Summary Emerging research evidence across multiple industries suggests that thriving at work is critically important for creating sustainable organizational performance. However, we possess little understanding of how factors across different organizational levels stimulate thriving at work. To address this gap, the current study proposes a multilevel model that simultaneously examines contextual and individual factors that facilitate thriving at work and how thriving relates to positive health and overall unit performance. Analysis of data collected from 275 employees, at multiple time periods, and their immediate supervisors, representing 94 work units, revealed that servant leadership and core self‐evaluations are 2 important contextual and individual factors that significantly relate to thriving at work. The results further indicated that thriving positively relates to positive health at the individual level, with this relationship partially mediated by affective commitment. Our results also showed that collective thriving at work positively relates to collective affective commitment, which in turn, positively relates to overall unit performance. Taken together, these findings suggest that work context and individual characteristics play significant roles in facilitating thriving at work and that thriving is an important means by which managers and their organizations can improve employees' positive health and unit performance.

Purpose Employees’ job engagement is a key driver for organizational success and competitive advantage. Based on Kahn’s engagement theory and social exchange theory, the purpose of this paper is to examine the relationships between job engagement, transformational leadership, high-performance human resource (HR) practices, climate for innovation, and contextual performance. Design/methodology/approach A questionnaire survey, conducted at two different points in time, was employed to collect data from 394 pairs of Vietnamese university academics and their leaders. Data were analyzed by structural equation modeling (SEM) and multilevel SEM using the Statistical Package for Social Science Version 24 and Mplus Version 7.4. Findings The findings indicated that transformational leadership and high-performance HR practices were key drivers of employees’ job engagement. A climate for innovation contributed effectively to mediate the effect of transformational leadership on employees’ job engagement. Further, employees’ job engagement was positively and significantly related to contextual performance. Research limitations/implications The short time lag between the two data collection phases might limit the ability to reach definite causal conclusions. Future research using a longitudinal design is needed to provide stronger validation for the underlying model. Originality/value This study is a rare attempt that investigates the process from which employees’ job engagement is generated and contributes to improve contextual performance in the higher education sector.

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Purpose This paper aims to explore the antecedents and consequences of thriving at work, identifies existing gaps in the literature and proposes a framework, which encapsulates potential pathways for future research on thriving. Design/methodology/approach This paper follows a rigorous review of the extant literature on thriving mainly based on journal articles published between 2005 and 2020. Findings The paper proposes a feasible conceptual framework highlighting the antecedents and outcomes of thriving. Specifically, the review illustrates how contextual factors, represented by transformational leadership and organisational virtuousness (OV), act as antecedents of thriving and then proposes potential research direction where thriving is associated with psychological empowerment, psychological capital and innovative work behaviour. Practical implications Understanding how and when contextual factors such as transformational leadership and OV promote thriving is important for organisations and leaders who wish to know how and when they can shape resources and organisational features to enable thriving. Originality/value This unique review is one of a few studies adding to the growing research on positive psychology at the workplace. The proposed framework and future research directions have the potential to help unpack the unique relationship between work-related contextual factors and thriving.

In today's fast-paced dynamic work environment, organizations are recognizing the important role played by leadership in attaining and sustaining individual, unit, and organizational effectiveness. This paper briefly reviews extant literature and builds a logical framework depicting the interrelationships between leadership and the contextual factors of societal culture and patrimonial behaviours in sub-Saharan Africa. The article concludes by outlining a future research agenda for leadership in sub-Saharan Africa.