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In work stress research, consistent relationships between job characteristics and strain have not been established across methods for assessing job characteristics. By examining the methods used to assess job characteristics in work stress research, I argue that this is because different methods are assessing interrelated, yet distinct, facets of job characteristics: latent, perceived and enacted facets. The article discusses the implications for work stress research of differentiating these facets of job characteristics.

Validation evidence is provided for scales that measure five aspects of affective well-being in relation to the work context: anxiety-comfort, depression-pleasure, bored-enthusiastic, tiredness-vigour and angry-placid. Confirmatory factor analysis is used to test four alternative structures for the items in the scales in two samples (n = 871, n = 1915). Analyses in both samples support one structure. The final scales have acceptable internal reliability. The unique explanatory power of each scale is suggested by partial correlations with theoretically related variables. Confirmatory factor analysis indicates that the five factor solution has a better fit with the data than other first order solutions with fewer factors. Second order factor analysis shows that two superordinate factors, corresponding to negative and positive affect, can account for the relationships amongst the five first order factors.

Measuring affective well-being in organizational studies has become increasingly widespread, given its association with key work-performance and other markers of organizational functioning. As such, researchers and policy-makers need to be confident that well-being measures are valid, reliable and robust. To reduce the burden on participants in applied settings, short-form measures of affective well-being are proving popular. However, these scales are seldom validated as standalone, comprehensive measures in their own right. In this article, we used a short-form measure of affective well-being with 10 items: the Daniels five-factor measure of affective well-being (D-FAW). In Study 1, across six applied sample groups ( N = 2624), we found that the factor structure of the short-form D-FAW is robust when issued as a standalone measure, and that it should be scored differently depending on the participant instruction used. When participant instructions focus on now or today, then affect is best represented by five discrete emotion factors. When participant instructions focus on the past week, then affect is best represented by two or three mood-based factors. In Study 2 ( N = 39), we found good construct convergent validity of short-form D-FAW with another widely used scale (PANAS). Implications for the measurement and structure of affect are discussed.

When implementing teams, first-line leaders are often responsible for such implementation and their leadership role changes. This change may result in a perceived mismatch between the demands of the function and the leader's resources. In a multi-method, controlled intervention study, we examined whether training leaders in team management changes their appraisals of the job and preserves their well-being. Data were collected with the Experience Sampling Method from 29 team leaders and survey data were collected from their followers ( N = 233). Multi-level analyses revealed that training increased trained leaders' challenge experiences and well-being states only where team members reported openness to change. In situations when both trained and non-trained leaders found themselves challenged above their average levels of challenge, they reported better well-being.

The effects of social support, job control, participative decision making practices, and locus of control upon the relationship between occupational stress and psychological well-being have been well discussed and researched. In order to synthesize these areas of research, a 1-month follow-up study of 244 accountants was conducted. The results indicated complex interactions between stressors, locus of control, and social support or job autonomy in predicting psychological well-being, controlling for initial measures of well-being. These interactions reveal that an internal locus of control, and social support/job autonomy synergistically buffer the effects of stressors upon well-being.