Special Issue of Management Revue
Demands in the modern workplace
Guest Editors:
Sascha Ruhle, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany
Johannes Siegrist, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany
Stefan Süß, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany
Eva-Ellen Weiß, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany
The flexibility of work organization and employment, the growing need for training and development, digitalization of work, the increasing blurring boundaries between work and private life – the list of developments that have shaped the modern working world in recent years is long. Those developments will continue to affect employees as well as organizations and economies. Especially for employees, several of these developments are challenges rather than improvements. Various approaches have increased our understanding of these and similar challenges, including the job demand-control model (Karasek, 1979), leader-member exchange (Graen & Uhl-Bien, 1995; Hesselgreaves & Scholarios, 2014), the effort–reward imbalance model (Siegrist, 2002) and the concept of work-family conflict (Barnett, 1998).
There are numerous indications that demands in the modern work place lead to elevated stress experiences (Sparks et al., 2001; Sverke et al., 2002; Stansfeld & Candy, 2006) and related health consequences (e.g. Schnall et al., 2009; Siegrist & Wahrendorf, 2016). Sources of stress may, for example, be rooted in role overload or even role underload depending on the type of demands (Shultz et al., 2010). Further, research shows that changing working conditions can provoke conflicts between work and private life (e.g., Byron, 2005). In the long run, impairments of job satisfaction and health can result as well in reduced work engagement and elevated turnover intentions (e.g., Kinnunen, 2008; Li et al., 2015). Thus, organizations increasingly aim at improving working conditions in order to keep their employees healthy and productive.
Divers options exist for organizations to tackle these challenges. For example, both supervisor and coworker support have been shown to reduce the negative consequences of demands (Luchman & González-Morales, 2015), and the same holds true for a transformational leadership style (Weiß & Süß, 2016), while an increase in time flexibility might even further strain the individual (e.g., Biron & van Veldhoven, 2016). Another way to deal with workplace demands might be the development of personal resources, which in turn can decrease burnout (Huang et al., 2015) or the adequate design of employees’ task fields (Shultz et al., 2010).
Yet, to answer challenges resulting from demands in the modern workplace, research might benefit from considering not only results from a single discipline, but a combined perspective. Multiple disciplines, like business administration, psychology, sociology, and occupational medicine contribute to, e.g., research on stress and resulting strain (e.g., Ganster & Rosen, 2013). A joint approach might further enhance our understanding of the prevention, occurrence, and the consequences of work demands as multiple perspectives on the area of research are being combined.
Therefore, prospective papers may address, but are not restricted to, the following questions:
- Which individual and organizational consequences result from the various developments that characterize the modern working world? And how might organizations manage the different technological and economic changes in order to reduce negative consequences for employees?
- Under what circumstances do particularly problematic work demands arise? What are the differences between various forms of employment and their influences on work demands?
- How can organizations manage the various demands in the workplace and which approaches are the most promising ones? What possible help can leadership or co-worker support provide to face increasing work demands?
- What are the socio-structural and economic antecedents of and consequences caused by work demands? Are there burdens which are unequally distributed among different social or occupational classes that account for differences in the exposure to changing demands?
Potential authors
Authors are encouraged to submit research manuscripts that are likely to make a significant contribution to the literature on demands in the modern workplace. The focus of the Special Issue is empirical – qualitative or quantitative – evidence, and we welcome contributions from business administration, industrial and organizational psychology, work sociology, and occupational medicine as well as other disciplines dealing with the topic of the Special Issue.
Deadline
Full papers for this special edition of “management revue” must be with the editors by 31 January 2017. All submissions will be subject to a double-blind review process. Papers invited for a “revise and resubmit” are due on 31 May 2017. Final decision will be made by September 2017. The special edition will be published in 2017 or 2018. Please submit your papers via email to Sascha Ruhle and Stefan Süß, using “management revue” as a subject.
Submission Guidelines
Manuscript length should not exceed 8,000 words (excluding references) and the norm should be 30 pages in double spaced type with margins of about 3 cm (1 inch) on each side of the page. Further, please follow the guidelines on the website http://www.management-revue.org/authors_guidelines.php and submit the papers electronically by sending a “blind” copy of your manuscript (delete all author identification from this primary document), and in a second document information that would typically appear on the document’s title page (title, author names, complete postal addresses, titles, affiliations, contact information including email, and phone).
We look forward to receiving your contribution!
Sascha Ruhle, Johannes Siegrist, Stefan Süß & Eva-Ellen Weiß