Taru Feldt

University of Jyväskylä | JYU · Department of Psychology

This study explores what kinds of moral potency profiles can be identified among three different samples: Top sports, Leaders, and Followers. Based on the social norm theory, we examine whether and how the experienced strength of ethical organizational culture is associated with the probability to be identified into different moral potency profiles...

The aim of the present longitudinal study was to profile the occupational well-being (burnout, work engagement) of highly educated employees (n=442) at three measurement points: in 2017 (T1), 2019 (T2), and 2021 (T3). We were interested in whether profile transitions would occur during the follow-up, and if so, whether the three dimensions of perce...

Purpose Intensified job demands (IJDs; work intensification, intensified job- and career-related planning and decision-making demands, and intensified learning demands) illustrate the intensification of working life. This study examined relationships between IJDs and work engagement. Design/methodology/approach Nine diverse samples (n = 7,786) wer...

Tässä Jyväskylän yliopiston psykologian laitoksen toteuttamassa ja Työsuojelurahaston rahoittamassa (hankenumero 210129) hankkeessa kehitettiin työn merkityksellisyyden ja työhyvinvoinnin tukemisen toimintamallit organisaatioille ja työelämä- ja uraohjausalan ammattilaisille asiakkaineen. Toimintamalleja sovellettiin myös ammattiliitoille sekä opis...

Background Healthcare workers frequently face ethically demanding situations in their work, potentially leading to stress of conscience. Long-term work intensification (more and more effort demanded year after year), organizational change and COVID-19 may be risk factors concerning stress of conscience. Aims The main aim was to investigate the rel...

Aims: To identify a valid, longitudinally invariant factor model for stress of conscience and to investigate how stress of conscience dimensions associate with burnout and turnover intentions. Background: There has been a lack of consensus about the number and content of stress of conscience dimensions, and a lack of longitudinal studies on its...

Tutkimme kahden vuoden seurantatutkimuksessa, miten muutosvoimavarat (viestintä, osallistuminen päätöksentekoon, muutostuki) ovat yhteydessä terveydenhuoltoalan henkilöstön työhyvinvointiin (työuupumus, työn imu) sekä työpaikan ja alanvaihtoaikeisiin organisaatiomuutoksen aikana. Tutkimukseen osallistui 303 sairaanhoitopiirin työntekijää, joista 87...

Objectives The aim of this longitudinal study was to investigate how intensified job demands (job-related planning demands, career-related planning demands, and learning demands) are associated with burnout. We explored whether affective-identity motivation to lead moderates this association and, thus, functions as a personal resource regardless of...

Tämän tutkimuksen tarkoituksena oli tarkastella suomalaisen sairaanhoitopiirin potilastyötä tekevän henkilöstön (n = 735) omantunnon stressiä ja sen yhteyksiä työuupumukseen. Lisäksi tutkittiin, muuntaako työn merkityksellisyys omantunnon stressin ja työuupumuksen välistä yhteyttä. Tutkimuksen teoreettisena mallina toimi työn vaatimusten ja voimava...

The aim of this study was to broaden the current understanding of leader integrity by applying a social-cognitive process model to leaders’ moral decision-making. Leaders (n = 223) were classified into different integrity styles (informational, normative, or diffuse-avoidant) based on their personal descriptions of how they approach moral questions...

The study investigated the mediating role of teachers' psychological detachment between successive days' job stress and negative affect. Fifty-seven Finnish teachers answered to a mobile diary four times a day on two successive workdays assessing their negative affect, three times a day assessing their job stress and once a day after work assessing...

To study the ever-increasing pace of work practices, we investigated leader experiences of intensified job demands (IJDs) and their effects on followers. Based on the challenge-hindrance approach, different kinds of job demands may produce either negative or positive work-related outcomes. Using this perspective, we investigated the leaders IJDs ag...

Work intensification (WI) is a notable job stressor, which has been hypothesised to result in various negative outcomes for employees. However, earlier empirical studies regarding this stressor hypothesis have not yet been reviewed. Our narrative review focused on the outcomes for employees of WI as a perceived job stressor. Our review was based on...

The aim of this longitudinal study was to investigate the temporal dynamics of ethical organisational culture and how it associates with well-being at work when potential changes in ethical culture are measured over an extended period of 6 years. We used a person-centred study design, which allowed us to detect both typical and atypical patterns of...

The growing body of research suggests that leadership is not among the most attractive career goals, especially for the younger work force. However, the need for leadership has not diminished. To shed light on the “problem of supply”, this study addresses the question of why high-potential individuals (i.e., non-leaders) do not pursue leadership po...

Tutkimuksessa tarkasteltiin työn intensiivistymisen ilmenemismuotojen ja työn imun välisiä yhteyksiä yhdeksän ammattialan aineistossa (N = 7 786). Tutkimus toteutettiin kyselyllä, ja tuloksia analysoitiin regressioanalyyseillä ammattialoittain. Tulokset osoittivat, että yhteydet työn imuun vaihtelivat työn intensiivistymisen eri ilmenemismuotojen j...

Background: Nurses frequently face ethically demanding situations in their work, and these may lead to stress of conscience. Working life is currently accelerating and job demands are intensifying. These intensified job demands include (1) work intensification, (2) intensified job-related planning demands, (3) intensified career-related planning d...

Työn tuunaaminen on oma-aloitteista työn kehittämistä työn voimavaroja ja vaatimuksia muokkaamalla. Tutkimme, millaisia tuunausprofiileja voidaan löytää kolmesta erilaisesta tuunaustavasta, jotka olivat työn voimavarojen lisääminen, työn vaatimusten lisääminen ja työn vaatimusten optimoiminen. Selvitimme myös, miten työhyvinvointi vaihtelee profiil...

The aim was to investigate teachers’ coping profiles and their relations to teacher well-being. Questionnaire data was collected from 107 Finnish teachers. Theory-driven content analysis of teachers’ responses revealed three coping categories: problem-focused, emotion-focused and mixed problem- and emotion-focused. Next, teachers were categorized i...

Aims Intensified job demands (IJDs) and their effects on employee burnout, work engagement and patient satisfaction were investigated across different work units and occupational groups in a healthcare setting. Design A multilevel study. Methods One thousand twenty-four healthcare employees responded to a survey in 2019 and rated their experience...

Intensified job demands (IJDs) originate in the general accelerated pace of society and ever-changing working conditions, which subject workers to increasing workloads and deadlines, constant planning and decision-making about one’s job and career, and the continual learning of new professional knowledge and skills. This study investigated how indi...

Aims and objectives The aims of the study were to identify content categories of unreasonable and unnecessary illegitimate tasks and to investigate how unreasonable and unnecessary tasks relate to occupational wellbeing. Background Illegitimate tasks are a common stressor among healthcare professionals, and they have been shown to have negative as...

This study investigated the reasons that leaders have given for their leader role occupancy. By using a mixed-method approach and large leader data, we aimed to provide a more nuanced picture of how leader positions are occupied in real life. We examined how individual leadership motivation may associate with other reasons for leader role occupancy...

Worries about leadership among highly educated professionals: Associations with career aspirations and personal work goals. We investigated how highly educated professionals’ worries about leadership roles relate to their career aspirations and personal work goals. Altogether 1151 professionals without leadership positions participated in the surve...

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 the present study was twofold: First, to profile the long-term development of burnout symptoms (exhaustion, cynicism and reduced professional efficacy), and second, to investigate the associations of developmental burnout profiles with job demands and resources. The study focused on Finnish white-collar professionals (N = 169) who partic...

This study investigates leaders' motivation to lead (MTL) as a personal resource for building a sustainable career as a leader. Using a person-centered methodology, we identified different latent profiles of leadership motivation. These motivational profiles were compared with leaders' occupational well-being and leadership-related career intention...

There are two contrasting perspectives on the effects of state extraversion. One states that people benefit from behaving extraverted, regardless of their level of trait extraversion. The second entails that behaving concordant to one’s trait is natural while deviations from the trait level— counterdispositional behaviors—are effortful to maintain,...

We examined intensified job demands (IJDs) and selecting-optimizing-compensating (SOC) strategies as predictors of job performance (task performance, organizational citizenship behavior). We also investigated SOC strategy use as a moderator in the linkages between IJDs and performance. We sampled three disparate occupational groups (N=4,582). We fo...

Examining age as a moderator between intensified job demands, burnout and enagegement.

Background: Working life today is characterized by acceleration and intensification due to social, and particularly technological, acceleration affecting the whole of society. These phenomena also affect working life by intensifying job demands, possibly imposing new job stressors on the workforce. At the same time workforce is aging, raising a que...

We investigated the applicability of the identity status paradigm in identifying different stages of moral identity maturity among managers, focusing on how they solve moral conflicts in the context of work. Researchers conducted two theory-driven studies. Study 1 was based on focus group discussions among 16 managers, while Study 2 was based on op...

Differences in identity stability and change from age 36 through 42 to 50 were examined between three male and female personal style clusters extracted at age 27. We expected, first, the identity statuses to consistently differ between the clusters and, second, those with the least mature identity to move closer to others during midlife. Difference...

Minkkinen, J., Mauno, S., Feldt, T., Tsupari, H., Auvinen, E., & Huhtala, M. (2019). Uhkaako työn intensiivistyminen työhyvinvointia? Intensiivistymisen yhteys työuupumukseen opetus- ja tutkimustyössä. Psykologia, 54 (04), 255–301. Abstract: Work intensification has recently attracted interest as changes in working conditions are occurring continuo...

The aim of this three‐wave longitudinal study conducted among 664 Finnish employees was to examine the cross‐lagged relationships between various work‐related ruminative thoughts (affective rumination, problem‐solving pondering, lack of detachment from work) during off‐job time and employee well‐being (exhaustion, vigour). We tested normal, reverse...

The aim of the present longitudinal study was to quantitatively examine whether an ethical organizational culture predicts turnover among managers. To complement the quantitative results, a further important aim was to examine the self-reported reasons behind manager turnover, and the associations of ethical organizational culture with these reason...

This research addresses the profiles of nature exposure and outdoor activities in nature among Finnish employees (N = 783). The profiles were formed on the bases of nature exposure at work and the frequency and type of outdoor activities in nature engaged in during leisure time. The profiles were investigated in relation to work engagement and burn...

So far, the field of business ethics lacks validated measures for assessing virtues at the organizational level. The aim of this study is to investigate the measurement invariance of a shortened Corporate Ethical Virtues scale. In this manner, we contribute to validating an instrument that is both psychometrically sound and efficient to use. We con...

Latent profile analysis (LPA) is a person-centered method commonly used in organizational research to identify homogeneous subpopulations of employees within a heterogeneous population. However, in the case of nested data structures, such as employees nested in work departments, multilevel techniques are needed. Multilevel LPA (MLPA) enables adequa...

This study analyzed the multidimensional (including emotional, psychological, and social well-being) profiles of mental well-being and their links to various indicators of successful aging (SA; including diseases, cognitive and physical function, and engagement with life). The analyses were based on the Finnish Jyväskylä Longitudinal Study of Perso...

Hyvinvointi työelämässä puhututtaa paljon: Mikä nykyisessä työelämässä kuormittaa? Miksi työ koukuttaa toisia ja kuluttaa toisia? Miten työkuormituksesta palaudutaan ja miten työuupumusta hoidetaan? Kirjassa kuvataan, mitä työstressi on ja millaiset tekijät sitä lisäävät alati muuttuvassa työelämässä. Lisäksi teoksessa esitellään laajasti työhyvin...

Työntekijöiden jaksaminen on työelämässä koetuksella. Tarkoituksemme on tutkia, kuinka uupumusasteisen väsymyksen taso muuttuu kahden vuoden aikana ja miten tämä muutos tai pysyvyys kytkeytyy työstä palautumiseen. Palautumista tutkimme sitä ylläpitävien palautumisen kokemusten (työstä irrottautuminen, rentoutuminen, taidonhallinta ja kontrolli vapa...

Understanding of the mutual developmental dynamics between burnout and work engagement is limited due to the lack of longitudinal studies with long follow-ups and multi-wave data. This study sought to identify subgroups of employees characterized by long-term exhaustion-vigor (energy continuum) and cynicism-dedication (identification continuum). A...

This study extends previous research on recovery from work stress by investigating the role of qualitative job demands and leadership in employees’ work-related rumination (WRR). The long-term development of WRR was examined from a person-centred approach across 22 months. Drawing on the stressor-detachment framework and conservation of resources t...

The aim of this 2-year longitudinal study was to identify long-term patterns of work-related rumination in terms of affective rumination, problem-solving pondering, and lack of psychological detachment from work during off-job time. We also examined how the patterns differed in job demands and wellbeing outcomes. The data were collected via questio...

The main aim of the present study was to examine whether an ethical organizational culture is associated with sickness absence in a Finnish public sector organization at both the individual (within-level) and work unit (between-level) levels. The underlying assumption was that employees working for organizations that are characterized by a strong e...

We investigated school psychologists’ experiences of ethical strain (the frequency of ethical dilemmas at work and the stress caused by these dilemmas) and dilemma-related rumination outside working hours. Individual latent profiles were estimated at the study baseline based on these three dimensions. The psychologists’ weekly well-being (vigor, ex...

The long-term development of employee well-being is still poorly understood. Consequently, in this three-wave 10-year longitudinal study among Finnish managers (n = 402) the development of employee well-being was examined in in detail. Specifically, the long-term development of job-related affective well-being was investigated at the intra-individu...

The research addresses the impact of long-term reward patterns on contents of personal work goals among young Finnish managers (N = 747). Reward patterns were formed on the basis of perceived and objective career rewards (i.e., career stability and promotions) across four measurements (years 2006–2012). Goals were measured in 2012 and classified in...

This study contributes to the literature on the supervisors’ role in employee well-being by drawing on two separate lines of research: transformational leadership and organizational justice. The purpose of the study was to investigate the 'unique' contributions of transformational and fair leadership (justice behaviours of supervisors) on work enga...

The first aim of this study was to identify long-term patterns of ethical organizational culture based on the perceptions of 368 Finnish managers over a period of two years. The second aim was to investigate whether there is a difference in the long-term occupational well-being (burnout and work engagement) of managers exhibiting different patterns...

Objective: The effort-reward imbalance (ERI) model includes the personal characteristic of overcommitment (OC) and the job-related characteristics of effort, reward, and ERI, all of which are assumed to play a role in an employee's health and well-being at work. The aim of the present longitudinal study was to shed more light on the dynamics of th...

This one-year follow-up study (N = 841) investigated the relationship between boundary crossing behavior from work to non-work and work-related rumination (i.e., affective rumination, problem-solving pondering and lack of psychological detachment from work during off-job time). This relationship is important to examine as work-related rumination is...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationships between authentic leadership and team climate across 22 months. More specifically, three alternative causation models (normal, reversed, reciprocal) were tested. Design/methodology/approach – The longitudinal study was conducted among 265 Finnish municipal employees (87.5 per cent...

This article reports a systematic review of findings on the long-term development of employee well-being, taking into account the effects of time lag, age, and job change. High-quality quantitative empirical studies focusing on employee affective well-being based on the circumplex model and utilizing measurements at more than two points in time wer...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the moderating role of goal conflict in the relationship between the contents of managers’ personal work goals and occupational well-being (burnout and work engagement). Eight goal categories (organization, competence, well-being, career-ending, progression, prestige, job change, and employment...

The aim of the present study conducted among 1,106 Finnish employees was to identify boundary management profiles based on cross-role interruption behaviors from work to nonwork and from nonwork to work. Adopting a person-oriented approach through latent profile analysis, five profiles were identified: Work Guardians (21% of the employees), Nonwork...

The Passion Scale: Factorial and divergent validity among Finnish professionals Jennifer Pickett¹, Taru Feldt¹, Anne Mäkikangas¹, & Johanna Rantanen² ¹Department of Psychology, University of Jyväskylä, Finland ²Department of Teacher Education, University of Jyväskylä, Finland Work passion, work engagement and workaholism are all contemporary concep...

In this study we found that fair leadership is even more important for employee well-being than transformational leadership. Using Cholesky decomposition to overcome multicollinearity, we demonstrated that fair leadership explained work engagement among employees to the same extent as transformational leadership. Furthermore, unfair leadership cont...

Purpose: The present study aimed at identifying subgroups of employees with similar daily energy management strategies at work and finding out whether well-being indicators and job characteristics differ between these subgroups. Methods: The study was conducted by electronic questionnaire among 1,122 Finnish employees. First, subgroups of employee...

The overall objective of this longitudinal study was to investigate the association between perceived leadership and employee well-being from a person-centred approach utilizing the principles of the conservation of resources theory (Hobfoll, S. E. (1989). Conservation of resources: A new attempt at conceptualizing stress. American Psychologist, 44...

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...

Purpose Ethical culture is a specific form of organizational culture (including values and systems that can promote ethical behavior), and as such a socially constructed phenomenon. However, no previous studies have investigated the degree to which employees’ perceptions of their organization’s ethical culture are shared within work units (departme...

Purpose ‐ The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the link between transformational leadership and depressive symptoms among employees is mediated by such personal resources as occupational self-efficacy, perceived meaningfulness of the work, and work-related rumination. Design/methodology/approach ‐ The study was conducted using questionna...

The present study tested the factorial validity of the 9-item Bergen Burnout Inventory (BBI-9)1). The BBI-9 is comprised of three core dimensions: (1) exhaustion at work; (2) cynicism toward the meaning of work; and (3) sense of inadequacy at work. The study further investigated whether the three-factor structure of the BBI-9 remains the same acros...

The aim of the present study was to investigate the moderating role of optimism in the relationship between job resources (organizational climate, job control) and work engagement among Finnish young managers (N = 747). Hierarchical regression analyses showed that both job resources and optimism exerted a positive effect on work engagement and its...

The aim of the present study conducted among 274 Finnish employees was to examine the relationships between job characteristics, recovery experiences and occupational well-being across 1 year. We hypothesized that these relationships would follow normal causation, that is, job characteristics at T1 predict recovery experiences (detachment, relaxati...

The aims of this two-year follow-up study among Finnish managers (n = 463) were twofold: first, to investigate the relation between work engagement and workaholism by utilizing both variable-and person-centered approaches and second, to explore whether and how experiences of work engagement and workaholism relate to job change during the study peri...

This study investigated the factorial validity of the 58-item Corporate Ethical Virtues scale (CEV; Kaptein, J Organ Behav 29(7):923–947, 2008). The major aim was to test the invariance of the factor structure across different organizational samples. The CEV scale was designed to measure eight corporate virtues: clarity, congruency of supervisors,...

Despite working in the same workplace and sharing the same working conditions, employees’ occupational well-being may vary considerably as a result of differences in their personalities, motivation, and personal goals. This is an issue that has attracted the attention of many scholars over the years. However, the role of personality in employee wel...

Purpose The main aim of the present study is to discover whether the managers’ self‐evaluations of their ethical leadership style are associated with their assessments of the ethical organisational culture (measured with an eight‐dimensional Corporate Ethical Virtues‐model). It aims to hypothesise that the more ethical the managers evaluate their o...

The aims of this study were to investigate what kinds of personal work goals managers have and whether ethical organisational culture is related to these goals. The sample consisted of 811 Finnish managers from different organisations, in middle and upper management levels, aged 25–68 years. Eight work-related goal content categories were found bas...

The study aimed to determine if an applicant’s personality type is associated with his/her reactions (fairness perceptions, face validity perceptions, and predictive validity percep- tions) to the selection process. The participants (N = 258) were real-life applicants for ad- mission to a vocational school. A person-centered approach was applied to...

The aim of this study was, first, to identify long-term patterns of effort-reward imbalance (ERI) and over-commitment (OVC), and, second, to examine how occupational well-being (burnout, work engagement) and recovery experiences (psychological detachment, relaxation, mastery and control) differ in these patterns. The study was based on follow-up da...

This study investigates the associations of longitudinal Big Five personality profiles with long-term health in 304 adults (53% males). Personality traits (Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness) were assessed at ages 33, 42, and 50. Subjective (self-rated health, symptoms, psychological distress) and objective (body...

Purpose: The present study investigated whether the factor structure of the effort-reward imbalance (ERI) scale (Siegrist et al. Soc Sci Med 58:1483-1499, 2004) remains same across two white-collar samples (i.e., factorial group invariance) and across three measurement times (i.e., factorial time invariance). Methods: The factorial group invaria...