How managerial coaching enables thriving at work. A sequential mediation

Abstract

The psychological state in which an individual experiences a form of vitality and a sense of learning at work is known as thriving at work. Since the new millennium, empirical research is evident that thriving (employees' sustainability) is critical for organizational sustainability. However, this human dimension of sustainability is understudied, and little is known about how individual characteristics and managers promote employee thriving at work. To address the gap, this pioneering study investigates the work context and individual differences in promoting thriving at work. The intervening mechanism of self-efficacy and prosocial motivation in the association between managerial coaching and thriving at work has been examined using a sequential mediation approach. Data has been analyzed using a Hayes' PROCESS Model 6 (based on 1,000 bootstrap resampling) with an actual sample of 221 respondents. Our results provide support for our hypothesized model. The study finds a direct association between managerial coaching and self-efficacy. It is concluded that self-efficacy is directly related to prosocial motivation, hence enhanced employee thriving at work. It is also found that self-efficacy and prosocial motivation play a vital role in explaining the association between managerial coaching and thriving at work.

The Impact of Challenge and Hindrance Stressors on Thriving at Work Double Mediation Based on Affect and Motivation

“…Control variables. In order to determine the potential impact of other explanations on the empirical results, after a thorough review of the empirical studies on thriving at work, we chose age, gender and education level as control variables, which were also adopted by many scholars with thriving or stressors research (Li et al, 2019;Abid et al, 2020;Lin et al, 2020). Firstly, age is crucial to thriving, since elder people are more likely to be tired at work and unwilling to learn new knowledge (Kanfer and Ackerman, 2004).…”

“…Jex and Bliese (1999) found that self-efficacy is a mediator between time pressure, workload, task characteristics and physical and mental stress. In addition, Abid et al (2020) found that self-efficacy plays a mediating role between managerial coaching and thriving at work. We therefore suggest the following hypothesis: H5a: Challenge stressors promote thriving at work by enhancing self-efficacy.…”

“…Based on the socially embedded model of thriving at work (Spreitzer, 2005) and the integrative model of human growth at work (Spreitzer and Porath, 2013), the antecedent variables of thriving at work can be divided into following categories: (i) work context, such as perceived organizational support (Abid et al, 2015), information sharing, climate of trust (Kocak, 2016), leadership (Walumbwa et al, 2017) and stress (Flinchbaugh et al, 2015); (ii) work resource, such as knowledge (Jiang et al, 2019) positive meaning (Niessen et al, 2012) and positive affect (Taneva and Arnold, 2018); (iii) individual characteristics, such as proactive personality (Jiang, 2017), prosocial motivation and self-efficacy (Abid et al, 2020); (iv) agentic work behaviors, such as task focus (Niessen et al, 2012), exploration and learning (Paterson et al, 2014); and (v) basic psychological needs, including autonomy, competency and relatedness (Spreitzer and Porath, 2013).…”

“…In addition, self-efficacy is often realized through the mediating process of choice, thought, motivation, and psychosomatic reaction (Bandura, 1997). For example, the latest research of Abid et al (2020) shows that selfefficacy affects thriving at work through prosocial motivation. Therefore, compared with positive affect, the impact of selfefficacy on thriving is less immediate.…”

“…In addition, a chain of evidence showed that both affect and work motivation are important antecedents of thriving at work. For example, Abid et al (2020) proposed that prosocial motivation is an important intermediary between managerial coaching and thriving. All these works showed that there is not a simple direct relationship between stressors and thriving at work, but a complex mediating mechanism, and different types of stressors may have different effects on outcome variables (Podsakoff et al, 2007).…”