Many governments react to the current coronavirus/COVID‐19 pandemic by restricting daily (work) life. On the basis of theories from occupational health, we propose that the duration of the pandemic, its demands (e.g., having to work from home, closing of childcare facilities, job insecurity, work‐privacy conflicts, privacy‐work conflicts) and personal‐ and job‐related resources (co‐worker social support, job autonomy, partner support and corona self‐efficacy) interact in their effect on employee exhaustion. We test the hypotheses with a three‐wave sample of German employees during the pandemic from April to June 2020 ( N w 1 = 2900, N w 12 = 1237, N w 123 = 789). Our findings show a curvilinear effect of pandemic duration on working women's exhaustion. The data also show that the introduction and the easing of lockdown measures affect exhaustion, and that women with children who work from home while childcare is unavailable are especially exhausted. Job autonomy and partner support mitigated some of these effects. In sum, women's psychological health was more strongly affected by the pandemic than men's. We discuss implications for occupational health theories and that interventions targeted at mitigating the psychological consequences of the COVID‐19 pandemic should target women specifically.

We highlight two conceptual and methodological threats that undermine the interpretability and validity of published findings about employee silence: The existing literature is clear that silence requires input to share, i.e. employees must have encountered relevant events to speak up or remain silent about. However, standard survey research neither examines the presence of such events nor their independent effects on outcomes attributed to silence, e.g. burnout. Re-analyzing a publicly available cross-cultural dataset (N = 8222 in 35 samples), we show that as many as 60 % of study participants might not have encountered events to remain silent about. They answer questions about the frequency and motives of silence regardless, creating ambiguous response patterns. In a second re-analysis of published data (N = 675 in 75 teams, and N = 894 in 107 teams), we show that the association between employee silence and burnout is overestimated when the independent effects of preceding events are not accounted for. Lastly, we designed a simulation based on the first two studies to examine this confounding influence of events on outcome variables under controlled circumstances. The respective distributions of event and silence frequency, the correlation between them, and the strength of the independent event effect on an outcome variable all affected the amount of bias in the estimated silence-outcome relationship. We discuss the effects of this bias on the existing literature and on the design of future studies (e.g. sample size and power), and highlight different approaches to reduce its impact on employee silence research.

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Die psychische Gesundheit von Beschäftigten rückt seit Jahren immer stärker in den Fokus von Unternehmen. Gerade die Anzahl an Arbeitsunfähigkeitstagen (AU-Tage) aufgrund von psychischen Erkrankungen ist in den letzten Jahren immer stärker gestiegen. Um Beschäftigten frühzeitig helfen zu können, hat der Automobilhersteller Audi ein Präventionsangebot entwickelt, das die individuelle Lebenssituation in den Mittelpunkt stellt. Erste Evaluationsergebnisse zeigen einen positiven Einfluss auf das psychische Wohlbefinden.

Successfully implementing new ideas is one of the hardest parts of innovation for organizations, hindered by a plethora of barriers. Employee voice can help to overcome them, e.g. by additional elaboration or by pointing out potential problems with the implementation step. Particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises (SME), such widespread participation is important to compensate for their limited resources for innovation. This study explores employee voice and related communication processes as a key enabler for innovation processes. Drawing on iterative action research (AR) principles, we first examined employee voice and silence at a textile manufacturing SME in two AR cycles using a mixed methods research design. Findings from our interviews, observations, and surveys show simultaneous availability of ideas for change or known problems, and the absence of organizational structures and processes that systematically capitalize on this valuable input.Based on our data, we derive propositions for priorities and principles for interventions that target employee voice and silence, so that companies can determine whether communication issues hamper innovation, where these issues originate, and how to address them.