Uta K. Bindl

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Reader (Associate Professor) in Organisational Behaviour at King's College London

Despite an extensive body of research on job crafting, our understanding of how bottom‐up job crafting behaviors interact with top‐down job design in influencing employee effectiveness remains limited. Drawing on conservation of resources theory, we developed and tested a theoretical framework to examine the implications of daily promotion‐ versus...

Research depicts job crafting as a desirable, ongoing employee behavior rather than a one-off event. However, insights are lacking into how employees’ active engagement in job crafting may be sustained across time. In this study, we advance a dynamic framework of how changes that follow employees’ periods of job crafting may, in turn, motivate vers...

This paper investigates how entrepreneurs achieve a sense of purpose or, more precisely, eudaimonic well-being—the experience of a good and meaningful life. We explore this in the context of women entrepreneurs participating in a business training program in Nigeria. Specifically, we conduct mixed-methods research, starting with an inductive qualit...

The challenges faced by individuals and organizations during the COVID‐19 crisis have significantly changed how businesses operate. In response, how we think about organizational and vocational behavior research has shifted. Questions of how leaders manage their workforce, how workers manage their daily work demands, and how workers consider their...

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...

Job crafting refers to the myriad ways employees customize their jobs, such as by altering their tasks and social interaction at work. Numerous scholars over the past 20 years have remarked on the overall need to better understand the role of time in job crafting. However, the literature has not considered how employees think about time, or, relate...

This paper brings together Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory and other perspectives on wellbeing to test predictions about dimensions of affect which are linked to approach motivation or avoidance motivation. Valence and activation are jointly conceptualised as either approach-affect or avoidance-affect through the diagonal axes of an affective circ...

Employees often self-initiate changes to their jobs, a process referred to as job crafting, yet we know little about why and how they initiate such changes. In this paper, we introduce and test an extended framework for job crafting, incorporating individuals’ needs and regulatory focus. Our theoretical model posits that individual needs provide em...

Organizations benefit from proactive employees who initiate improvements at work. Although evidence suggests happy employees are more likely to become proactive, the emotional journeys employees take during the process of making things happen, and their implications for future proactivity at work, remain unclear. To develop an understanding of patt...

Proactive work behaviors are self-initiated, future-focused actions aimed at bringing about changes to work processes in organizations. Such behaviors occur within the social context of work. The extant literature that has focused on the role of social context for proactivity has focused on social context as an overall input or output of proactivit...

While managerial work is action-oriented and time pressured, this paper proposes that both individuals and organizations gain from increased individual reflection at work. While previous work has studied reflection at the team-level and as a structured organizational intervention, we conceptualize individual reflection as individuals’ general tende...

Emphasizing differences in activation as well as valence, six studies across a range of situations examined relations between types of job-related core affect and 13 self-reported work behaviours. A theory-based measure of affect was developed, and its four-quadrant structure was found to be supported across studies. Also consistent with hypotheses...

Scholars have argued that different forms of proactive behaviors (e.g., career initiative, feedback seeking, and taking charge) all involve employees’ self-initiated and future-focused efforts to bring about change in a situation (Parker et al., 2006). There are at least three important elements that define proactivity: future-focus, change-orienta...

Proactivity is a type of goal-directed work behavior in which individuals actively take charge of situations to bring about future change in themselves or their organization. In this chapter, we draw on goal-regulation research to review conceptual and empirical evidence that elucidates some of the complex links of affective experience and employee...

The authors consider how multiple dimensions of affect relate to individual proactivity. They conceptualized proactivity within a goal-regulatory framework that encompasses 4 elements: envisioning, planning, enacting, and reflecting. In a study of call center agents (N = 225), evidence supported the distinctiveness of the 4 elements of proactive go...

Being proactive is about making things happen, anticipating and preventing problems, and seizing opportunities. It involves self-initiated efforts to bring about change in the work environment and/or oneself to achieve a different future. The authors develop existing perspectives on this topic by identifying proactivity as a goal-driven process inv...

Proactive behavior at work is about making things happen. It involves self-initiated, anticipatory action aimed at changing either the situation or oneself. Examples include taking charge to improve work methods, proactive problem solving, using personal initiative, making i-deals, and proactive feedback seeking. In this chapter, we define proactiv...

Purpose This study aims to examine the applicability of key measures of service quality and customer satisfaction in a cross‐cultural setting, first establishing measurement equivalence and then investigating the impact of culture on these measures. Design/methodology/approach Using scenarios involving a visit to the dentist's office, respondents...