Fluctuating levels of personal role engagement within the working day: A multilevel study

In this diary study, we examined a theoretical model in which the psychological conditions of meaningfulness, availability, and safety serve as mechanisms through which the work context during discrete situations within the workday influences “state” engagement. We further theorised that a person's “trait” level of engagement would exert cross‐level effects on the state level relationships. Multilevel analyses based on a sample of 124 individuals in six organisations and 1,446 situational observations revealed that meaningfulness and availability (but not safety) mediated the relationships between perceptions of the work context and state engagement. High levels of trait engagement strengthened the within‐person relation between availability and state engagement, yet weakened the within‐person relation between meaningfulness and state engagement, suggesting two different processes may be at play. Overall, the findings advance our understanding of engagement as a multilevel and temporally dynamic psychological phenomenon and promote a contextually based HRM approach to facilitating engagement.     

Do we understand each other? Toward a simulated empathy theory for entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurs often face the daunting task of predicting consumer demand before it exists—what consumers will want if and when the entrepreneur might make it available to them. Such alertness and judgment require an entrepreneur's vicarious imagination—the supposition of what a value experience would be like for another—such as empathy. Prevailing theories of empathy, however, are ill-suited for entrepreneurship theory as they are defined as and focused on an emotion-matching process. We propose that empathy be understood instead as a vicarious mental simulation of another's experience that, when accurate, produces similar emotions but also similar experiential knowledge. According to our ‘simulated empathy theory,’ empathy is a rational imagination process, intentional and knowledge-based. We connect this empathy process to contemporary entrepreneurship theory, namely opportunity recognition and evaluation processes. We also revise the concept of empathic accuracy accordingly, and derive therefrom some practical implications regarding how entrepreneurs can increase their empathic accuracy and, thereby, their chances of success.