Karkkola, P., Kuittinen, M. & Hintsa, T. (2019). Role clarity, role conflict, and vitality at work: The role of the basic needs. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 60,[456][457][458][459][460][461][462][463] This study aimed to provide new information on the relationships between vitality at work and role clarity, role conflict, and psychological basic need satisfaction. Participants of the cross-sectional study were 110 employees in a preventive intervention program. Associations between the focal constructs were examined with regression and bootstrapping analyses. The results suggest that the role clarity is associated with subjective vitality at work through higher autonomy and higher competence, and that role conflict is negatively associated with subjective vitality at work through lower autonomy and lower relatedness. Additionally, an interaction between the role characteristics was observed, suggesting that the strength of the association between role clarity and competence, and the strength of the indirect association between role clarity and vitality through competence may vary depending on the level of role conflict. The findings are consistent with the notion that that managers and co-workers may affect the opportunities of individuals to achieve need satisfaction and feel energized by delineating and negotiating role-related factors at work. Need satisfaction, in turn, is an antecedent of well-being and motivation. Employees should feel able to clarify role ambiguities with their supervisor or co-workers and thus reduce the role conflicts imposed by the expectations of various stakeholders. Limitations of the study include the self-rating methodology, cross-sectional design, and properties of the sample restricting generalizability.

Background and aims Pain is a common condition. However, only a minority of people experiencing pain develop a chronic pain problem. Factors such as somatization, pain self-efficacy and lack of psychological well-being affect the risk of pain chronicity and pain-related disability. However, research on protective pain-related psychological factors in populations without chronic pain is scarce. We aim to examine if pain self-efficacy attenuates the associations between pain and both anxiety and somatization in a community sample. Methods In a cross-sectional study, 211 participants from a community sample responded to measures of average pain over the last 3 months, anxiety, somatization, and pain self-efficacy. The possibility of moderation effects were tested with a series of regression analyses. Results The association between pain and anxiety was not moderated by pain self-efficacy. In contrast, pain self-efficacy moderated the relation of pain and somatization. The interaction explained 3% of the variance in somatization, in addition to the independent effects of pain and self-efficacy (F(1,207)=5.65, p<0.025). Among those in the bottom quartile of pain self-efficacy, the association between pain and somatization was moderate or strong (r=0.62, p<0.01), whereas for those in the top quartile the association was modest (r=0.11, p>0.05). Conclusions The results are partly consistent with the hypothesis that pain self-efficacy attenuates the associations between pain and pain chronification risk factors in a relatively healthy community sample. Should further preferably longitudinal studies replicate the findings, the role pain self-efficacy as a protective factor needs to be explicated in theoretical models of pain chronification. Implications The findings are consistent with the notion that clinicians should promote patient’s pain self-efficacy in acute and sub-acute pain conditions especially when the individual is prone to somatization. However, more prominent clinical implications require studies with longitudinal designs.

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Social ties and social support affect mental and physical health (Thoits, 2011). This also applies in the context of work. Social support at work is related to both adverse and beneficial outcomes. Social support is consistently associated with lower levels of burnout (Day and Leiter, 2014; Lee and Ashforth, 1996) and especially when received from a supervisor, negatively associated with perceived workload (Bowling et al., 2015). In prospective studies, low social support has predicted stress-related symptoms, such as depression and anxiety, particularly among men (Nieuwenhuijsen, Bruinvels and Frings-Dresen, 2010). Lack of social support may incur billions of dollars of healthcare costs in the United States alone (Goh, Pfeffer and Zenios, 2016). Social support also fosters well-being at work. It is associated with several job attitudes, such as job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and a low level of turnover intentions (Edmondson and Boyer, 2013). Support from a supervisor appears to be especially important with regard to job attitudes (Ng and Sorensen, 2008). Social support is also consistently associated with work engagement, an active and pleasurable state of work-related well-being (Halbesleben, 2010). Thus, social support is an essential job resource, as job resources are defined as work-related characteristics facilitating goal achievement, reducing job demands and the associated strains, or stimulating growth, learning, and development (Bakker and Demerouti, 2017). However, the job demands-resources theory does not explicate the underlying mechanisms from job characteristics to outcomes (Schaufeli and Taris, 2014). One suggested explanatory mechanism for outcomes related to motivational and energetic processes of optimal functioning is satisfaction of psychological basic needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness (Van den Broeck et al., 2008). Through their aforementioned functions (e.g. facilitating goal achievement and promoting growth), job characteristics are expected to affect the satisfaction of one or more basic needs. For example, task identity could support autonomy, whereas feedback may facilitate competence (Deci, Olafsen and Ryan, 2017). As the selfdetermination theory (SDT; Ryan and Deci, 2017) posits need satisfaction as a necessary condition for thriving, the needs are expected to act as an explanatory mechanism in the association between job resources and several outcomes. Psychological Basic Needs in the Self-Determination Theory According to the SDT, the satisfaction of the psychological basic needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness is essential for optimal development, integrity, and wellbeing (Ryan and Deci, 2017). Each need is expected to be independently important and to have its own criteria for fulfilment. The need for autonomy is the need to experience volition, self-endorsement and ownership of actions. The need for competence is satisfied when an actor is effective in his or her interactions with the social environment, for example, expressing and expanding th...