Angeli Santos

Cyberloafing is increasingly recognised as a common yet motivationally complex workplace behaviour. Drawing on the Job Demands–Resources (JD-R) framework, this study examined whether toxic leadership is associated with cyberloafing through burnout syndromes and whether individual-level perceived psychosocial safety climate (PSC) buffers this health-impairment process. Using a cross-sectional online survey design, data were collected from 199 working adults across multiple industries, primarily from South Asia. A first stage moderated parallel mediation model was tested using Hayes’s PROCESS v5.0 Model 7 with 5000 bootstrap resamples. Toxic leadership was positively associated with all four burnout subdimensions, and significant indirect effects on cyberloafing emerged via exhaustion, cognitive impairment, and emotional impairment, whereas mental distance did not mediate the relationship. Individual-level perceived PSC did not significantly buffer the links between toxic leadership and burnout. Overall, the findings suggest that, in toxic supervisory contexts, cyberloafing may be better understood as a maladaptive coping response to burnout-related impairment than as a simple retaliatory behaviour. These results extend leadership and burnout research by locating toxic leadership within the JD-R health-impairment pathway and by highlighting the limited protective role of perceived PSC when the source of harm is the immediate supervisor. Practical implications support an integrated intervention strategy.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between mindset and impostor phenomenon, via the explanatory role of fear of failure and goal orientation in the work domain. Only one known study has previously connected mindset and impostor phenomenon in the scientific literature among females in a university setting. Data was collected from 201 working adults, with a roughly equal male-female ratio, from a range of sectors in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and United States. Participants completed an online survey comprising the Implicit Theories of Intelligence Scale, the Performance Failure Appraisal Inventory, Work Domain Goal Orientation Instrument, and the Clance Impostor Phenomenon Scale (CIPS). We tested a serial-parallel mediation model using structural equation modeling. The results suggest that people with a fixed mindset tend to experience more impostor phenomenon at work and this relationship is predominantly explained by their fear of failure. Further, when employees are also motivated by a performance avoid goal orientation, the relationship increases in strength. This indirect relationship suggests that staff training, and coaching interventions designed to increase people’s belief that they can develop their abilities results in a reduction of their fear of failure and in their motivation to want to avoid showing their inability at work. The results also suggest cultivating environments that promote a growth mindset and learning goal orientation, alongside the safety to fail, could lessen the negative effects of having a fixed mindset, reduce fear of failure, and alleviate impostor phenomenon’s negative impact on employee career development and wellbeing.

A quasi-experimental longitudinal intervention study utilizing intervention and comparison groups was carried out with first-year Malaysian college students in order to evaluate the effectiveness of a careers course designed to help students in their career decision-making. Participants in both groups were given questionnaires assessing career decision self-efficacy (CDSE), career indecision, and career decision-making difficulties at various time points. Career indecision and decision-making difficulties (CDDs) are different constructs in that research on career indecision encompasses a wider area wherein the identification of sources of career indecision, often referred to as decision-making difficulties, is one line of research. Gender differences at the outset and over the duration of the course were also examined. Results indicated that upon completion of the course participants in the intervention group experienced increased CDSE and reduced career indecision compared to the comparison group. An overall decrease in career decision-making difficulties was also observed, but further investigation revealed that the decrease was not significant in 1 of 10 subcategories of difficulties. Although gender differences in career indecision and career decision-making difficulties were observed at the outset, these disappeared over the course of the intervention. Implications and suggestions for further research are discussed.

This study examines the nature, prevalence and impact of educator targeted bullying (ETB) in a sample of 575 Malaysian school teachers. Specifically it was predicted that ethnicity may be related to exposure to ETB; that frequency of exposure would vary by type of ETB; that there would be tenure-related differences in terms of exposure and burnout; and that teaching experience could moderate the exposure-burnout relationship. Results suggest that less severe forms of ETB are more prevalent than physical forms; and that educators with increased teaching experience are less exposed to ETB. ETB exhibits a negative impact on burnout; and is strongest for student-related burnout. Increased experience buffers the ETB–student-related burnout relationship while ethnicity is unrelated to exposure to ETB.

Purpose: – This study aims to examine the concepts of trait emotional intelligence (EI), emotional labour strategies and burnout among internal human resources (HR) service providers. It proposes a model to deepen our understanding of the processes explaining the protective effects of trait EI on employee burnout.Design/methodology/approach: – The present study comprises a sample of 143 HR professionals from a large Malaysian financial institution.Findings: – Results suggest that trait EI predicted personal- and work-related burnout but not client-related burnout. Trait EI was also found to be partly related to emotional labour (EL), exhibiting a negative relationship with surface acting but not with deep acting. While surface acting exhibited a significant relationship on all three forms of burnout, deep acting was only significantly related to client burnout. Moreover, mediation analyses revealed that surface acting partly mediated the relationship between EI and burnout.Originality/value: – This study examines the relationship between EI, EL and burnout in HR professionals. This study is the first in the literature to examine these relationships in the context of internal service providers and in a non-Western context. Our study enhances our understanding of the processes explaining the protective effects of trait EI on employee burnout in a non-Western context.

This study examined the relationship between job satisfaction, job stress and the big five personality traits on organisational and interpersonal workplace deviance among employees of a construction consultancy organisation in Singapore. Gender differences and organisational tenure differences were also analysed. Results suggest that while job stress directly predicted deviance, job satisfaction did not. Extraversion also had a direct effect on workplace deviance and a significant buffering effect on job stress and interpersonal deviance. Overall, males exhibited higher workplace deviance. Those who have worked for over five years in the company exhibited higher scores on organisational deviance but not interpersonal workplace deviance.