In an organization, coworkers are the people who have the most contact with a worker besides his or her supervisor. Past empirical evidence of social support in workplace research has focused on supervisor while support from coworkers is often discussed with social support and organization citizenship behaviors (OCBs). Based on Affective Event Theory (AET), this study extends previous research of coworker support by focusing on the personal emotion, reaction and opinion. The main points of this study include: What are the different types of coworker support and nonsupport behaviors? How do these coworker behaviors influence the workers¡¦ personal emotions? How do workers response to them? This qualitative study uses the Critical Incident Technique (CIT) to collect coworker behaviors as incidents, define criteria and analyze. This study finds that coworker support can predict the workers¡¦ emotion, reaction and opinion. Coworker support will help to enhance the displays of positive emotion, reaction and opinion of workers. In addition, people in positive emotion are more likely to response and think positively. They will keep interacting with others, dedicate to their job and identify themselves to their organizations. From a standpoint of practical management, in order to enhance organization performance, managers should improve organization environment to facilitate coworker support.

Coworkers can play an important role in helping each other overcome stressful circumstances (Beehr, Jex, Stacy, & Murray, 2000; LaRocco & Jones, 1978; Viswesvaran, Sanchez, & Fisher, 1999), yet work-family researchers have paid significantly less attention to coworker-provided support than they have to supervisor-provided support (Kossek, Pichler, Bodner, & Hammer, 2011). This thesis contributes to the occupational health literature by providing empirical evidence of the benefits of a novel construct termed work-family supportive coworker behavior (WFSCB) – defined as any supportive action that a coworker can take to contribute to the improved management of an individual’s work and family role demands. A phenomenological qualitative investigation revealed five categories of WFSCB that were tested using three quantitative samples to develop and validate a multidimensional measure. The findings indicated that four dimensions of behavior best reflect WFSCB including: 1) emotional support, 2) facilitating work adjustments, 3) sharing resources and knowledge, and 4) proactively developing solutions. In testing the criterion-related validity of the new measure, this research provides evidence of the positive relationship between these behaviors and various work-family outcomes, as higher levels of WFSCB were associated with lower levels of work-to-family conflict, and higher levels of work-family balance, work-family positive spillover, and overall life satisfaction. In addition, the utility of WFSCB as a source of informal workplace support was underscored based on evidence of its incremental validity in the prediction of these same outcome variables over and above a measure of general coworker support (i.e., emotional and instrumental support). Practically, these findings suggest that general measures of coworker support may fall short in assessing a broad spectrum of supportive coworker behaviors that can significantly contribute to improved work-family outcomes. Overall, the results of this research program will place scholars in a better position to provide prescriptive advice to organizations and employees on the behaviors that they can engage in towards one another to promote improved work-family integration for individuals and more broadly, to contribute to a work-family supportive organizational climate.

This study investigated whether the percentage of time that weekly employees spend in virtual workspaces is related to job satisfaction (JS), organizational commitment (OC), perceived supervisor support (PSS) and perceived coworker support (PCS). One hundred thirty-five virtual workers employed by 1 of 5 large, privately owned companies reported the percentage of their work time spent performing virtual work and completed 4 instruments to measure JS, OC, PSS, and PCS. Data were analyzed using multivariate linear regression, multivariate multiple regression, and multivariate analysis of variance. Results showed that virtual workers who spent 75% or more of their time engaged in virtual work had higher JS, OC, and PSS than virtual workers who spent 25% or less of their work time working virtually. No relationship was found between the percentage of time spent working virtually and PCS. Results were also examined to determine whether gender or age moderated any of the relationships found between the percentage of time working virtually and organizational outcomes. Neither gender nor age moderated the relationships observed. The study results showed that as employee time performing virtual work increases, employee and corporate benefits also increase in large, privately owned companies. The results of the study have several potential implications for positive social change for organizations, employees, and society as a whole by providing information to organizations considering increasing the percentage of time employees spend engaging in virtual work, helping society determine how performing virtual work affects an employee's well-being, potentially providing insight to employees regarding the pros and cons of virtual work.

Hiring and maintaining quality staff members is crucial in juvenile correctional facilities. Unfortunately, staff turnover is much more common in correctional agencies than other areas of government work. Although several studies have looked at rates and predictors of employee turnover in adult correctional facilities, few have assessed the issue among juvenile correctional staff. Therefore, this study was guided by two main questions: (1) what are the current turnover rates among frontline staff members at Delaware's public juvenile correctional facilities, and (2) what are the main factors that lead to frontline staff leaving? To answer the above questions, this study used a mixed-methods approach consisting of three stages. In the first stage, total rates of voluntary turnover were provided by an administrator from Delaware State's Division of Youth Rehabilitative Services (DYRS) Personnel Department. The voluntary turnover rates for juvenile correctional officers in Delaware's public facilities for 2011 and 2012 were 7 percent and 13 percent, respectively. This is slightly less than voluntary turnover rates from previous studies on juvenile correctional staff. The next two stages of research were designed to assess the best predictors of intentions to leave for Delaware's frontline staff members. Specifically, the second stage consisted of interviews with 14 staff members from five residential facilities across Delaware. The interviews increased our understanding of how aspects of job satisfaction and organizational commitment apply to this particular sample of employees and provided greater insight into two recently developed aspects of employee turnover theory: Job Embeddedness and the Employment Opportunity Index (EOI). More importantly, three aspects of employee turnover for this sample were discovered: commitment to youth, career stepping stone and job expectations. The discovery of new variables supports the idea that it is important for researchers assessing employee turnover to conduct face-to-face interviews with employees prior to analyzing survey data. The final stage of research compared three models of employee turnover. The first was based on Lambert's 2001 model of correctional officer turnover which stemmed from employee turnover theory. The second model was designed to assess improvement in predicting intentions to leave by incorporating two concepts, Job Embeddedness and the Employment Opportunity Index (EOI), that have not been tested in many studies on employee turnover. The last model that was tested incorporated the three new variables that were created based on the interviews in stage two. Intentions to leave was used as the outcome variable in this study. It measures the extent to which a person desires to leave his or her job. It was chosen for two reasons: 1) Samples consisting of employees who have quit can take years to obtain and 2) Assessing employees intentions to leave could be more useful to administrators. The sample for the last stage of this study consisted of 102 frontline staff members from five of Delaware's six facilities. The data for the last portion of this study were analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM). This method was appropriate because it could assess the impact of both direct and indirect measures. However, because the sample size for this study was not adequate to run any of the models in full, ordinary least squares (OLS) regression was also incorporated. Results from the quantitative portion of this study showed that there were several variables that predicted intentions to leave for this sample. Similar to most studies that look at intentions to leave, job satisfaction and organizational commitment were two of the strongest predictors of intentions to leave. In terms of individual characteristics, race/ethnicity was the only statistically significant predictor. What was especially interesting about this result was that when previous studies found a race effect, it was that African Americans had higher levels of intentions to leave. This was not the case for this sample. Along these lines, race/ethnicity was significantly associated with one of the factors from Job Embeddedness, organizational fit, which assesses if employees believe they are an appropriate match for their job. Interestingly, whites had lower levels of organizational fit which resulted in higher levels of intentions to leave. Findings from this study have implications for the correctional literature and employee turnover theory. This study supported a long history of employee turnover studies that have found job satisfaction and organizational commitment to be the best predictors of employee turnover. At the same time, this study also found a new predictor of employee turnover specific to juvenile correctional officers: commitment to youth. This stands to have a major impact on future research on employee turnover, not just for juvenile corrections but also studies in the larger body of employee turnover in that this study made it clear that one model does not fit all workers. The concept, commitment to youth, applies only to employees who work with youths. And, the particular way commitment to youth was measured in the present study would only apply to those who work with at-risk youths. Therefore, this study should be viewed as an important step towards understanding the relationship between commitment to youth and decisions made by juvenile correctional officers. This study also had important implications for administrators of juvenile correctional facilities. A major finding stemming from the interviews, which was subsequently confirmed by the quantitative analysis, was that support from coworkers is vital to the overall performance of staff. In fact, subjects reported that a lack of support from coworkers was the difference between a good day and a bad day, and that it was never the juveniles that created a bad day for staff; it was their coworkers. Based on this finding, it is vital that administrators stress the importance of not only working as a team, but also the importance of respecting fellow staff members, especially in front of youths. To do this, administrators should encourage supervisors to demonstrate this type of behavior every day and stress the importance of it during trainings, especially the impact it can have on the residents; several staff members discussed how the youthful offenders can easily detect bad feelings among staff. / Criminal Justice

In recent years, studies have discussed the abusive supervision behavior in the organizations. Especially, supervisors¡¦ abusive supervision behaviors were believed to have negative effects on subordinates. However, the relationship between supervisors¡¦ abusive supervision behaviors, subordinates¡¦ work-family conflict, and deviant behavior remained unclear. For this reason, this study intends correlating supervisors¡¦ abusive supervision behaviors and subordinates¡¦ work-family conflict with deviant behavior. In this study, abusive supervision is the independent variable; Deviant behavior is the dependent variable; Work-family conflict is the mediator. Besides, we defined social support (family-supportive policies, perceived organizational work¡Vfamily support, and perceived coworker support) as a moderator not only between supervisors¡¦ abusive supervision behaviors and subordinates¡¦ work-family conflict, but also between work-family conflict and deviant behavior. The subjects of the study who are selected by convenience sampling and the data are collected using dyad-approach are common enterprise employees from manufacturing, high-tech industry, and service industry in Taiwan. Two hundred and twelve effective questionnaires (106 supervisor-subordinate dyadic data) of the survey are retrieved. Moreover, the analytic tools such as descriptive analysis, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), linear structural relation, hierarchical regression analysis, and sobel test are utilized to analyze the result of the survey and to verify the assumptions of the study. The findings of the study are as follows. (1) Abusive supervision correlates positively with work-family conflict. (2) Work-family conflict also has significantly positive correlation with deviant behavior. (3) Mediating effect of work-family conflict is significant. (4) Family-supportive policies moderate the relationship between Abusive supervision and work-family conflict. The findings highly support the hypothesis I made, and also testify some researcher¡¦s suggestions. Further from this research, I also offer some suggestions for management and practice to the issue and following related research.

Previous researches about the Person-Environment Fit were mainly based on the points of view of Person-Organization Fit and Person-Job Fit. Researches based on the points of view of Person-Supervisor Fit (P-S Fit) and Person-Workgroup Fit (P-G Fit) was less made. But nowadays, more and more companies adopt team approach for the organization of the main mold of operation. How to establish a harmonious group and enhance group¡¦s and individual performance becomes an important issue. The main purpose of this research is base on Fit Theory to examine Person-Supervisor Fit and Person-Workgroup Fit between crew, their supervisor and their coworker in every flight. In this study, Person-Supervisor Fit and Person-Workgroup Fit were defined as independent variables; role performance, job satisfaction and perceived support were defined as dependent variables. The relationship between independent and dependent variable are deeply discussed. There are 136 pairs of questionnaires surveyed by employees and their supervisors. Supervisor Leadership Profile (SLP) and Workgroup Characteristics Profile (WCP) were reduced to 16 of 25 statements as Q ranking items, and Q methodology was applied for measuring P-S Fit and P-W Fit. Regression analysis was used to further explore the dependent variable on the independent variable's influence. The result indicate that¡GFirst, employee with high P-G Fit, has more job satisfaction, the correlation between P-G Fit and job satisfaction is significant; second, employee with high P-S Fit, has more perceived supervisor support, the correlation between P-S Fit and perceived supervisor support is significant; third, employee with high P-G Fit, has more perceived coworker support, the correlation between P-G Fit and perceived coworker support is weak significant. This research further represents the direction of future research and practical meaning of management.

<p>Managers within the hospitality industry are often required to handle irate guests through various service-recovery situations and thus are exposed to frequent guest aggression. Consequently, manager work is associated with high stress and anxiety. This study used several theories to understand the complex landscape of manager stress and anxiety within the hospitality industry. The Conservation of Resource Theory (Hobfoll, 1989), Stress as Offense to Self Theory (Semmer et al., 2007), and the Social Exchange Theory (Baumeister & Leary, 2005) are used as the foundation to delineate the roles of guest aggression and workplace social support played in reducing manager turnover intention through stress and anxiety. The study results identify that stress and anxiety are vital in impacting turnover intention; however, only certain forms of workplace social support (such as appraisal support) moderate the relationship in such a way that turnover intention decreases.</p> <p>The study design utilized a moderated-mediation analysis with a two-time cross-sectional survey. Respondents were guest-facing managers in various hospitality organizations, including restaurants, hotels, and clubs. Two hundred and sixty-three participants completed the first and second waves of the survey, and after data cleaning, a total of 260 usable responses remained. This study employed Hayes' (2018) mediation analysis model 4 and the moderated mediation analysis model 58 to test all hypotheses.</p> <p>This study shows that guest aggression is a significant predictor of turnover intention, and anxiety mediates the relationship leading to turnover intention. At the same time, stress only has a direct effect itself on turnover intention. In addition, this study found that some forms of workplace social support increased turnover intention, while supervisor appraisal (words of affirmation) moderated the relationship. Ultimately, this study helps guide organizations in making decisions that may reduce managers' intention to quit while providing a foundation for future researchers to examine how workplace social support uniquely affects managers.</p>

Using the Job Demands – Resources Model, this study investigates the moderating role of support in the organization, such as coworker, supervisor, and perceived organizational support, in attenuating the relationship between emotional job demand and employees’ emotional exhaustion. A series of hierarchical regression analysis on 237 respondents indicate that emotional job demand is negatively related to emotional exhaustion. With respect to the moderating role of support variables, although both instrumental and emotional support from supervisors are shown to moderate the relationship between emotional job demand and emotional exhaustion, only instrumental support is associated with lower levels of emotional exhaustion. This finding provides evidence for the buffering effect. Findings indicate several promising theoretical and managerial implications, and suggestions for future research.

Lazarus and Folkman's (1984) transactional stress-strain-coping theory provides the theoretical background for the present thesis. This theory proposes that strain (i.e., burnout) occurs when demands (i.e., work stressors) exceed coping resources (e.g., social support). The current thesis explores the influence of social support on the stress-burnout relationship in nurses. A sample of Australian nurses working across three public hospitals in Brisbane's metropolitan district were recruited to investigate the nature and level of burnout experienced by nurses. Burnout is characterised by emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation and reduced personal accomplishment. The present research addresses gaps in the empirical literature by investigating the key work stressors experienced by Australian nurses and by establishing nurses' referent levels of work stress, social support, and burnout. In addition, the research explores the complex relationships between work stress, social support and burnout. The majority of nursing studies have failed to consider how support from within the nurses' work environment mitigates burnout. The present research builds upon previous nursing literature by examining the "main&qout; and "buffering" effect hypotheses. Studies have consistently found support for the main effect model, however the hypothesis that social support buffers the negative effects of stress has resulted in highly conflicting findings. Some theorists (Cohen & Wills, 1985; Cutrona & Russell, 1990) propose that the buffering effects of social support will only be found if there is an adequate match between the needs elicited by the stressful event and the type of support an individual receives. The present study extends the stress or support matching theory by exploring the matching between specific types of stressors to specific types (i.e., emotional and instrumental) and sources (i.e.,supervisor and coworkers) of support. Cutrona (1990) suggests that the controllability of a stressor is the primary dimension in determining an appropriate match between stressors and types of support. Cutrona proposes that controllable stressful events elicit needs for instrumental support and uncontrollable events elicit needs for emotional support. Heeding Cutrona's advice, independent raters classified nurses' work stressors as controllable or uncontrollable stressful events prior to investigating the stressor-support matching theory. Three sequential studies were undertaken to explore the variables of interest to this research program. In Study 1, focus groups were conducted with 68 nurses (11 males, 34 females) from two public hospitals. The qualitative data was subjected to content analysis. The findings revealed that Australian nurses are exposed to a range of job-specific stressors (i.e., Job Conditions, Job Uncertainty, Interpersonal Conflict and a Lack of Professional Recognition and Support) and generic role stressors (i.e., Role Overload, Role Conflict and Role Ambiguity). The findings prompted the research to utilise Wolfgang's (1988) Health Professions Stress Inventory to measure nurses' job-specific stressors and Osipow and Spokane's (1987) Occupational Roles Questionnaire to measure nurses' role stressors in Study 2. The findings from Study 1 also confirmed that the way nurses perceive work support is consistent with current social support literature. Nurses indicated that their two main sources of support were their coworkers and their supervisor. Furthermore, nurses discussed social support from a multidimensional perspective, recognising different types of support that were broadly classified as emotional and instrumental support. Based on these findings, the researcher developed a work support measure specifically for the purpose of this research. Items were taken from established social support scales and were slightly modified to ensure that they were contextually relevant to nurses. In Study 2, 273 nurses (38 males, 235 females) completed a multi-measure questionnaire. While there was sufficient research evidence to indicate that the Occupational Roles Questionnaire (Osipow & Spokane, 1987) and the Maslach Burnout Inventory (Maslach, Jackson, & Leiter, 1996) possess adequate levels of reliability and validity, less was known about Wolfgang's Health Professions Stress Inventory and the work support scales designed for this research program. Factor analysis of the Health Professions Stress Inventory revealed a four-factor solution: Lack of Professional Recognition and Support, Patient Care Uncertainty, Job Conditions, and Interpersonal Conflict. Cronbach's coefficient alphas ranged from .62 to .83. Factor analysis of the Coworker Support Scale revealed a two-factor solution, representing emotional and instrumental support. Cronbach's coefficient alphas for the Emotional Coworker Support and Instrumental Coworker Support were .92 and .88 respectively. Contrary to expectations, factor analysis of the Supervisor Support Scale revealed a one-factor solution. It was therefore deemed appropriate to examine Supervisor Support as a unidimensional construct in subsequent analyses. Cronbach's coefficient alpha for the Supervisor Support scale was .96. Overall, the results from Study 2 provided supporting evidence to suggest that the measures used in the current research program were psychometrically sound. In Study 3, the data collected in Study 2 was subjected to further statistical analysis. The findings from Study 3 indicated that overall, the sample of Australian nurses reported low to moderate levels of work stress, moderate levels of work support and moderately high levels of burnout. For Emotional Exhaustion, predictor variables accounted for 42.2% of the total variance. Sociodemographic factors explained a small but significant proportion of the variance (2.7%). Work stressors however, were the main predictors of Emotional Exhaustion, explaining 41.5% of the total variance. Role Overload, Job Conditions and Role Conflict were the main determinants of Emotional Exhaustion, with Role Overload explaining most of the variance. For Depersonalisation, the predictor variables accounted for 34.2% of the total variance. Sociodemographic factors (11.5%) and work stressors (33.6%) both explained a significant proportion of the variance. Role Conflict and Patient Care Uncertainty were the main determinants of Depersonalisation, with Role Conflict explaining most of the variance. For Personal Accomplishment, Role Conflict and Role Ambiguity explained 20.5% of the total variance, with Role Conflict explaining most of the variance. Sociodemographic factors and job-specific stressors were not significant Predictors of Personal Accomplishment. Evidence for main effects of work support on burnout were limited. There was no evidence to suggest that work support had significant main effects on Emotional Exhaustion. Supervisor Support had a small, but significant main effect on Depersonalisation (â = -.15, p < .05) and Personal Accomplishment (â = -.24, p < .01). There was no evidence of main effects for Emotional and Instrumental Coworker Support. Furthermore, the present research found no significant evidence to support the buffering effect of work support on burnout. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.