For university students, perceived employability is gaining growing importance in dealing with occupational uncertainty. However, how perceived employability is shaped in the university setting is still under-researched. This study examines how support from university teaching staff influences perceived employability in a sample of Italian final-year university students. We draw on Conservation on Resources Theory to hypothesise a positive impact of support from teaching staff on students’ perceived employability. In addition, we contend that perceived employability predicts students’ psychological well-being. To test our hypotheses, one hundred twenty-seven university students completed a survey three times over a 10-month period. The results confirm that support from teaching staff enhances students’ perceived employability. Moreover, a positive effect of perceived employability on students’ psychological well-being emerges. Perceived employability also appears to mediate the relationship between support from teaching staff and psychological well-being. Using a time-lagged approach, this study enhances the empirical knowledge about antecedents and outcomes of students’ perceived employability. This scholarly work underlines universities’ responsibility in refining teachers’ roles and didactical practices to equip their students with career resources.

Nowadays organizations have to cope with two related challenges: maintaining an engaged and highly performing workforce and, at the same time, protecting and increasing employees’ well-being and job satisfaction under conditions of a generalized increase of job overload, in an increasingly growing older population. According to the motivational process of the JD-R model, a work environment with many organizational resources will foster work engagement, which in turn will increase the likelihood of positive personal and organizational outcomes, such as job satisfaction, performance, and intention to stay. However, it is not clear how this motivational process could work in different age cohorts, as older workers may have different priorities to those of younger colleagues. Postulating the existence of a gain-cycle in the relationship between work engagement and outcomes, in this study we tested a longitudinal moderated mediation model in which job satisfaction increases over time through an increment in work engagement. We hypothesized that this process is moderated by job workload and aging. We collected data in public administrations in Northern Italy in order to measure work engagement and job satisfaction. 556 workers aged between 50 to 64 replied to the survey twice (the first time and eight months later). The findings confirmed a moderated mediation model, in which job satisfaction at time 1 increased work engagement, which in turn fostered job satisfaction eight months later, confirming the hypothesized gain-cycle. This relationship was shown to be moderated by the joint influence of job demand intensity and age: higher job demands and younger age are related to the maximum level of level gain cycle, while the same high level of job demands, when associated with older age, appears unable to stimulate a similar effect. The results confirm that, on one hand, older workers cannot be seen as a homogeneous group and, on the other hand, the importance of considering the role played by the gain cycle of resources. Our findings show that age matters, and that greater consideration should be devoted to age differences in order to design appropriate human resources practices that foster work engagement and satisfaction.

According to the psychology of sustainability and sustainable development, even though there are numerous challenges within the current labor market, it is possible to establish meaningful lives and meaningful work experiences through optimizing the use of personal resources and regenerating them. In line with this assumption, the present study aims to test the moderation effect of the type of worker contracts on the relationship between psychological capital, perceived employability, and job insecurity. Participants were N = 190 Italian young workers (self-employed, permanent employees, or temporary employees). Results showed that perceived employability mediated the relationship between psychological capital and job insecurity, and that this relationship was moderated by the workers’ type of contract. Specifically, a higher level of psychological capital corresponded to a higher perception of employability, and consequently a lower job insecurity for temporary and self-employed workers, but not for permanent ones. These findings are in line with the assumptions of the psychology of sustainability, and encourage preventive interventions aimed to foster personal resources in order to reduce job insecurity, especially in cases of non-standard employment.

The Burnout Assessment Tool (BAT) has shown satisfactory validity evidence in several countries, with the 23-item version of the instrument reporting adequate psychometric properties also in the Italian context. This paper is aimed to present results from the Italian validation of the 12-item version of the BAT. Based on a sample of 2277 workers, our results supported the factorial validity of a higher-order model represented by 4 first-order factors corresponding to the core dimensions of burnout, namely exhaustion, mental distance, and emotional and cognitive impairment. The measure invariance of the BAT-12 between data collected before and during the COVID-19 pandemic was supported. However, ANCOVA results suggest a higher score on the second-order burnout factor on data collected during the COVID-19 pandemic in comparison with earlier data. In line with the JD-R model, the BAT-12 total score reported a positive association with job demands (i.e., workload, time pressure, and role conflict) and a negative association with job resources (i.e., job autonomy, coworkers’ support) and personal resources (i.e., optimism, social self-efficacy, and task self-efficacy). Additionally, the BAT-12 showed a negative association with work engagement components (i.e., vigor, dedication, and absorption) and positive job attitudes (i.e., job satisfaction, affective commitment). All in all, our results identify the Italian version of the BAT-12 as a brief and reliable tool for measuring burnout among workers.

Job satisfaction (JS) is an indicator of individual psychosocial health. Consistent evidence showed that voluntary extra-role behavior in organizations, namely organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), can also contribute to individual psychological health. JS has been found to positively influence employees’ OCB, and both JS and OCB have been found to predict employees’ task performance (TP). The purpose of this study was to investigate whether employees’ OCB mediates the relationship of JS with TP, taking into consideration gender as a potential moderator, and other sociodemographic and work-related characteristics as confounding variables. A total of 518 employees, 54.6% women, aged 19–66 years with a mean age of about 36 years, completed measures of JS, OCB, and TP. Results showed a partial mediation of OCB in the JS-TP relationship, which was invariant across gender. A potential practical implication of findings is that human resource managers and practitioners might ultimately benefit male and female employees’ well-being as well as the organizations’ productivity by developing targeted individual- and group-level trainings and interventions to enhance JS and OCB.