Work-related psychosocial risks, particularly mobbing/workplace
bullying; work-related stress; counterproductive work behavior
(organizational withdrawal, abuse/hostility, etc.); work
engagement; workaholism.
A first area of research concerns the measurement and
evaluation of the effects of psychosocial risk factors (i.e.
workload, job control, role conflict and role ambiguity, etc.). In
this area my research has focused on the Italian validation of
assessment tools which quantify exposure and on the investigation of the effects of such exposure.
A more specific area of research is on mobbing/workplace
bullying, i.e. an extreme psychosocial risk factors. Here my
research has investigated the individual effects of exposure
to bullying. More recently the interest has shifted
towards the understanding of the potential antecedents of
workplace bullying, particurly by adopting the theoretical
framework of the so called 'work environment hypothesis' of
bullying, according to which dysfunctional conflicts and
bullying are triggered by a poor work organization. The role of individual factors is
also explored.
A further theme concerns counterproductive work behavior, which
regards negative behaviors such as
abuse/hostility, production deviance, theft, etc.
Here one of the aims
is to explore bullying behavior from the actor
(rather than victim) perspective, with the end of understanding the
organizational reasons that promote frustration and aggression and thus the enactment of bullying
and other forms of counterproductive
behavior.
More recently I developed an interest towards work
engagement and workaholism. The former is considered a motivational
outcome of the availability of personal (e.g. self-efficacy) and
job (e.g. social support, autonomy and feedback) resources at work.
My studies here focused on the Italian validation of a Dutch measure
of work engagement and an exploration of
the potentially mediating role of job-related affective experiences
in the relationhip between organizational factors and work
engagement. As far as workaholism is
concerned, my work focused on the Italian validation of a
screening tool for the assessment of work addiction and on the investigation of
its effects by using
also physiologic measures (e.g. blood
pressure).
