Francisco Gabriel Martín-Martín

Universities are higher education institutions where knowledge is discussed and disseminated, serving as a key element in the future of society. However, their employees face high levels of role ambiguity, especially after COVID-19. Studies suggest this ambiguity reduces intellectual engagement, the relationship between these variables may not be linear, but curvilinear. This study examines how perceived role ambiguity affects intellectual engagement among 122 technical employees at a public university. The results confirm the existence of a curvilinear asymmetric U-shaped influence. Higher ambiguity initially reduces intellectual engagement, but becomes a challenge at medium levels, boosting it. These results highlight ambiguity’s dual nature in public administration, showing it can evolve from a negative stressor to a motivational factor driving intellectual engagement.

Background: This study addresses a critical gap in the literature by examining how optimism can moderate the effects of role conflict specifically among administrative staff at public universities. Role conflict is a prevalent challenge for these workers, who must navigate the demands of various groups with opposing needs, such as the university’s governing body, different professors and researchers, students, and suppliers. This situation can be a stressor that depletes their resources. Previous research has shown the negative impact of role conflict on job satisfaction and performance; however, few studies analyze this relationship in administrative employees at public universities considering their individual characteristics. One individual factor that has been shown to mitigate the negative effects of role conflict is employees’ optimism, but it is necessary to analyze whether this effect is also observed in this uniquely characterized work context and across both sexes (women/men). Objectives: The purpose of this study is to verify whether role conflict has a negative impact on job satisfaction and perceived performance among administrative employees. Additionally, it aims to investigate whether employees’ optimism moderates the negative effects of role conflict on job satisfaction and performance. Moreover, this study will explore whether the effects of role conflict and optimism vary based on the employee’s sex (women/men), considering potential differences in how these factors influence their experiences and outcomes in the workplace. Design and Methods: Data were collected from 334 employees with administrative and customer service roles at a public university (172 men and 162 women). This sample size provides sufficient statistical power to detect significant effects, allows for reliable subgroup analysis by gender, and aligns with typical sample sizes in organizational and psychological research. Results: The results confirm that role conflict has a significantly negative influence on performance through job satisfaction (mediation effect), although only in the men group. Moreover, this process is moderated by optimism (Men: IE =.0733, SE =.028, 95% CI BC from.0210 to.1296; Women: IE =.0312, SE =.046, 95% CI BC from -.0660 to.1146). Conclusions: It is concluded that role conflict negatively affects the perception of one’s own performance among administrative employees. However, while in the men group this relationship is mediated by job satisfaction and moderated by optimism, in women, role conflict directly affects performance. This difference may be due to distinct coping strategies and emotional responses to work demands between men and women, which influence how job satisfaction impacts perceived performance. These findings suggest that interventions aimed at increasing optimism and other personal resources may be particularly effective in mitigating the negative effects of role conflict, especially in men. Nonetheless, in the case of women, it is important to further investigate other potential individual factors that may moderate role conflict, as well as implement strategies that directly reduce stress sources in the workplace.

When analyzing occupational safety factors, a human factor is associated with 80–90% of incidents and accidents that occur. Controlling this factor is essential when it comes to creating healthy and safe organizations. Personality traits have shown great relevance when understanding the behavior of safety or self-protection in the workplace, affecting the motivation of subjects and, therefore, their behavior. The objective of this study is to analyze the influence of the extraversion trait on compliance with safety rules and behaviors, while evaluating the mediating effect of motivation for safety in health professionals. The sample is composed of 183 nurses and wardens of a hospital in Spain. The obtained results confirm the hypotheses raised, validating the negative influences of extraversion on motivation for security and compliance with norms, behaviors, and security, while verifying the effect of the total mediation of motivation for security in the influence of extraversion on security compliance. This confirms the effect of this personality trait on employees’ safety behaviors, and the possibility of reducing this influence by controlling personal motivations with interventions from the organization.

Job demands are factors that are associated with a physical and psychological cost when it comes to coping with them, but which can also positively affect the motivational process. Demands such as overload, defined as an excessive workload, have not presented positive results in any of the studies that have related it to employee engagement. The present study aims to delve into the possible positive effect of this demand on the intellectual bonding of employees. It is hypothesized that: (a) Initially, the increase in the perception of work overload will show a negative influence on the intellectual engagement of the employees; but (b) high perceptions of overload will change this effect, producing an increase in the intellectual dimension of engagement. The sample is made up of 706 employees of a Spanish multinational company. The results support this asymmetric curvilinear influence. The level of intellectual engagement is significantly reduced when the role overload increases from the lower values of the scale. However, upon reaching high levels of role overload, the intellectual engagement response begins to grow. These results challenge the conceptualization of overload as only negative and opens the door to consider that the positive response to a demand can also occur at high levels of it.

Hepatitis B (HBV) is a pathogen virus with transmission mechanisms that include contact with the infected blood or bodily fluids of the infected organism. Nowadays, healthcare workers are one of the most exposed groups to HBV. Conventionally, completing a vaccine series dosage with Engerix B^® lowers this risk by providing workers with immunity to the virus. However, through the years, we have encountered nonresponsive health personnel to the Engerix B^® vaccine; hence, the Occupational Health Service of Poniente Hospital studied the Fendrix^® adjuvanted vaccine as an alternative vaccine to develop immunological responses in healthcare workers who do not respond to vaccination with Engerix B^®. In our study, we employed a vaccination schedule with the Fendrix^® vaccine, performing serology tests on the cases after the application of each dose. The results obtained showed humoral immunity in 92.3% of the cases, with a remarkable increase in antibody titer after the first doses. These encouraging results support the future inclusion of this vaccine as one possible alternative for the immunization to HBV for healthcare workers nonresponsive to Engerix B^®.