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December 2022: New article on reactions to perceived overqualification and formal work arrangements accepted

If individuals feel they have more skills and qualifications than are required for their jobs, they perceive themselves to be overqualified. Extant research has primarily focused on lower satisfaction and wellbeing that individuals experience in such a situation. In the present study, we complement this perspective by examining how individuals can adaptively and proactively deal with being overqualified. In a sample of 453 employees who we surveyed across three points in time we show that overqualified employees are angrier about their situation, which hampers their performance and satisfaction. Moreover, our study highlights the demotivating role of a temporary employment contract and long job tenure for overqualified employees to actively reorganize their work – such that overqualified employees are particularly less likely to actively change their work if they are only employed on a temporary basis or have been working in their jobs for a relatively long time. Taken together, this study points to the (de)motivating role of formal work arrangements in the context of perceived overqualification.

Debus, M. E., Körner, B., Wang, M., & Kleinmann, M. (in press). Reacting to perceived overqualification: Uniting strain-based and self-regulatory adjustment reactions and the moderating role of formal work arrangements. Journal of Business and Psychology. PDF

November 2022: New article on handling missing data for sleep monitoring systems published

Sensor-based sleep monitoring systems (e.g., wristbands) can be used to track sleep behavior on a daily basis and provide feedback to their users. To provide useful feedback, sleep monitoring systems must be able to recognize whether an individual is sleeping or awake. Existing approaches to infer sleep-wake phases typically assume continuous streams of data, yet this is rarely the case in reality. We use regression- and interpolation-based imputation strategies to mitigate the errors that might be caused by incomplete data. To evaluate our approach, we use a data set that includes physiological, behavioral, and self-report sleep monitoring data. Our results show that the presence of missing sensor data degrades the balanced accuracy of the classifier on average by 10-35 percentage points for detecting sleep and wake depending on the missing data rate. The imputation strategies explored in this work increase the performance of the classifier by 4-30 percentage points.These results open up new opportunities to improve the robustness of sleep monitoring systems against missing data.

Gashi, S., Alecci, L., Gjoreski, M., Di lascio, E., Mehrotra, A., Musolesi, M., Debus, M. E., Gasparini, F., & Santini, S. (2022). Handling missing data for sleep monitoring systems. 10th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII), 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACII55700.2022.9953832 PDF

November 2022: Interview with Deutschlandfunk (with podcast) about work stress and meaningfulness,  https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/beruflicher-stress-kuendigen-jobwechsel-beratung-100.html

September 2022: Interview with Augsburger Allgemeine on «Quiet quitting», https://www.augsburger-allgemeine.de/wirtschaft/arbeit-wie-das-phaenomen-quiet-quitting-die-arbeitswelt-veraendern-kann-id63851321.html

March 2022: New article on sleep stage and sleep quality recognition using wearables accepted

Sleep is a vital process for maintaining good health and well-being. While automatic detection of sleep (e.g., polysomnography, accelerators, wrist-worn devices) has been studied extensively, there is a lack of studies exploring how population and personalized models influence the performance of sleep detection. In this paper, we address this challenge by investigating the recognition of sleep/wake stages and high/low sleep quality with a focus on investigating the impact of personalized models. To evaluate our approach, we use a dataset of physiological signals and self-reports about sleep/wake times and sleep quality score. The dataset contains 6557 hours of data collected using wristbands over one month. Our results show that personalized models perform significantly better than population models for sleep quality recognition, and comparably good for sleep stage detection.

Gashi, S., Alecci, L., Di Lascio, E., Debus, M. E., Gasparini, F., & Santini, S. (2022). The role of model personalization for sleep stage and sleep quality recognition using wearables. IEEE Pervasive Computing. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/doi : 10.1109/MPRV.2022.3164334 PDF

Economic stressors (specifically job insecurity and overqualification at work)

Resources and recovery from work

Impression management at work

Editorial board memberships: Occupational Health Science, Frontiers in Psychology, Journal of Business and Psychology, Journal of Vocational Behavior

Journal reviewer: Applied Psychology: An International Review, Applied Psychology: Health and Well-being Career Development International, Društvena istraživanja, Economic and Industrial Democracy, European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, German Journal of Human Resource Management, Human Relations, Human Resource Management Journal, International Journal of Selection and Assessment, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Business and Psychology, Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Journal of Personnel Psychology, Journal of Vocational Behavior, Occupational Health Science, Organization Science, Safety Science, Stress & Health, Work & Stress

Interview with Deutschlandfunk (with podcast) about work stress and meaningfulness (11/2022), available here

Interview with Augsburger Allgemeine on «Quiet quitting» (9/2022), available here

Interview on work experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic with HR Today, 11/2021, available here

Interview on procrastination at work with Bilan, 2/2021 available here

Report on Gross, Debus, Liu, Wang, & Kleinmann (2020) on I/O At Work, available here

Interview on the future of work with myHEALTH, 11/2020, available here

Interview on remote leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic with Beobachter, 8/2020, available here

See here for a complete list

*Equal contribution.

For a complete list, please see my profile on ResearchGate.

• Debus, M. E., Körner, B., Wang, M., & Kleinmann, M. (in press). Reacting to perceived overqualification: Uniting strain-based and self-regulatory adjustment reactions and the moderating role of formal work arrangements. Journal of Business and Psychology. PDF

• Gashi, S., Alecci, L., Gjoreski, M., Di lascio, E., Mehrotra, A., Musolesi, M., Debus, M. E., Gasparini, F., & Santini, S. (2022). Handling missing data for sleep monitoring systems. 10th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII), 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACII55700.2022.9953832

• Gashi, S., Alecci, L., Di Lascio, E., Debus, M. E., Gasparini, F., & Santini, S. (2022). The role of model personalization for sleep stage and sleep quality recognition using wearables. IEEE Pervasive Computing, 21(2), 69-77. https://doi.org/10.1109/MPRV.2022.3164334

• Di Lascio, E., Gashi, S., Debus, M. E., & Santini, S. (2021). Automatic recognition of flow during work activities using context and physiological signals. 9th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII), 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACII52823.2021.9597434

• *Gross, C., *Debus, M. E., Ingold, P. V., & Kleinmann, M. (2021):  Too much self-promotion! How self-promotion climate relates to employees’ supervisor-focused self-promotion effectiveness and their work group’s performance. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 42, 1042-1059. doi: 10.1002/job.2547

• Debus, M. E., Unger, D., & Probst, T. M. (2021). Dirty work on the COVID-19 frontlines: Exacerbating the situation of marginalized groups in marginalized professions. Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice, 14, 144-148. doi:10.1017/iop.2021.33
• Greulich, B., Debus, M. E., Kleinmann, M., & König, C. J. (2021). Potential biasing factors in work stress surveys: A qualitative study on response behaviour. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 30, 40-57. doi:10.1080/1359432X.2020.1812580
• Gross, C., Debus, M. E., Liu, Y., Wang, M., & Kleinmann, M. (2020). I am nice and capable! How newcomers’ self-presentation to their supervisors affects their socialization outcomes. Journal of Applied Psychology. Advance online publication. doi:10.1037/apl0000817
• Heimann, A., Ingold, P. V., Debus, M. E., & Kleinmann, M. (2020). Who will go the extra mile? Selecting organizational citizens with a personality-based structured job interview. Journal of Business and Psychology. Advance online publication. doi:10.1007/s10869-020-09716-1
• Luksyte, A., Bauer, T. N.*, Debus, M. E.*, Erdogan, B.*, & Wu, C*. (2020). Perceived overqualification and collectivism values: Implications for work and non-work outcomes. Journal of Management. Advance online publication. doi:10.1177/0149206320948602
• Di Lascio, E., Gashi, S., Hidalgo, J. S., Nale, B., Debus, M. E., & Santini, S. (2020). A multi-sensor approach to automatically recognize breaks and work activities of knowledge workers in academia. Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, 4, 1-20. doi:10.1145/3411821
• Debus, M. E., Kleinmann, M., König, C. J., & Winkler, S. (2020). Being tough versus tender: The impact of country-level and individual masculinity orientations as moderators of the relationship between job insecurity and job attitudes. Applied Psychology: An International Review, 69, 616-652. doi: 10.1111/apps.12189
• Debus, M. E., Gross, C., & Kleinmann, M. (2020). The power of doing: How job crafting transmits the beneficial impact of autonomy among overqualified employees. Journal of Business and Psychology, 35, 317-331. doi:10.1007/s10869-019-09625-y
• Stollberger, J., & Debus, M. E. (2020). Go with the flow, but keep it stable? The role of flow variability in the context of daily flow experiences and daily creative performance. Work & Stress, 34, 342-358. doi:10.1080/02678373.2019.1695293
• Debus, M. E., Greulich, B., König, C. J., & Kleinmann, M. (2019). Insecure about how to rate your job insecurity? A two-study investigation into time frames applied to job insecurity measures. Occupational Health Science, 3, 421-435. doi:10.1007/s41542-019-00049-x
• Debus, M. E., Unger, D., & König, C. J. (2019). Job insecurity and performance over time: The critical role of job insecurity duration. Career Development International, 25, 325-336. doi:10.1108/CDI-04-2018-0102
• Debus, M. E., Fritz, C., & Philipp, M. (2019). A story of gains and losses: Shifts in job characteristics and well-being when transitioning to a managerial role. Journal of Business and Psychology, 34, 637-655. doi:10.1007/s10869-018-9604-3
• Debus, M. E., & Körner, B. (2018). Überqualifizierung im Kontext organisationaler Karrieren: Die Signalwirkung von proaktivem Verhalten [Overqualification in the workplace: The signaling function of proactive behavior]. Gruppe. Interaktion. Organisation - Zeitschrift für Angewandte Organisationspsychologie, 49, 34-41. doi:10.1007/s11612-018-0400-3
• Debus, M. E.*, & Unger, D.* (2017). The interactive effects of dual-earner couples’ job insecurity: Linking conservation of resources theory with crossover research. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 90, 225–247. doi:10.1111/joop.12169
• Debus, M. E., König, C. J., Kleinmann, M., & Werner, C. S. (2015). Examining the effects of negative affectivity on self- and supervisor ratings of job stressors: The role of stressor observability. Work & Stress, 29, 341-361. doi:10.1080/02678373.2015.1075233
• Debus, M. E., Sonnentag, S., Deutsch, W., & Nussbeck, F. W. (2014). Making flow happen: The effects of being recovered on work-related flow between and within days. Journal of Applied Psychology, 99, 713-722. doi:10.1037/A0035881
• Debus, M. E., König, C. J., & Kleinmann, M. (2014). The building blocks of job insecurity: The impact of environmental and person-related variables on job insecurity perceptions. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 87, 329-351. doi:10.1111/joop.12049
• Debus, M. E., Probst, T. M., König, C. J., & Kleinmann, M. (2012). Catch me if I fall! Enacted uncertainty avoidance and the social safety net as country-level moderators of the job insecurity-job attitudes link. Journal of Applied Psychology, 97, 690-698. doi:10.1037/a0027832
• König, C. J., Debus, M. E., Häusler, S., Lendenmann, N., & Kleinmann, M. (2010). Examining occupational self-efficacy, work locus of control and communication as moderators of the job insecurity-job performance relationship. Economic and Industrial Democracy, 31, 231-247. doi:10.1177/0143831X09358629