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SummaryEmployee engagement has recently been introduced as a concept advantageous to organizations. However, little is known about the value of employee engagement in explaining work performance behaviors compared with similar concepts. The learning climate, defined as the organization's beneficial activities in helping employees create, acquire, and transfer knowledge, has also been proposed as an antecedent of employee engagement. Using data from a sample of 625 employees and their supervisors in various occupations and organizations throughout Israel, we investigated employee engagement as a key mechanism for explaining the relationship between perceptions of the organization's learning climate and employees' proactivity, knowledge sharing, creativity, and adaptivity. We also tested whether employee engagement explained the relationship more thoroughly than similar concepts such as job satisfaction and job involvement. Multilevel regression analyses supported our hypotheses that employee engagement mediates the relationship between the perceived learning climate and these extra-role behaviors. Moreover, engagement provides a more thorough explanation than job satisfaction or job involvement for these relationships. The implications for organizational theory, research, and practice are discussed.

The term ‘workaholism’ is widely used, but there is little consensus about its meaning, beyond that of its core element: a substantial investment in work. Following Snir and Zohar, workaholism was first defined in the present study as the individual’s steady and considerable allocation of time to work-related activities and thoughts, which does not derive from external necessities. Subsequently, it was measured as time invested in work, while controlling the financial needs for this investment. The relation between workaholism and possible attitudinal (meaning of work indices), demographic (gender, marital status), and situational (occupation type, employment sector) variables was examined through two representative samples of the Israeli labor force. The following predictor variables were significantly related to workaholism: work centrality, economic orientation, occupation type, employment sector and gender. From those variables, gender was found to be the strongest predictor - that is, men, in comparison with women, have a higher likelihood of being workaholics. Moreover, married women worked fewer hours per week than unmarried women, while married men worked more hours per week than unmarried men. The theoretical contribution of the above findings, and of the other study’s findings, to the understanding of workaholism is discussed.

The phenomenon of telecommuting has implications for individuals and organizations, and society generally. Examines the advantages and disadvantages of telecommuting to the parties involved and affected by it. Key advantages to individuals are increased autonomy and flexibility; to organizations, increased human resource capacity and savings in direct expenses; and to society, a reduction in environmental damage, solutions for special‐needs populations, and savings in infrastructure and energy. Advantages are weighed against disadvantages: to individuals, possible sense of isolation, lack of separation between work and home; to organizations, costs involved in transition to new work methods, training, and damage to commitment and identification with the organization; finally, society is faced with a danger of creating detached individuals. Discusses implications of the suitability of individuals to telecommuting.

The theoretical and empirical literature assumes stability of important attitudes and values. Accordingly, this study examined the hypothesis that the structure of the meaning of work will remain stable over time. This hypothesis was tested on two independent samples of the Israeli labour force. The first ( n = 407) was a group of individuals who were interviewed twice, once in 1981 and again in 1993. The second was a new representative sample ( n = 942) of the labour force, assembled in 1993, to serve as a comparison with the first sample. The findings generally support the hypothesis regarding the stability over time of the structure of the meaning of work concept.

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This unique longitudinal study examines the state of work centrality and other life areas (family, leisure, community and religion) in Israel among the same individuals (n=407) over a 12-year period. A new representative sample (serving as a control group) of the Israeli labour force in 1992-93 (n=942) assists us in exploring whether the changes occurred by cohort, life course or period effect. The restudied sample maturation led to a decrease in the importance of leisure, while the importance of work, family, community and religion remained stable. The increase of work centrality between the 1980s and the 1990s was found to be influenced by period effect; there was no evidence of a life course or cohort effect on work centrality, while life course effect was found on the importance of community. In contrast to findings from other countries showing that young people attributed relatively high importance to leisure and relatively less importance to work, cohort effect regarding the latter was not observed in Israel. There, young people in the 1990s tended to view work and leisure as important as their predecessors did in the 1980s.

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