Programa del congreso

• Objectives. Drawing on Conservation of Resources Theory, we investigate the underlying effects of negative workplace gossip (NWG) on the relationship between empowering leadership and performance, mediated by structural job resources

• Theoretical background. Conservation of Resources Theory frames the proposed theoretical relationships, contextual factors have been largely neglected in the COR process.

• Methodology. A multiwave time-lagged and multisource design was used in a sample of 132 employees and managers. Process macro in SPSS was employed to test the proposed relationships.

• Results/implications. Our findings reveal that NWG negatively interacts with empowering leadership, resulting in a detrimental impact on individual performance. However, this effect is neutr alized by structural job resources.

Employees’ affective well-being may be negatively affected by situations in which there is a lack of information on their future in the job. One potential underlying mechanism could be the level of anxiety experienced by the employees in uncertainty situations, especially when these situations are perceived as threats to their immediate job future. Structural equation modelling, specifically through partial least squares -Smart PLS 4.0-, was used to test this point, and responses from a sample of 205 hotel employees in Spain after the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic were statistically analysed for such purpose. The findings revealed that, as expected, job-related uncertainty perceptions reduce the affective well-being of employees not directly but rather indirectly by increasing their level of anxiety, which reveals that the predicted full mediating effect of employee anxiety was, therefore confirmed. This study thus demonstrates that job anxiety is increased by job-related uncertainty perceptions and that job anxiety reduces the affective well-being of the employees, which could be dangerous for the competitiveness of the firms.

Internal labor markets within business groups serve as a mechanism for efficiently organizing human resources to enhance the production of goods and services. Nonetheless, grounded in agency theory, our study delves into the potential opportunistic use of this mechanism to mitigate the adverse impacts of the COVID-19 crisis at the expense of minority shareholders. Specifically, we investigate whether business groups strategically reallocate employees and labor costs among affiliated firms according to the business group's controlling shareholders' economic interests. Our findings indicate that business groups generally display more workers and labor costs during the crisis in firms that grant fewer economic rights to the controlling shareholder when the employment of the business group is geographically and/or industrially concentrated. Therefore, we find evidence pointing to the existence of tunneling practices through internal labor markets as long as geographic closeness and industrial relatedness pave the way for it. Thus, the burden of the economic downturn is shifted by directing the workforce and costs towards firms where the controlling shareholders of the business group have a lower economic interest, and where profits and losses are shared with minority shareholders in a larger proportion.

Pay communication policies continue to garner attention in human resource management. This article draws on social exchange theory to examine the consequences of different types of pay information on employee perceived organizational support (POS), and on organizational justice theory and the relational model to examine the mediating effect of pay level satisfaction and satisfaction with variable pay and pay raise procedures. The hypothesized model was tested using structural equation modelling in a sample of 695 employees of Spanish firms. Our findings show that pay information did not have a direct effect on POS. Furthermore, base pay information and pay information about other employees in the firm and in the industry had an indirect influence on POS through the multiple mediating effect of pay comparison and pay level satisfaction. Finally, variable pay and pay raise information were indirectly related to employee POS through satisfaction with pay procedures. This study highlights the importance of considering the type of pay information provided to employees and the need for understanding how pay information can influence employees’ perceptions.