Although earlier research has shown that work engagement is associated with positive outcomes for the employee and the organization, this paper suggests that employees also need time periods for temporarily disengaging (i.e., psychological detaching) from work. We hypothesized that work engagement and psychological detachment from work during off-job time predict high positive affect and low negative affect and that psychological detachment is particularly important when work engagement is high. Over the course of four working weeks, 159 employees from five German organizations from various industries completed surveys twice a week, at the beginning and the end of four consecutive working weeks. Hierarchical linear modelling showed that a person's general level of work engagement and the week-specific level of psychological detachment from work during off-job time jointly predicted affect at the end of the working week. As expected, work engagement moderated the relationship between psychological detachment and positive affect. These findings suggest that both engagement when being at work and disengagement when being away from work are most beneficial for employees' affective states.

Empirical evidence suggests that power elicits a generic tendency to disregard advice. We examined different responses power holders may show in their tendency to take advice depending on the construal of power. We report a field study and an experiment among managers and other powerful professionals (Studies 1 and 2) and an experiment in which participants were assigned to a powerful role (Study 3). Across studies, we found a higher tendency to take advice among those who construed their power as a responsibility rather than as an opportunity. This effect of the construal of power on advice taking was mediated by a heightened perceived value of advice, not by decreased confidence in own judgments or sense of power. Accordingly, the increase in advice taking when power was construed as a responsibility was observed regardless of whether the advice came from subordinates (Study 1), expert advisors (Study 2), or a less powerful teammate (Study 3). This highlights the relevance of considering how power holders construe their power in order to understand their tendency to take advice from others.

Attitudes toward outgroups are an important determinant of peaceful coexistence in diverse societies, but it is difficult to improve them. The current research studies the impact of messages with negations on outgroup attitudes, more specifically on outgroup trust. All studies were preregistered. Using different target groups, Studies 1 and 2 provide evidence for the prediction that communicating negations (e.g., “they are not deceptive”) enhances outgroup trust (more so than affirmations, such as “they are reliable,” and no messages) among people who are initially low in outgroup trust. Three additional studies (Studies 3a, 3b, and 4), using both a causal chain approach and (moderated) mediation analysis, demonstrate that negations promote cognitive flexibility which in turn enhances outgroup trust among those initially low in outgroup trust. One final study suggests that these findings generalize to outgroup attitude change per se by showing that communicating negations also results in more moderate attitudes when the dominant initial attitude is positive (Study 5: high warmth) rather than negative (Studies 1–4: low trustworthiness). As such, communication that negates people’s initial outgroup attitudes could be an effective (previously discounted) intervention to reduce prejudice in intergroup settings.

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