Home > Differential Effects of Challenging and Hindering Job Demands on Stress-Related Presenteeism and Outcomes: Can Psychological Capital and Mindfulness Be Successful Interventions to Undo the Harm?
Differential Effects of Challenging and Hindering Job Demands on Stress-Related Presenteeism and Outcomes: Can Psychological Capital and Mindfulness Be Successful Interventions to Undo the Harm?
For many decades, organization research scholars have been trying to find answers as to why individuals behave in a certain way at work and what consequences it can have for the individual and the organizations. In their quest for finding answers to such questions, they have mostly studied a variety of behaviours and also observed reasons for why people absent themselves from work (absenteeism) or chose to come to work (presenteeism) in spite of certain conditions when they shouldn’t do so. While a plethora of research is available on understanding the meanings and reasons of absenteeism, still its counterpart presenteeism does not enjoy the same attention of organizational scholars and has been limited to the attention of medical researchers and practitioners due to its narrowly defined nomenclature of ‘coming to work while ill’. An intriguing question here would be if people can absent themselves for all sorts of reasons other than health related and absenteeism can manifest into different meanings at the workplace, then presenteeism can also be due to different reasons and can have different meanings. Today’s work environment is dynamic and the challenges faced by individuals in contemporary organizations are countless; be it changing information technology, fierce competition at both local, national and global level, the shift in the paradigm of business from product oriented to service oriented, demographics changes, the changing nature of internal organizational structures and even the traditional understanding of a job as a set of fixed tasks. At the heart of all such changes is the individual who has to put in all efforts to meet organization sumptuous expectations of maximum productivity and long term success which has apparently little interest in an individual’s well-being. These challenges create stress for the individuals, they chose to be present at work but their mental energies are not focused on the task at hand and they are distracted. This type of psychological strain has been conceptualised by certain researchers as stress-related presenteeism. Though research on presenteeism has been overwhelmed by sickness-related presenteeism, researchers have started to raise important concerns about the understanding of sickness related presenteeism and how it can be measured. This study therefore, employed stress-related presenteeism which is an understudied construct and more relevant to the context of Pakistan which has a collectivist culture where there are strong norms of reciprocity, social bindings, and citizenship pressures due to which individuals may feel more pressures, thereby creating stress which can lead to distraction at work and can have devastative effects on their well-being. The field of presenteeism is quite a theoretical. Lack of theory is an important challenge while studying presenteeism. Most studies on the different types of presenteeism have used the job demands resource theory to explain how presenteeism manifests at the workplace where job demands have been seen as a crucial antecedent of presenteeism. The most popular model by Gary Johns also explicates that job demands can lead to presenteeism at the work place. Keeping in line with this theorizing, the current study used the Job Demands-resource (JD-R) model and the conservation of resource theory to investigate the differential effects of challenging (workload) and hindering (emotional demands and, cognitive load) job demands on stress-related presenteeism and outcomes (psychological well-being and procrastination). In an attempt to investigate how individuals can cope with stress-related presenteeism, individual personal resources of psychological capital and mindfulness were also included as moderating variables. Data was collected at two time waves from 298 employees of the banking industry of Pakistan. For analysis of data, stepwise regression analysis in SPSS and bootstrapping mediation analysis techniques were used.The results of this study confirmed the relationship between workload and cognitive demands with stress-related presenteeism. However, no support was found for emotional demands. As proposed, the findings also supported the moderating role of psychological capital and mindfulness on cognitive job demands and not on emotional job demands. In the end, results of the study have been explained based on past literature and theory and also practical implications for managers have been discussed at the end.
"تم اللہ کے ساتھ کفر کا رویہ کیسے اختیار کرتے ہو حالانکہ تم بے جان تھے، اس نے تم کو زندگی عطا کی، پھر وہی تمھاری جان سلب کرے گا، پھر وہی تمہیں دوبارہ زندگی عطا کرے گا، پھر اسی کی طرف تمہیں پلٹ کر جانا ہے"۔
The concept of keeping wealth in a safe place dates to centuries. Ancient civilizations had diverse means of storing wealth in the form of crops, cattle, precious metals etc. The evolution of modern banking practice began with the introduction of receipts which were exchanged against precious metals and coins deposited to goldsmiths for safe keeping. Whenever the need for payments and transactions arose the holder of the receipts used to utilize the receipts as guarantee. The society used to honor these receipts as they carried the same weight as other precious metals. Receipts were swapped in place of precious metals and thus for all practical purposes paper was introduced as currency in the society. With the advent of currency notes the system of traditional banking came into being. Since then the banking system has gone through continuous change. The present banking system is geared up to meet the present and the future requirements of modern age. In the contemporary world money is now being steadily replaced by banknotes, cheques, pay orders, bank draft, ATM cards, debit cards, credit cards, e-banking.
The dairy industry is associated with the production of contaminated waste water. The whey disposal remains a serious pollution problem for dairy industry, particularly in developing countries. Direct disposal of whey in the environment creates serious pollution problems, it destroys the physical and chemical structure of soil which decreases the crops yield and if discarded in water bodies, it reduces the aquatic life. The best solution to this environmental problem is the enzymatic hydrolysis of whey by using β-galactosidase which catalyses the hydrolysis of lactose (main constituent of whey) into its basic monomers, glucose and galactose. β-galactosidase can be obtained from different sources like plants, animals and microorganisms whereas bacterial β-galactosidase is generally regarded as safe. The basic aim of present research is to investigate the utilization of dairy industrial waste (cheese whey) as a substrate for the biosynthesis of β-galactosidase to convert environmental waste into useful biomaterial from a noval β-galactosidase producing bacterial isolate from Antarctica. Two hundred and thirty five isolates were obtained from five samples (ice, water and microbial mats) collected from different sites of Antarctica and screened for their ability to produce β-galactosidase by using X-gal. A total of 61 bacterial isolates which turned blue on X-gal were then cultured in R2 medium and Marine medium aseptically at 10˚C for one month. The most potent bacterial isolates were identified using a polyphasic taxonomical approach. Cells were found strictly aerobic, Gram negative, rod shaped, motile and formed creamy white, half transparent colonies. Growth occurred at 4°C to 28°C with an optimum at 20°C, with 0 – 5.0 % (w/v) NaCl (optimum at 0 - 1.0 %) and at pH 4.0 – 11.0 (optimum at pH 7.0 - 9.0). The major fatty acid was C18:1 ω7c. Respiratory quinone was ubiquinone 10 (Q-10). The DNA G+C content was 60.7 %. The polar lipids were phosphatidylglycerol, phosphatidylethanolamine and phosphatidylmethanolamine in addition to three unidentified lipids, one unknown glycolipid, and five unidentified phospholipids. Comparative analysis of 16S rRNA gene sequences showed highest sequence similarity (98.1 %) to Pararhizobium giardinii H152T, P. herbae CCBAU 83011T, and “P. polonicum” F5.1T. In silico average nucleotide identity (ANI) and genome-to-genome distance calculator (GGDC) showed 81.1 % identity (ANI) and 22.6 % identity (GGDC) to the closest relative, “P. polonicum” F5.1T. On the basis of phenotypic, phylogenetic, genomic and chemotaxonomic data, the two strains xii represent a novel species of the genus Pararhizobium, for which the name Pararhizobium antarcticum sp. nov. is proposed. The type strain is NAQVI 59T LSRP00000000 (=DSMZ 103442T = LMG29675T). Strains NAQVI-58 and NAQVI-59T showed the highest enzyme production (0.21 U/ml) for strain NAQVI-58 and (0.33 U/ml) for strain NAQVI-59 with cheese whey as a substrate at pH (7), 28 ˚C and after 48 hours of incubation respectively. In this study, a new Pararhizobium sp. is discovered by using dairy industrial waste cheese whey as a substrate which is further used for the production of β-galactosidase.