Job resources as contributors to wellbeing

Protecting employees from the unfavorable consequences of work-related, psychosocial risk factors and enhancing their motivation at work should be a main priority, since healthy and happy employees are important assets for organizations (for a review, see Demerouti & Cropanzano, 2010). Work psychology and occupational health literatures suggest that organizations can achieve this goal by designing resourceful work environments (Hackman & Oldham, 1980) since job resources have been found to play a dual role in employee wellbeing (Bakker & Demerouti, 2007; Demerouti, Bakker, Nachreiner, & Schaufeli, 2001). First, job resources help employees manage and deal more effectively with their job demands, thus buffering their detrimental impact on job strain and health. Second, job resources are important in their own right because the availability of resources facilitates goal attainment, thereby enhancing employee motivation, work engagement, and performance. Based on these theoretical assumptions and supportive empirical evidence (for a review, see Bakker, Demerouti, & Sanz-Vergel, 2014), organizations are encouraged to create and sustain resourceful work environments. To this end, recent studies have emphasized the role of the supervisor in this process, since certain leadership styles (e.g., transformational leadership) have been found to promote job resources (e.g., Breevaart, Bakker, Demerouti, Sleebos, & Maduro, 2014; Breevaart, Bakker, Demerouti, & Van den Heuvel, 2015).