, M., Li, J., Parker, S.K., Qu, J., Rosati, F., Sahasranamam, S., Sekiguchi...

Self-determination theory has shaped our understanding of what optimizes worker motivation by providing insights into how work context influences basic psychological needs for competence, autonomy and relatedness. As technological innovations change the nature of work, self-determination theory can provide insight into how the resulting uncertainty...

Affect regulation matters in organizations, but research has predominantly focused on how employees regulate their feelings. Here, we investigate the motives for why employees regulate their feelings. We assess employees’ engagement in affect regulation based on distinct motives and investigate their implications for performance‐related outcomes. W...

Adopting a person-centred approach, we integrate the job demands-control-support model with relational work design theory to investigate employee work design profiles involving autonomy, workload, social support and prosocial characteristics (representing the combined influence of task significance and beneficiary contact). For a sample of Australi...

Employees can craft their job demands by optimizing or reducing them. Research has shown reducing demands produces dysfunctional effects, yet optimizing demands creates positive effects. However, little is known about when and why employees choose to engage in optimizing demands versus reducing demands. Drawing on the transactional theory of stress...

Our research examined how team age diversity can be either detrimental or beneficial for team performance depending on team agreeableness minimum. In age diverse teams, a disagreeable teammate may trigger age-based stereotypes about his/her social group, thereby activating social categorization. This would result in decreased relational team functi...

While the creative approach of idea exploration (e.g., consideration of multiple alternatives, doing in-depth research) has been identified to be important in the creative process, another approach, idea harmonization (e.g., avoidance of disruptive ideas, endorsement of co-worker ideas), has been largely overlooked. This study is the first to exami...

Workplace mistreatment regularly occurs in the presence of others (i.e., observers). The reactions of observers toward those involved in the mistreatment episode have wide-reaching implications. In the current set of studies, we draw on theories of perspective-taking to consider how this form of interpersonal sensemaking influences observer reactio...

We conducted a longitudinal (3-month) qualitative study to examine elite military personnel's (N = 32) experiences and perspectives of team resilience emergence following two team-oriented training courses within an 18-month high-stakes training program where personnel are required to operate in newly formed tactical teams for extended periods. Our...

Responding to the call to investigate the positive side of overqualification, we drew on the job crafting perspective to theorize that overqualified employees can proactively regulate the discrepancies between their actual and ideal jobs via two different job crafting strategies: job crafting towards strengths (JC-strengths) and job crafting toward...

There is intuitive and practical appeal to the idea of emergent resilience, that is, sustaining healthy levels of functioning or recovering quickly after some degree of deterioration following exposure to heightened risk or vulnerability. Scholars typically utilize mean levels of functioning indices to identify qualitatively distinct latent subgrou...

We review the literature on algorithmic management (AM) to bridge the gap between this emerging research area and the well-established theory and research on work design. First, we identify six management functions that algorithms are currently able to perform: monitoring, goal setting, performance management, scheduling, compensation, and job term...

The COVID-19 pandemic was a key event forcing an increase in virtual work. Drawing on event system theory, we examined whether virtual teams showed enhanced processes in later stages of the pandemic compared to the early stages of the pandemic. We collected data from 54 virtual teams (N = 152 individuals) who worked on a 30-minute task. We measured...

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs including the selfemployed) account for 90% of businesses globally and provide 70% of employment worldwide. These businesses, typically entrepreneur led, are threatened by the Covid-19 pandemic, meaning that millions of jobs are at risk. This report presents insights from a global study conducted during the...

A surge in longitudinal personality research has yielded insights into how our personalities change over life stages. Very little of this research, however, has employed the HEXACO model of personality, and thus little is known about the life-course of, especially, the honesty-humility dimension, nor of the longitudinal psychometric properties of t...

The honesty‐humility factor from the HEXACO model of personality has been found to offer incremental validity in predicting several work‐related criteria over the remaining factors, yet its interplay with other personality factors is rarely examined. In this study, we examined how honesty‐humility (the tendency to be sincere, fair, non‐materialisti...

Introduction This study investigated the extent to which five human resource management (HRM) practices—systematic selection, extensive training, performance appraisal, high relative compensation, and empowerment—simultaneously predicted later organizational-level injury rates. Methods Specifically, the association between these HRM practices (ass...

With advancing technological capabilities, as well as a global economy, many organizations increasingly use virtual teamwork to accomplish their goals. Virtual teams are those in which team members use technology to work from different locations. How can managers and organizations leverage knowledge from work design to help virtual teams achieve hi...

Given that existing knowledge on remote working can be questioned in an extraordinary pandemic context, we conducted a mixed-methods investigation to explore the challenges remote workers at this time are struggling with, as well as what virtual work characteristics and individual differences affect these challenges. In Study 1, from semi-structure...

Job crafting refers to self-initiated, proactive strategies to change work characteristics to better align one's job with personal needs, goals, and skills. This study evaluated the conditions under which job crafting interventions are effective for increasing job crafting behaviours. We assessed the impact of initial workload on the effectiveness...

In the light of mental health issues amongst the workforce, as well as future of work challenges ahead, it is more important than ever to create well-designed work. In this article, as researchers and practitioners, we share our approaches to influencing work design practice and policy. We draw on research on the antecedents of work design to ident...

Objective: To isolate heat exposure as a cause of cognitive impairment and increased subjective workload in burns surgical teams. Summary background data: Raising ambient temperature of the operating room can improve burns patient outcomes, but risks increased cognitive impairment and workload of surgical team members. Prior research indicates a...

Although proactive behavior is an important determinant of individual work performance, its consequences for employee well-being and other personal outcomes have been largely neglected. In this study, we adopted a within-person perspective to investigate how taking charge behavior (a form of proactivity) affects employees' life outside of work by e...

The objective of this conceptual article is to illustrate how differences in societal culture may affect employees’ proactive work behaviors (PWBs) and to develop a research agenda to guide future research on cross-cultural differences in PWBs. We propose that the societal cultural dimensions of power distance, individualism–collectivism, future or...

Ambidextrous leadership theory proposes that a leader's interplay between opening behaviors and closing behaviors enhances followers' exploration and exploitation behaviors, which ultimately increases innovative outcomes. Unfortunately, previous research suffers from problems with causal interpretation and endogeneity concerns threatening the valid...

We investigated how age‐based worker stereotypes correspond with attributes of expected work performance. Participants (N = 220) rated 86 stereotypical descriptors of older (e.g., ‘resistant to change’) and younger workers (e.g., ‘savvy with technology’). Each descriptor was rated on both the extent that it was a common stereotype about younger (vs...

The rapid changes of work, the ease of mobility, and ubiquitous use of virtual tools have fundamentally changed the way that teamwork in modern organizations is accomplished. Although these developments have elicited a broad range of studies focusing on the phenomenon of team virtuality, the construct itself is still tied to conceptual ambiguities,...

People design and use technology for work. In return, technology shapes work and people. As information communication technology (ICT) becomes ever more embedded in today’s increasingly digital organizations, the nature of our jobs, and employees’ work experiences, are strongly affected by ICT use. This cross-disciplinary review focuses on work des...

Ambidexterity requires both exploration and exploitation, but our understanding of the individual ambidexterity concept, its association with multitasking behaviours and paradoxical leadership across the firm life cycle of entrepreneurs is still very limited. In this study, we examined N= 4,355 behavioural activities (exploration and exploitation)...

How do complex healthcare systems that are organised into distinct speciality areas achieve effective patient care transitions when patients present with a rare constellation of symptoms that affect multiple body systems? How do these patients challenge existing ways of organising tasks, clinical activities, and interdependent responsibilities? The...

Voiced suggestions for improvement and constructive change (i.e., voiced creative ideas) by employees are important for organizations. In order to reap the benefits of these ideas, leaders need to be receptive. Drawing on achievement goal theory and approach-inhibition theory of power, we examined the joint effects of leader achievement goals and p...