News from the front: A monthly study on stress and social support during a military deployment to a war zone.

Abstract

Soldiers deployed to combat zones are likely to experience some stressful situations that can result in individual strains or ill health. In addition to the stressors originating in situ, problems at home can also affect soldiers' strains and attitudes about deployment. However, they may also possess resources in the form of social support from both their comrades and family that, based on resources theories of occupational stress, can lessen strains or enhance attitudes. A serious problem in examining this issue is the difficulty of studying their occupational stress, because collecting data in their work situation-a combat zone-is inherently complicated. Most studies rely on past recollection of the deployment situation in postdeployment data collections, with some studies including a pre-deployment measure or one data collection during deployment. The present study was the first to collect data from soldiers periodically (monthly) over the course of their entire deployment to a combat zone, which has the advantage of providing more accurate tracking of stressor and resource effects on both their strains and positive deployment attitudes closer to real time. This monthly diary study found that, consistent with resource theories of occupational stress, the previous month's combat stressors had a detrimental effect on many outcomes, and the resource of social support from work and home during the previous month improved physical health and depression, respectively. Future research should not only replicate this approach to data collection but also extend the measurement periods to examine soldiers' readjustment process after returning home.

A meta-analysis on the crossover of workplace traumatic stress symptoms between partners.

“…Studies were excluded if they reported on veterans where it was clear they had not been on active duty for 5 years or more because as post-active duty time passes, life events other than service-related trauma may significantly influence their well-being (Ragsdale et al, 2021). Community, student, and retiree samples were also excluded when it was not clear whether one of the partners within the majority of the couples was working full-time.…”

Expanding deep acting: Effects of engagement and disengagement deep acting on emotional exhaustion.

“…Consequently, more study of the temporal unfolding of the effects of emotional labor on outcomes is warranted. For example, adaptation theory suggests that people adapt to stressful situations, such that certain strains may be self-limiting (e.g., Ragsdale et al, 2021). Future research using repeated measures and growth curve modeling may provide a more nuanced understanding of how emotional labor results in emotional exhaustion over time.…”

Fueling employee proactive behavior: The distinctive role of Chinese enterprise union practices from a conservation of resources perspective

“…Third, a time‐lag design helps reduce problems related to common method biases, which is beneficial to revealing the relationships between CEUPs, perceived insider status, affective commitment, and proactive behavior that really exist (Podsakoff et al., 2003). We used a 1‐month time lag as it is believed to be sufficient for individuals to capture changes in work resources and respond to these changes (Ragsdale et al., 2021). This approach is in line with previous studies on organizational practices (e.g., HRMPs, Lee et al., 2019), perceived insider status (Zhao & Liu, 2020), affective commitment (Buch, 2015), and proactive behavior (Lee et al., 2019) involving time‐lag data collection.…”