Helen Pluut

The “right to choose repair” in European consumer law is central to sustainable consumption and consumer protection, yet its effectiveness depends on equitable access and enforcement across all consumer groups. While (consumer) law assumes that gender-neutral legal frameworks ensure equal protection, this premise remains empirically untested in the context of repair rights. This paper presents the first empirical study of gender’s role in enforcing the right to choose repair. Based on representative survey data from 3,141 consumers in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, gender-based differences in adherence to the right to choose repair and factors shaping willingness to enforce it are analysed. Results show that women face distinct barriers, including acting less consistently with legal rights and greater sensitivity to procedural obstacles, financial costs, and conflict. The extent and significance of these gender-based barriers vary between national contexts, pointing to targeted policy responses that address gendered patterns in consumer law enforcement.

Historically, men were expected to be the financial providers, whereas women—in their role as homemakers—were seen more as dependents. However, with the rise of dual-earner families, this economic asymmetry has long been overturned in much of the world. Nevertheless, integrating social role theory with social support resource theory, we argue that a similar asymmetry exists in the realm of social support in response to heavy demands at work faced by dual-earner couples. We used a daily diary design to address the everyday challenges faced by members of dual-earner couples in providing support to one another. We found that both husbands and wives provide less spousal support on days characterized by work-to-family conflict. When a spouse feels emotionally exhausted due to work, wives are more likely than husbands to increase support. Although both partners benefit from providing and receiving support, men benefit most when they are the provider and women benefit most when they are the receiver, consistent with traditional gender norms. Our work-family study identifies a novel gender dynamic in social support and extends social role theory in a new direction.

In this diary study, we contribute to research on day-level multitasking in organizations by investigating why and when multitasking impairs employees’ work-related flow and subjective job performance on a daily basis. Drawing on Lazarus and Folkman’s transactional model of stress and coping, we propose that employees’ appraisal of their daily tasks (i.e., less challenging and more hindering) may explain why multitasking has negative implications for flow and job performance. Moreover, we expect that daily work engagement can buffer the detrimental effects of multitasking on flow and job performance. A total of 33 professional workers in the food industry participated in our study and were asked to respond to 10 daily surveys at work across 4 weeks. In line with our expectations, results showed that on days when employees’ working time was highly fragmented across a high number of tasks, they experienced less flow and, in turn, their job performance was lower on that particular day. Moreover, appraisal of daily tasks as less challenging – though not more hindering – explained why multitasking impairs flow. Finally, daily work engagement buffered the detrimental impact of multitasking on flow. The results presented in this paper offer novel and ecologically valid insights into why and when multitasking may backfire for employees.

A few years ago, before the outbreak of COVID-19, stress was coined the health epidemic of the 21 st century by the World Health Organization. It goes without saying that work stress is at the core of this societal problem. An extensive body of research in the I/O psychology field shows that various occupational hazards contribute to mental health problems in the work population: blurred work-home boundaries (Pluut & Wonders, 2020), illegitimate and nonpromotable tasks (Semmer et al., 2015), workload and excessive work behaviors (Molino, Bakker, & Ghislieri, 2016), job insecurity (De Witte, Vander Elst, & De Cuyper, 2015), dysfunctional and abusive leadership (Schyns & Schilling, 2013), and a psychologically unsafe climate (Dollard & Bakker, 2010) are but a few examples. The Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR) recently published a report titled 'Better work: Society's new mission' 1 , which is a call to consider the quality of work (for everyone who is willing and able to work) as a societal challenge for businesses, institutions, social partners, and the government. In light of such societal problems as work intensification, burnout, and

We report the results of three validation studies for a short measure of emotional, physical, and behavioral markers of eustress and distress as they occur when individuals encounter stressful events in academic and organizational settings. Given the importance of the distinction between “positive” and “negative” stress as well as the recent resurgence of research exploring the differences between challenge and hindrance stress and between eustress and distress, it is important to put forward a short, validated scale that evaluates these constructs. Our short measure—the MEDS—therefore has important theoretical as well as practical implications. By showing that the eustress and distress subscales have adequate internal consistency and good construct and criterion validity, we open new avenues for research that extends our knowledge and understanding of the antecedents and consequences of eustress and distress. We also discuss appropriate uses of the scale in educational and organizational settings.

This paper describes and discusses the portfolio of courses in which empirical legal research skills are currently taught to law students in the Netherlands. It results from an in-depth country-wide study we undertook as part of a project supported by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) in view of the growing attention to empirical legal studies (ELS). The paper concludes with a reflection on the future of ELS education in the Netherlands.

Drawing on conservation of resources and related theories, this study develops and tests an interpersonal model of work-family spillover. Our model specifies how social stressors at work (i.e., workplace incivility, abusive supervision, interpersonal conflict) result in the experience of a social-based form of work-family conflict, ultimately influencing marital behaviors at home, on a daily basis. The mediating role of burnout and the moderating role of trust were also examined. A 2-week experience-sampling study with daily employee surveys at work and at home and with spousal ratings for employees' marital behaviors in the evening provided general support for the proposed relationships. Within individuals, social stressors at work were associated with burnout symptoms, which mediated the effect of workplace social stressors on social-based work-family conflict. In line with congruence response models, we found that those who are more trusting were more negatively affected by social stressors at work. Finally, on evenings when employees experienced social-based work-family conflict, their spouses reported more withdrawn and angry behaviors and less supportive behaviors shown toward them. Overall, the present research explicates a specific form of work-family conflict, one in which social stressors in one domain result in negative behaviors in the other domain via burnout experiences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

As there is a growing trend for people to work from home, precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, this research examines the impact of blurred work-life boundaries on lifestyle and subjective well-being. Our cross-sectional study in the Netherlands demonstrates that heightened levels of blurred work-life boundaries predict negative changes in happiness through enhanced emotional exhaustion. In addition, the findings point to a dual role of lifestyle in this process. On the one hand, we observed that healthy overall lifestyle patterns buffered employees against the detrimental effects of blurred work-life boundaries and emotional exhaustion on happiness. On the other hand, employees who experienced increases in blurring of work-life boundaries reported a deterioration in healthy lifestyle behaviors, which in turn was related to reduced happiness. Paradoxically, it seems that those who would benefit the most from a healthy lifestyle are less able to sustain health-promoting behaviors. A case for shared responsibility between employers and employees is built as we discuss the practical implications of the current research.

This cross-sectional field study examines the influence of employee and spousal characteristics on employees’ career-related motivations in dual ladder systems. We go beyond “constraints-based” explanations of spousal influence and focus on the degree to which the spouse has aspirations for the focal employee’s career – referred to as spousal career aspirations. Using a dyadic study design, we tested a model that specifies the influence of both partners’ career salience and materialism on an employee’s motivation for a particular career path: as manager or technical specialist. According to survey responses from a matched sample of 207 employees and their spouses, the spouse’s career salience and materialism (the latter only for women) were associated with higher levels of spousal career aspirations. In turn, those employees whose spouses aspired for them to have a career were less motivated to obtain a specialist position. Employees’ own career salience was positively associated with their motivation for a managerial position and, in combination with high levels of spousal career aspirations, pulled employees away from a career on the technical ladder. Our results shed light on the family-relatedness of career decisions and have notable implications for dual ladder organizations.