Four hundred thirteen postal employees were surveyed to investigate reciprocation's role in the relationships of perceived organizational support (POS) with employees' affective organizational commitment and job performance. The authors found that (a) POS was positively related to employees' felt obligation to care about the organization's welfare and to help the organization reach its objectives; (b) felt obligation mediated the associations of POS with affective commitment, organizational spontaneity, and in-role performance; and (c) the relationship between POS and felt obligation increased with employees' acceptance of the reciprocity norm as applied to work organizations. Positive mood also mediated the relationships of POS with affective commitment and organizational spontaneity. The pattern of findings is consistent with organizational support theory's assumption that POS strengthens affective commitment and performance by a reciprocation process.

Three studies examined the interrelationships among work experiences, perceived organizational support (POS), affective commitment (AC), and employee turnover. Using a diverse sample of 367 employees drawn from a variety of organizations, Study 1 found that POS mediated positive associations of organizational rewards, procedural justice, and supervisor support with AC. Study 2 examined changes of POS and AC in retail employees over a 2-year span (N = 333) and a 3-year span (N = 226). POS was positively related to temporal changes in AC, suggesting that POS leads to AC. Study 3 found a negative relationship between POS and subsequent voluntary employee turnover that was mediated by AC in retail employees (N = 1,124) and in poultry- and feed-processing workers (N = 262). These results suggest that favorable work conditions operate via POS to increase AC, which, in turn, decreases employee withdrawal behavior.

A diverse sample of 295 employees drawn from a variety of organizations was surveyed to investigate (a) whether the relationship between the favorableness of job conditions and perceived organizational support (POS) depends on employee perceptions concerning the organization's freedom of action and (b) whether POS and overall job satisfaction are distinct constructs. The favorableness of high-discretion job conditions was found to be much more closely associated with POS than was the favorableness of low-discretion job conditions. No such relationship was found between job conditions and satisfaction. To decide how much the organization values their contributions and well-being, employees distinguish job conditions whose favorableness the organization readily controls versus job conditions whose favorableness is constrained by limits on the organization's discretion.

The authors examined the influence of neuroticism (N) on the occurrence of different types of daily events, primary and secondary appraisals of those events, use of specific coping strategies, and end-of-day negative mood. College students completed questionnaires at the end of every day for 14 consecutive days. When reporting their most stressful event of each day, high-N individuals, compared with low-N individuals, reported more interpersonal stressors and had more negative primary and secondary appraisals and reacted with more distress in response to increasingly negative primary and secondary appraisals. Compared with low-N individuals, high-N individuals used less-adaptive coping strategies (e.g., hostile reaction) and reacted with more distress in response to some types of coping strategies. The appraisal findings, in particular, help to explain the chronic negative affectivity associated with neuroticism.

Police patrol officers were surveyed to investigate how the strength of socioemotional needs affects the relationship between perceived organizational support (POS) and work performance. The association of POS with driving-under-the-influence arrests and speeding citations generally increased with strength of the needs for esteem, affiliation, emotional support, and social approval. Patrol officers with strong socioemotional needs, but not those with weak needs, showed a positive relationship between POS and performance. The findings are consistent with social exchange views that maintain (a) work effort is encouraged by the receipt of socioemotional resources, (b) POS fulfills a variety of socioemotional needs, and (c) the value of POS and the obligation to reciprocate with high performance increase with the strength of socioemotional needs.

For decades, coping researchers have used between-person designs to address inherently within-person questions derived from theory and clinical practice. The authors describe recent developments in the use of within-person, process-oriented methods that examine individuals intensively over time. Ongoing studies of stress and alcohol consumption, the effects of depression on adaptational processes, and the temporal dynamics of coping with chronic pain demonstrate that by tracking rapidly fluctuating processes such as mood and coping close to their real-time occurrence, daily process designs offer unique insights into conceptually and clinically challenging questions. Such designs also provide new opportunities to examine the purported mechanisms of therapeutic interventions. Despite its demands on participants and investigators, daily process research offers fresh opportunities to link psychological theory, research, and practice.

Retail employees in Study 1 and employees from multiple organizations in Study 2 completed a questionnaire investigating the moderating effect of perceived organizational support (POS) on the relationship of employees' fear of exploitation in exchange relationships (reciprocation wariness) and their in-role and extra-role job performance. When POS was low, reciprocation wariness was negatively related to in-role and extra-role job performance-With high POS, reciprocation wariness was positively related to extra-role performance and either positively related to in-role performance (for retail employees) or showed no reliable relationship with in-role performance (for the multiorganizational sample). In deciding on their work effort, reciprocation-wary employees considered how much the organization values their contributions and cares about their well-being. Implications for employee-employer exchange relationships and workforce cynicism are discussed.Social exchange theory assumes that the reciprocation of valued resources fosters the initiation, strengthening, and maintenance of interpersonal relationships. Gouldner (1960) argued that the exchange process is governed by a universal norm of reciprocity obligating individuals receiving benefits to compensate the donor. Extending this approach to work organizations, employee-employer relationships may be viewed as the trade of employee effort and loyalty for socioemotional benefits (e.g., esteem and approval) and tangible resources (e.g., pay and fringe benefits;

Objective: Topiramate has been shown to reduce drinking and heavy drinking in alcohol-dependent individuals whose goal was to stop drinking. The present study evaluated the efficacy and tolerability of topiramate in heavy drinkers whose treatment goal was to reduce drinking to safe levels. Method: We randomly assigned 138 individuals (62.3% male) to receive 12 weeks of treatment with topiramate (N=67), at a maximal daily dosage of 200 mg, or matching placebo (N=71), both groups receiving brief counseling to reduce drinking and increase abstinent days. We hypothesized that topiramate-treated patients would be better able to achieve these goals and predicted that, based on prior research, the effects would be moderated by a single nucleotide polymorphism (rs2832407) in GRIK1, encoding the kainate GluK1 receptor subunit. Results: The rate of treatment completion was 84.9% and equal by treatment group. Topiramate treatment significantly reduced heavy drinking days (p<0.001) and increased abstinent days (p=0.032) relative to placebo. The topiramate group also had lower concentrations of the liver enzyme γ-glutamyltranspeptidase and lower scores on a measure of alcohol-related problems than the placebo group. In a European-American subsample (N=122), topiramate’s effect on heavy drinking days (p=0.004) was significantly greater than for placebo only in rs2832407 C-allele homozygotes. Conclusions: These findings support the use of topiramate 200 mg/day to reduce heavy drinking in problem drinkers. The moderator effect of rs2832407, if validated, would facilitate the identification of heavy drinkers who are likely to respond well to topiramate treatment and provide an important personalized treatment option. The pharmacogenetic findings also implicate the kainate receptor in the mechanism of topiramate’s effects on heavy drinking. www.clinicaltrials.gov registration: NCT00626925