Anchored in conservation of resources theory, this study considers how employees' experience of job stress might reduce their organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB), as well as how this negative relationship might be buffered by employees' access to two personal resources (passion for work and adaptive humor) and two contextual resources (peer communication and forgiving climate). Data from a Mexican-based organization reveal that felt job stress diminishes OCB, but the effect is subdued at higher levels of the four studied resources. This study accordingly adds to extant research by elucidating when the actual experience of job stress is more or less likely to steer employees away from OCB – that is, when they have access to specific resources that hitherto have been considered direct enablers of such efforts instead of buffers of employees' negative behavioral responses to job stress.

Drawing on the job-demand resource theory, the article examines the relative importance and the complementarity of three widely practiced leadership styles – transformational, paternalistic, and authoritarian. It investigates how the three styles relate to followers’ work engagement amongst employees in Russian domestic organizations. It also theorizes and tests the mediating effects of three psychological mechanisms, namely self-efficacy, self-esteem, and job control, on the examined relationships. The findings show that all three leadership styles relate to followers’ work engagement positively. The relationship of transformational leadership is dominant and mediated by all three psychological mechanisms. The remaining two styles also make their unique contributions to followers’ work engagement. Whereas authoritarian leadership influences followers by enhancing their self-efficacy and self-esteem, paternalistic leadership operates more extrinsically by increasing followers’ job control. Surprisingly, our analyses found that the role of control variables such as gender, age, and hierarchical position were insignificant in predicting how the three leadership styles influence employee work engagement. The study is among the first to shed light on the relative importance of the three focal leadership styles, their differential influences and interrelations, and the different mechanisms through which they relate to followers’ work engagement.

I examine whether firms’ use of alternative work arrangements, particularly temporary agency workers, affects their cost of equity. Exploiting a major labor-market deregulation in Japan that induced manufacturing firms to increase their employment of temporary agency workers, I show that the cost of equity decreased in manufacturing firms, relative to nonmanufacturing firms, after the deregulation. Further analysis using variations within manufacturing firms provides corroborating evidence. The rigidity in labor expenses and the cost of debt also decreased in manufacturing firms. Overall, alternative work arrangements increase the flexibility in labor costs, leading to lower operating leverage and cost of capital.