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Recently, strengths used at the team level, that is, collective strengths use, has been introduced as a novel construct that consists of the sub-dimensions of strengths awareness, credibility, and coordination, and influences individual as well as team performance. In this study, we developed a scale to measure this novel construct; moreover, we empirically tested the hypotheses that collective strengths use relates positively to team performance, and that individual performance mediates, while strengths diversity moderates, this relationship. We tested the resulting 2-1-2 moderated mediation model using a sample of 136 work teams encompassing 925 individual employees and their leaders. Cluster-corrected structural equation modeling supported the expected direct relationship between collective strengths use and individual performance and leader-rated team performance, but provided no support for the mediation and mixed support for the moderation hypotheses. Importantly, the analysis revealed differential relationships between the three sub-dimensions of collective strengths use and individual- and team-level performance.

The teaching profession is characterized by high demands and teachers who thrive are better able to navigate their demanding context than teachers who survive. Based on theories on strengths use we propose that strengths interventions which help teachers to identify, use, and develop their strengths can enhance their thriving (vitality and learning) which enables them to perform better. In addition, based on the socioemotional selective theory we propose that strengths interventions are especially beneficial for older teachers because it fits their goals and skills. We conducted a quasi-experimental study, in which 152 teachers and their team leaders participated in a strengths intervention. Longitudinal survey data indicated that the strengths intervention contributed to older teachers’ (≥ 46 years old) vitality, which in turn, contributed to their performance. No significant effects were found for younger teachers. We discuss the implications of our study for older teachers.

Young adults differ in their self-esteem change during the university-to-work transition. The short-term processes related to individual variability in change (e.g., state changes) are not yet fully understood. We examined experiences of state pride as an emotional process underlying state self-esteem change. We followed 232 Dutch master students over 8 months across their university-to-work transition. We used dynamic and multilevel structural equation models to analyze three waves of 14-day experience sampling data. We examined momentary and daily associations between state pride and self-esteem on the within-person level. We examined correlated change in state pride and self-esteem, and the extent to which state pride predicted variability in state self-esteem change. Results indicated positive within-person associations and considerable individual differences in associations between state pride and self-esteem across moments and days. Across months, changes in state pride and self-esteem were positively correlated, but pride before graduation did not predict variability in later state self-esteem change. State-pride-state-self-esteem association remained robust after accounting for feelings of joy, valence, and timing of the university-to-work transition. Individuals who transitioned to work later (relative to wave 1) experienced greater increases in pride. Findings suggest that pride may uniquely help explain state self-esteem change during the university-to-work transition.

PurposeEmployees need a sustainable career to prolong their working lives. The ability, motivation and opportunity to work form an important basis for sustainable careers across the lifespan. However, over the lifespan of their careers employees are likely to experience several career shocks (e.g. becoming chronically ill or being fired) which might result in unsustainable trajectories. This study aims to contribute to the literature on sustainable careers by unraveling the process through which careers shocks relate to career (un)sustainability and what role perceptions of human resource practices play in the process.Design/methodology/approachThirty-three in-depth retrospective interviews with participants of 50 years and older were conducted and analyzed using a template analysis.FindingsResults showed that career shocks influence career sustainability through a process of changes in demands or changes in resources, which in turn, relate to changes in person–job fit. When person-job–fit diminished, the ability, motivation and opportunity to continue working decreased, whereas when person–job fit improved, the ability, motivation and opportunity to continue working improved as well. Organizations appear to be able to diminish the negative consequences of career shocks by offering job resources such as HR practices in response to career shocks.Research limitations/implicationsA limitation of this study is the retrospective nature of the interviews, which could have resulted in recollection bias.Practical implicationsThis study gives HRM practitioners insight into the HR practices that are effective in overcoming career shocks.Originality/valueThis study extends existing literature by including career shocks as possible predictors of sustainable careers.

Research has consistently shown that individuals, teams, and organizations cultivating strengths in the workplace report greater levels of well-being and performance. However, most leaders and professionals remain unaware of the best approaches to embrace a strengths approach. Therefore, the present chapter aims to provide an overview of the current scientific knowledge on strengths, their application in the workplace, and their relations with happiness. The concept of strengths will first be introduced in order to clearly define this notion and present the different classifications and measurement instruments available. Then, we will explain in more detail the processes by which the application of strengths is related to happiness at work. In an applied perspective, we will then propose proven methods and processes to promote strengths development at the individual, team, leader, and organizational levels. Finally, we will conclude with a discussion of the general benefits of strengths use in the workplace and specific advice for professionals who intend to implement this approach in their organization.

Prior research in Western contexts has pointed to the benefits of supporting employees in the use of their personal strengths at work. This manuscript aims to investigate the invariance of the relationship between employees’ perceived organizational support for the use of their strengths and their well-being (work engagement, burnout, and satisfaction with life) across countries. To this end, we collected a cross-sectional sample of n = 1894 working individuals from five different countries (Germany, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Romania, and South Africa). The results of multigroup path analysis indicated that the relationshipsbetween support for the use of their strengths at work and the three indicators of well-being did not differ across the five countries. Perceived support for the use of strengths displayed a significant positive relationship with work engagement and satisfaction with life and a significant negative relationship with burnout. Consequently, our findings provide initial evidence for the universal benefits of focusing on individual strengths at work.

Dit artikel leidt het themanummer 'Het verlagen van werkdruk door de inzet van positieve interventies' in. Terwijl het verlagen van werkdruk in veel sectoren prominent op de beleidsagenda staat, beperkt het beleid van veel organisaties zich tot werkdrukinterventies die worden ingezet zodra negatieve gevolgen van hoge werkdruk (denk bijvoorbeeld aan stressklachten) geconstateerd worden. Het is echter wenselijk om dit soort negatieve gevolgen te voorkomen door de oorzaken van werkdruk bij de bron aan te pakken en door meer in te zetten op preventieve in plaats van reactieve interventies of beleidsmaatregelen. Inzichten vanuit de positieve psychologie suggereren dat interventies die positieve aspecten van het werk of van werkende mensen zelf versterken, effectief zijn in het voorkomen van de negatieve gevolgen van werkdruk. De vier artikelen in het themanummer bieden vernieuwende, wetenschappelijke inzichten met betrekking tot positieve interventies om werkdruk te verlagen.

Personal growth is not only a central individual need but also a key requirement for organizational success. Nevertheless, workplace interventions aimed at stimulating the personal growth of employees are still scarce. In this study, we investigated the effectiveness of an intervention that aimed at the identification, development, and use of employee strengths in stimulating personal growth initiative. We conducted a field experiment with a sample of 84 educational professionals who were either assigned to a strengths intervention or a wait-list control group. In a 1-month follow-up study, we found that the intervention had a direct effect on general self-efficacy (GSE) and an indirect effect on personal growth initiative. Moreover, in line with plasticity theory we found that the intervention was especially effective for participants with low to medium initial levels of GSE. We conclude that a strengths intervention may provide a brief and effective tool for organizations that aim for self-directed learning among their staff, in particular when offered to employees who lack confidence in their own abilities. Practitioner pointsIn a 1 month follow-up study, we found that a strengths intervention had a positive direct effect on general self-efficacy and an indirect effect on personal growth initiative. In line with plasticity theory, we found that the strengths intervention was especially effective for participants with low to medium initial levels of general self-efficacy.

Two assumptions about employee reactions are currently driving debates around talent management (TM): First, that TM leads to positive outcomes in employees identified as talents; and second, that TM creates differences between talents and employees not identified as talents. This review critically evaluates these assumptions by contrasting theoretical arguments from the non-empirical literature on employee reactions to TM with the empirical evidence available. Our analysis partly supports both assumptions. Although positive reactions to TM were indeed found in terms of affective, cognitive, and behavioral employee outcomes, our review also found evidence for negative affective reactions in employees identified as talents. Significant differences between talents and non-talents were found for behavioral reactions, but not for affective and cognitive reactions; for the latter types of reactions, our review found mixed effects. We summarize these findings in an integrative framework on the basis of social exchange theory, which our review shows is the dominant theory underlying assumptions about employee reactions to TM. We propose that 3 elements are missing in our current understanding, which can help explain our review findings: uncertainty, power, and social identity. We conclude with recommendations for TM research and practice.

This paper reviews studies of strengths interventions published between 2011 and 2016. Strengths interventions aim to promote well-being or other positive outcomes by facilitating strengths identification, and sometimes also strengths use and/or development. The present review provides an overview of the different strengths interventions that are investigated, their effectiveness, and moderating and mediating factors. Results of the 18 (quasi-)experimental studies that were identified through a systematic literature search showed that all types of strengths interventions had positive outcomes in terms of well-being, job outcomes (e.g. work engagement), personal growth initiative, and group or team outcomes (e.g. class cohesion). Hope, positive affect, authentic self-expression, perceptions of the employment relationship, and feelings of social worth were identified as mediators, whereas extraversion and having specific strengths (e.g. persistence) were identified as moderators. Based on these findings, we discuss implications for future research and practice.Keywords: Strengths interventions, positive psychology, well-being, review, positive-activity model

Personal strengths are those characteristics that allow us to be at our best, that is, to deliver high performance while feeling happy and energized. Research has indicated that employees who perceive organizational support for strengths use (POSSU) display higher levels of well-being, and, in turn, performance. However, we do not yet know whether all employee groups benefit equally from the positive effects of POSSU. To fill this research gap, we introduce age as a relevant moderator that may alter the relationship between POSSU and respectively employee well-being (operationalized as work engagement in our study) and contextual performance (e.g., taking up new and challenging tasks). Building on life- and career stage theories, we expect that POSSU is more beneficial for younger employees who are still seeking to explore who they are and want to be (at work) and who are less able to use their strengths out of their own initiative. In a cross-sectional dataset of 753 Dutch employees, we found support for a moderated mediation model in which the indirect effect of POSSU on contextual performance via work engagement was moderated by age. Even though the indirect effect was significant for all age groups, it was found to be significantly stronger for younger employees. These findings highlight the relevance of focusing on individual strengths among younger employees who may be able to substantiate their tentative, positive (work) identities due to POSSU.

In this article, we explore the use of strengths interventions, defined as activities and processes that target the identification, development, and use of individual strengths, as an organizational tool to increase employee well-being. Engaging with one’s strengths is assumed to be a pleasant activity that elicits positive emotions like joy, pride, and gratitude, which, in turn, contribute to feelings of overall well-being and satisfaction. Building on this assumption, we hypothesized that participating in a strengths intervention leads to increases in general (i.e., psychological capital and satisfaction with life), and work-related well-being (i.e., increased work engagement and decreased burnout), and that positive affect mediates these effects. To test these hypotheses, we conducted a field experiment with a sample of N = 116 Dutch working people who were assigned to either an experimental group (participating in a strengths intervention) or a waitlist control group. All participants filled in a pre-intervention, post-intervention, and 1 month follow-up questionnaire. Results indicate that participating in a strengths intervention creates short-term increases in employee positive affect and short- and long-term increases in psychological capital. We did not find evidence for a positive, direct effect of the strengths intervention on satisfaction with life, work engagement, and burnout respectively, but we did find support for indirect effects via the mediator positive affect.

Talent management is a growing research stream within human resource management, and despite the great progress accomplished in the definition and conceptualization of talent management, there is s...

Organizational talent management has been widely recognized as a key driver of firm performance. Existing theoretical and empirical work in the domain has drawn on Social Exchange Theory to suggest that talent management affects organizational performance by eliciting positive reactions such as high organizational commitment and work effort among the firm's most high performing and high potential employees (i.e., talented employees). While this work has produced valuable insights, it has largely neglected the active role talented employees may play in gaining access to and in capitalizing on talent-management practices. The present manuscript aims to close this gap by integrating the concept of proactive behavior into talent-management theorizing. To this end, the manuscript presents a new conceptual model incorporating three potential relationships between talent proactive behavior and talent management. This model points out relevant avenues for future research in the talent-management domain.

Personal growth initiative (PGI), defined as being proactive about one's personal development, is critical to graduate students' academic success. Prior research has shown that students' PGI can be enhanced through interventions that focus on stimulating developmental activities. Within this study, we aimed to investigate whether an intervention that stimulates development in the area of one's personal strengths (strengths intervention) has more beneficial effects on students' PGI than an intervention that stimulates development in the area of individual deficiencies (deficiency intervention). We conducted 2 longitudinal field experiments to investigate the effects of the 2 interventions on students' PGI (Experiment 1) and the potential mediating role of psychological capital (PsyCap) in this regard (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, 105 (N = 105) university students participated in either a strengths intervention or a deficiency intervention. Results indicated that the strengths intervention increased the students' PGI in the short but not in the long term, whereas the deficiency intervention did not affect PGI. Ninety students (N = 90) participated in Experiment 2, in which we slightly refined both interventions by putting a stronger emphasis on the ongoing development of strengths (strengths intervention) or correction of deficiencies (deficiency intervention) by adding posttraining assignments. Results suggested that participating in both interventions led to increases in PGI over a 3-month period, but that these increases were bigger for the strengths intervention group. Furthermore, the relationship between the strengths intervention and PGI was mediated by hope as one component of PsyCap.

It is assumed that employees display favorable attitudes (e.g., high organizational commitment) and behaviors (e.g., high work effort) when identified as organizational talent. If they did not, the idea that talent management creates value by making disproportionate investments into organizational talent would need to be reconsidered. We reviewed the literature to explore whether the assumed favorable reactions among talent are valid and the results are not straightforward. Many studies found evidence for the assumption; however, several studies revealed that talent designation bears considerable risks: Being identified as talent creates (overly optimistic) expectations of receiving rewards and benefits from the organization and it increases the felt pressure to meet high performance standards. We discuss the findings in the light of social exchange theory, psychological contract theory, and others commonly used in talent-management research, highlighting key issues regarding talent designation and identifying avenues for future research.

This article builds on the argument that research on the link between HRM and performance benefits from investigating how HR practices are envisioned by managers (in terms of underlying philosophies), and how they are perceived by employees (in terms of psychological climates). Our study focuses on the effects of a strengths-based HR philosophy assuming that employee performance can be maximized through leveraging individual strengths. This philosophy relates to a strengths-based psychological climate, that is, employee perceptions of the opportunities they get to identify, develop, and use their strengths. We hypothesized that a strengths-based psychological climate positively influences employees’ positive affect, which in turn enhances their in-role and extra-role performance. In our study, 442 respondents working in 39 departments of eight Dutch and Belgian organizations gave ratings on the strength-based psychological climate of their organization, and indicated their level of work-related positive affect, in-role performance, and extra-role performance. Results of multilevel hierarchical regression analyses supported our hypotheses by indicating that strengths-based psychological climate was positively linked to in-role and extra-role performance, and that this link was mediated by positive affect. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

In order to explain how and why talent management can contribute to a firm's sustained competitive advantage, we need to gain insights into the philosophies about talent that underpin talent management. This article introduces four talent philosophies that vary in their perception of talent as (a) rare (exclusive) or universal (inclusive), and (b) stable or developable: the exclusive/stable; exclusive/developable; inclusive/stable; and inclusive/developable talent philosophy. We discuss basic assumptions, talent-management practices, opportunities, and challenges for each of the four philosophies. Based on this discussion, testable propositions for future research are developed.

Assumptions about employee reactions are currently driving much of the debate around talent management (TM). It is unclear, however, to what extent evidence from studies on employee reactions to TM...

In order to contribute to the theoretical understanding of talent management, this paper aims to shed light on the meaning of the term ‘talent’ by answering the following question: Is talent predominantly an innate construct, is it mostly acquired, or does it result from the interaction between (specific levels of) nature and nurture components? Literature stemming from different disciplines has been reviewed to summarize the main arguments in support of each of the three perspectives. Subsequently, these arguments are mapped on a continuum ranging from completely innate to completely acquired. We argue that an organization’s position on this continuum entails important implications for its design of talent management practices, which we discuss extensively. By providing guidelines on how an organization’s talent management system can be shaped in accordance with their respective talent definition, this paper is particularly useful to HR practitioners. publisher: Elsevier articletitle: Talent — Innate or acquired? Theoretical considerations and their implications for talent management journaltitle: Human Resource Management Review articlelink: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.hrmr.2013.05.003 content_type: article copyright: Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. ispartof: Human Resource Management Review vol:23 issue:4 pages:305-321 status: published

In 2006, Lewis and Heckman characterized talent management (TM) as a scientific field in its infancy. Despite a rise in the number of scientific publications on talent management in the subsequent ...

This article explores the use of strengths interventions as an organizational tool to increase work-related well-being. We hypothesized that participating in a strengths intervention leads to long-...