الاصابہ فی تمییز الصحابہ میں نماز و روزے سے متعلقہ روایاتِ اَحکام کا تحقیقی جائزہ Research Review of the Traditions of Rulings on Prayer and Fasting in Al-Aṣābah Fī Tamīz al-Ṣaḥābah

The book “Al-Aṣābah Fī Tamīz al-Ṣaḥābah” is a famous book of Ibn Ḥajar ‘Asqalānī on the life and contribution of the Companions. This book is quoted as a reference to decide the status of companions. It would not be wrong to call it the encyclopedia of the companions of the Holy Prophetﷺ. Apart from its status as a reference book regarding the companions this book encompasses the Seerah of Holy Prophet in a detailed and well composed manner. The distinction of the book is not hidden from the experts of science and research. In the book and other similar books, the life of the companions was discussed and the biography of the Prophet ﷺwas also described, but another aspect that remained unexplored in these books is the virtues and commandments mentioned in it. There are also narrations about virtues. In this paper the researcher has evaluated the Hadiths related to prayer and fasting that are narrated in Al-Aṣābah Fī Tamīz al-Ṣaḥābah. The evaluation comprises of authenticity of narrators and text, narrators’ mutual association or disassociation and the final decree about the authenticity of a hadith in the light of all available evidences.

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.