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Workplace flexibility can lead to fewer physical encounters, impacting the extent to which employees can help others. This is important because giving help to coworkers facilitates engagement. This study draws on two-wave panel data from 329 employees to examine the relationship between workplace flexibility and engagement through helping behavior. Furthermore, the role of communication control—that is, an employee's ability to regulate the use of work-related communication technologies—is examined, as it may buffer the negative associations between workplace flexibility and helping behavior. The results demonstrate that spatial flexibility is detrimental to engagement because it reduces helping behavior. Importantly, this negative impact may be alleviated by high levels of communication control (as opposed to low levels). Furthermore, the study provides insights into the independent effects of spatial and temporal flexibility on helping behavior and supports the notion that doing good may lead to feeling good, as helping behavior is positively associated with engagement.

The experiments presented here examine how managers and executives can improve the effectiveness of their negative written communications (i.e., refusal of employees' requests) by incorporating the concept of fit into their message framing. By applying regulatory focus theory, the authors suggest that an outcome-based fit between the message and the recipient leads to more favorable work outcomes. The results of Experiment 1 show that employees retain greater feelings of psychological empowerment when they receive a written refusal framed in terms that match (versus mismatch) their current regulatory focus. Moreover, data from Experiment 2 demonstrate that employees perceive a written refusal as more fair when it is framed in terms that match (versus mismatch) their activated regulatory focus. However, this effect was not found when an employee's request was approved, an observation that stresses the importance of regulatory fit in negative managerial communications specifically. Finally, this article discusses management implications for designing successful negative written managerial communications.

A common observation in the digital age is that new technologies are making people's behaviors, decisions, and preferences more visible. For scholars who study organizations and their effects upon society, increased information visibility raises the hope that organizations might become more transparent. Typically, we assume that increased information visibility will translate into high levels of organizational transparency, but we lack empirical evidence to support this assumption. Our ability to gather data on this important topic is limited because there have been few reliable ways to assess organizational information visibility. To remedy this problem, we develop and validate the Information Visibility Scale to measure the core aspects of information visibility. We then employ the scale to test the relationship between information visibility and transparency. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of the scale and consider the limitations and further research possibilities that the scale construction and validation suggest.