Challenges related to mental health and staff retention are common in the retail industry and were likely accentuated during COVID-19. This study used questionnaire data from Swedish retail employees (N = 388) to investigate whether job demands and resources differed based on occupational status and a crisis like the pandemic. Mean levels and associations with job satisfaction, turnover intention, and burnout were compared between blue-collar and white-collar employees, before and during the pandemic. Blue-collar employees reported greater physical demands, lower levels of resources, and higher levels of burnout. Job insecurity and emotional demands increased during the pandemic, especially for blue-collar employees. Overall, job demands and resources predicted outcomes in line with previous literature, but job insecurity was particularly salient for blue-collar employees, and autonomy for white-collar employees. Crises like the pandemic affect job demands and resources, potentially exposing lower occupational status employees to a higher risk for negative consequences such as burnout.

The retention of front-line staff in retail has proven challenging. Simultaneously, there are high demands for performance, in a working environment that is often characterized as being detrimental to personal wellbeing. In this paper, we test hindering job demands and job resources as predictors of individual well-being and work-related attitudes and behavior. Retail employees may need to manage their own emotions (emotional dissonance) and can even be exposed to threats and harassment in face-to-face interactions with customers. As a sector with high levels of part-time employment, insecurity around working hours may be an important demand within retail that has not received much attention in previous research. We also consider the role of job resources, namely job control, social support from the supervisor, and possibilities for development. We investigate outcomes related to employees’ well-being (exhaustion), thoughts about leaving the job (turnover intention) and job performance through moderated hierarchical regression analyses with interaction terms. Data was collected cross-sectionally by electronic survey using established measures, in collaboration with a large union that operates in the Swedish retail sector. Emotional dissonance predicted all outcome variables, threats and harassment predicted exhaustion, and worktime insecurity predicted exhaustion and turnover intention. All job resources were significantly and directly related to the outcome variables, but job control showed the strongest negative relation with exhaustion, possibilities for development the strongest negative relation with turnover intention, and supervisory support was a strong positive predictor of job performance. The findings mainly confirm that job demands themselves need to be managed actively, and that job resources have to be present to directly protect wellbeing and performance, and prevent turnover intention. However, evidence for moderating effects of job resources in this sample was weak.

There is often a gap between what managers perceive they do in terms of fairness (managers’ justice enactment perceptions) and how fairly employees feel treated by their supervisor (employees’ organizational justice perceptions). This study investigates three managerial actions as potential predictors of congruence in managers’ justice enactment and employees’ justice perceptions. Using individual pay setting as context, the authors hypothesize that goal clarity, continuous feedback, and supervisory credibility predict congruence in justice perceptions (distributive, procedural, interpersonal, and informational justice). Analyses are based on 124 pay-setting managers with their employees from an industrial company in Sweden. Results reveal that goal clarity, continuous feedback, and supervisor credibility reduce the mean-value difference in justice perceptions between managers and employees. This study broadens the organizational justice literature by contributing with a new way of simultaneously studying justice enactment and justice perceptions to further knowledge on how to facilitate and improve fairness in organizations.

This study explored pay-setting managers’ experiences regarding the individualized pay-setting process. Seven semi-structured group-interviews with pay-setting managers (N = 28) from four private companies in Sweden were conducted. A thematic analysis identified three main themes: 1) Prerequisites for pay-setting, which included conditions for pay-setting work and experiences of these conditions; 2) Assessment and feedback, which included experiences of employee performance assessment and feedback provision; 3) Rewards, which covered experiences of different pay incentives and the relationship between performance and pay. The pay-setting process was considered to include many obstacles as well as a few opportunities. Without proper pre-requisites to assess employee performance, the possibilities to adequately reward performance were experienced as limited, which, in turn, hampered possibilities to justify both the assessment and pay raise. Taken together, this study underscores the conflict between intentions relating to how to carry out a pay-setting process and managers’ difficulties to actually accomplish this.

How experiences and perceptions of pay and pay setting relate to employees’ job performance, willingness to remain in the organization, and health has been the subject of much debate. Previous research has typically used a variable-centered approach to investigate associations between different pay-related factors and such outcomes. In contrast, we used latent profile analysis to explore combinations of compensation characteristics (pay level, perceived horizontal pay dispersion, and procedural quality, i.e., transactional leadership and procedural pay-setting justice), combining relevant theories on the subject. Based on a nationally representative sample of private sector employees in Sweden (N = 1,146), our study identified six compensation profiles. Our key findings show, first, that higher levels of pay were generally associated with better performance, lower turnover intention, better self-rated health, and lower work-related exhaustion, especially when combined with perceptions of high procedural quality. Second, in terms of perceived horizontal pay dispersion, the results indicate that pay compression may be associated with beneficial outcomes, particularly when combined with high procedural quality. Third, procedural quality was generally associated with favorable work-related and health-related outcomes, although such positive effects may be contingent upon pay level and perceived horizontal pay dispersion. In conclusion, while pay level, perceptions of horizontal pay dispersion, and procedural quality may all matter for employee outcomes, it is important to consider their combinations.

Work and family are sources of both satisfaction and conflicting demands. A challenge is to identify individuals at risk for conflict and factors that potentially reduce conflict. This study investigated how gender and socioeconomic status (SES) were associated with work-family interference (WFI) and family-work interference (FWI) and how control at work and at home related to WFI and FWI. Data from 1991-1993 and 1997-1999 of the Whitehall II study of British civil servants, including 3484 (827 women and 2657 men) employees in three SES-levels, were analysed. Women reported a higher risk for WFI and FWI. High SES employees reported higher WFI. Less control at home increased risks for WFI and FWI as did low control at work but only for WFI. This suggests that high SES women are especially at risk for conflict and that aspects from the spheres of both work and home should be considered in further research and practice.

The use of performance-based pay is increasing rapidly, but empirical evidence on how and why it relates to job performance, as well as its relative strategical importance, remains unclear. The present study examined the relative importance of performance-based pay variables and support of psychological needs variables for task and contextual performance in a sample of 582 white-collar employees in Sweden. Multiple regression results, based on survey and register data, showed that the instrumentality of the pay system related to lower levels of task and contextual performance. However, supplementary relative weight analysis (RWA) showed that, in relative terms, instrumentality of the pay system was of minor importance for performance. Performance-based pay-raise amount was positively related to contextual performance but not predictive of task performance. Procedural pay-setting justice was unrelated to both outcomes. Among the support of psychological needs variables, feedback and job autonomy had positive associations with both outcomes while social support from colleagues was not predictive of performance. Considering the explained variance (16–17%), the performance-based pay variables combined accounted for up to a third (12.6–29.2%) while support of psychological needs variables accounted for more than half of the explained variance (56.1–68.1%) in task and contextual performance. The results indicate that organizations would benefit from putting support of psychological needs to the forefront of their motivational strategies as a complement to administrating complex compensation systems.

Perceiving a pay system as just has been suggested to be a precondition for individualized pay to have a motivating effect for employees. Supervisors’ enacted justice is central for understanding the effects that pay setting can have on employee attitudes and behavior. Yet, enacted justice has received little research attention, in regard to both organizational justice and pay-related topics. This study examines the effects of employees’ perceived pay justice and supervisors’ enacted justice, as well as the degree of congruence, on employees’ work-related attitudes and behaviors. Questionnaire data from employees (N = 566) matched with data from their pay-setting supervisors (N = 208), employed in a Swedish manufacturing company, were analyzed. Results of polynomial regression with response surface analysis show that employees’ perceptions of pay justice were important for their work-related attitudes and behaviors and that supervisor–employee congruence regarding pay justice was positively related to employees’ attitudes and behavior, particularly when the ratings concerned high levels of justice. The results not only highlight the importance of developing a pay system that is perceived as just by employees but also emphasize the importance of reaching a congruence between supervisors’ and employees’ perceptions of high fairness, as this has positive implications for employees’ attitudes and behaviors.

Nella loro carriera lavorativa tutti, prima o poi, sperimentano cambiamenti organizzativi. Il modo in cui le persone fanno fronte e reagiscono ai cambiamenti che incontrano nelle loro carriere e nella vita in generale dipende da molti fattori e da molte circostanze. È stato mostrato che un fattore importante del modo in cui i dipendenti reagiscono a un cambiamento organizzativo è la percezione e la valutazione del cambiamento stesso – se come una minacciao come un’opportunità. Quando il cambiamento è percepito come qualcosa di stressante, le persone tendono ad assumere un atteggiamento difensivo e a mettere in atto vari meccanismi di difesa per affrontare la situazione. Se invece il cambiamento è interpretato positivamente, e c’è la speranza che certi desideri e certe aspettative troveranno realizzazione, le persone possonoaccogliere con favore il cambiamento e possono anche contribuire ad esso. Poiché la maggior parte delle persone sembra preferire la prevedibilità, la sicurezza e la stabilità quando si tratta del proprio impiego e della propria situazione lavorativa, i cambiamenti organizzativi tendono a essere vissuti,almeno in una certa misura, come una fonte di stress. Questo capitolo illustra i modelli correnti del cambiamento organizzativo e ne descrive diversi tipi, soffermandosi sugli elementi più importanti per comprendere e spiegare imodi in cui le persone li interpretano e reagiscono ad essi.