External seminars
2024-2025 Seminars
#1 Roy Thurik (Montpellier Business School)
Mental health of entrepreneurs and daily recovery experiences
Thursday, February 6th, 2024, from 11:15 to 12:30
Abstract below
We analyse the relationships between daily recovery experiences (DRE) after work (detachment, relaxation, mastery and control) and mental health (well-being and burnout) based on four surveys among French entrepreneurs (small business owners). DRE are a considerable and well-documented instrument to fight burnout risks for employees. So, we compare levels of DRE of employees and entrepreneurs. We do the same for their four dimensions. Second, controlling for gender, age, life partner, education level, executive experience, business size, capital ownership and type of entrepreneur, both linear regressions and SEM analysis show that for entrepreneurs, the quality of DRE increases well-being and reduces burnout. Interestingly, we show that the detachment component is not correlated with well-being, and the mastery component is not correlated with burnout. Relaxation and control are most strongly associated with well-being, whereas control has the strongest association with burnout. Many implications (including clinical) are discussed.
#2 Anthony Klotz (University College London)
Our Better Nature: How a Biophilic Intervention Influences Uncivil Workplace Behavior
Thursday, February 20th, 2024, from 11:15 to 12:30
Abstract below
Given the benefits of contact with nature, management scholars have recently explored how contact with nature can promote employee well-being and desirable behaviors like task performance, citizenship, and creativity. In doing so, the organizational literature has focused on nature’s effects on positive outcomes for workers, overlooking the role that it may play in shaping negative outcomes. This oversight is meaningful given research in adjacent fields indicating that nature-based (i.e., biophilic) interventions can curb people’s engagement in deviant behavior. Yet whether such interventions, amid people’s workdays, will likewise have meaningful effects on their negative behavior at work, and the pathways via which these effects might occur, are unclear. In this paper, we draw on the theory of biophilic work design to test the hypothesis that nature-based interventions will reduce workplace incivility. We also examine whether, as predicted by this theory, these effects are transmitted by affective, cognitive, prosocial, and physical mechanisms. The findings of a two-week field experiment involving 181 employees indicate that biophilic interventions positively affect all four mechanisms, but only one of them—physical health—is strong enough to transmit the effects of biophilic interventions to reduced workplace incivility. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.