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The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of debt maturity structure and types of institutional ownership on accounting conservatism by using different financial variables and proxies.

Employing panel data analysis in the R programming language, the authors test their hypotheses on a sample of 143 (858 firm-year observations) companies listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange during 2011–2016.

Using Basu (1997) and Beaver and Ryan (2000) models as proxies for accounting conservatism, the findings suggest a non-significant relationship between accounting conservatism and debt maturity structure. Contrary to the primary expectation, the results indicate that short-maturity debts are also non-significantly and negatively associated with accounting conservatism in financially distressed firms. Finally, using both conservatism measures, the authors document that there is no significant relationship between both active and passive institutional ownership and accounting conservatism as well as debt maturity structure.

The current study is the first study conducted in a developing country like Iran, and the outcomes of the study may be helpful to other developing nations.

A large number of studies indicate that coercive forms of organizational control and performance management in health care services often backfire and initiate dysfunctional consequences. The purpose of this article is to discuss new approaches to performance management in health care services when the purpose is to support innovative changes in the delivery of services.

The article represents cross-boundary work as the theoretical and empirical material used to discuss and reconsider performance management comes from several relevant research disciplines, including systematic reviews of audit and feedback interventions in health care and extant theories of human motivation and organizational control.

An enabling approach to performance management in health care services can potentially contribute to innovative changes. Key design elements to operationalize such an approach are a formative and learning-oriented use of performance measures, an appeal to self- and social-approval mechanisms when providing feedback and support for local goals and action plans that fit specific conditions and challenges.

The article suggests how to operationalize an enabling approach to performance management in health care services. The framework is consistent with new governance and managerial approaches emerging in public sector organizations more generally, supporting a higher degree of professional autonomy and the use of nonfinancial incentives.

It is predicted that micromanagement may become a growing workplace concern post-Covid-19, with managers grappling for control in the current hybrid/remote working environment. This will be happening at a time when millennials represent half of the working population. This study contributes to existing literature and provides an overall appreciation of the complexities of micromanagement and how it impacts millennials' followership styles.

A quantitative study was undertaken and a series of hypotheses were tested. The target sample for this research was the millennial cohort aged between 24 and 41. Data were analysed using SPSS.

This paper confirmed that “unfavourable followership styles” consisted of various negative followership reactions such as anxiety, demotivation, dissatisfaction, disengagement, reduction in support for managers, limited upward feedback, team conflict, reduced productivity and innovation due to fear of making mistakes ultimately facilitating a toxic workplace. Essentially, this research validated the notion that in order to create a sustainable organisation post-Covid-19, HR professionals must take proactive measures to mitigate this form of harmful leadership.

Data weaknesses transpire where respondents have never interacted with a micromanager in reality. Therefore, perceived reactions to a hypothetical micromanager may differ from those respondents who were exposed to micromanagers.

A lack of research exists on the intersection of micromanagement and millennials' followership styles and as such this paper bridges that gap.

Policy makers are applying market-inspired competition and financial incentives to drive efficiency in healthcare. However, a lack of knowledge exists about the process whereby incentives are filtered through organizations to influence staff motivation, and the key role of managers is often overlooked. The purpose of this paper is to explore the strategies managers use as intermediaries between financial incentives and the individual motivation of staff. The authors use empirical data from a local case in Swedish specialized care.

The authors conducted an exploratory qualitative case study of a patient-choice reform, including financial incentives, in specialized orthopedics in Sweden. In total, 17 interviews were conducted with professionals in managerial positions, representing six healthcare providers. A hypo-deductive, thematic approach was used to analyze the data.

The results show that managers applied alignment strategies to make the incentive model motivating for staff. The managers’ strategies are characterized by attempts to align external rewards with professional values based on their contextual and practical knowledge. Managers occasionally overruled the financial logic of the model to safeguard patient needs and expressed an interest in having a closer dialogue with policy makers about improvements.

Externally imposed incentives do not automatically motivate healthcare staff. Managers in healthcare play key roles as intermediaries by aligning external rewards with professional values. Managers’ multiple perspectives on healthcare practices and professional culture can also be utilized to improve policy and as a source of knowledge in partnership with policy makers.

Drawing on the discursive properties of placemaking theory, this paper discusses the development of film tourism in Crete from the release of the award-winning Zorba the Greek (dir. Michael Cacoyannis, ZG) to date. The approach is “genealogical,” seeking to explain how ZG-inspired tourism on Crete ended up being more than about the film itself owing to historical contingency.

Mezirow's theory of transformative learning aims to evoke change on a deeper level of learning. This qualitative study with 38 pre-service teachers enrolled in a Master's degree programme for teacher education in Austria used semi-structured interviews to explore how diversity skills can transform after diversity training applying Mezirow's theory of transformative learning. In these trainings, a disorienting dilemma was placed at the centre of the diversity training from which transformative learning took its start.

In an increasingly diversified school system, diversity skills have become a pedagogical necessity for teachers in their future workplace. However, many teachers state not feeling adequately prepared for diversity within higher education and their attitudes towards diversity oftentimes remain unchanged despite diversity training.

The findings were deduced from structured content analysis. They show that the diversity trainings led to new cultural frames of reference for the study participants on a cognitive and social level, but to a smaller extent on an emotional level.

The study follows a different approach than “typical” diversity trainings through Mezirow's theory on transformative learning contributing to making a real change to preparing students for their workplaces in diversified Austrian schools.

Drawing upon the motivational affordance theory, this paper aims to investigate how gamification design and human motivational needs are associated in extant literature.

The authors conducted a literature analysis of 60 journal articles that studied motivational influences of gamification in information technology design. Content analysis was used to identify game design features and motivation variables studied in prior literature, and correspondence analysis was used to show the co-occurrence of game design features and basic motivational needs.

The results showed that four types of game design features and eight basic motivational needs are studied in this pool of literature. Correspondence analysis indicates some interesting associations between game design features and basic human needs.

This research used a motivational affordance perspective to interpret the impact of game design features and suggested directions for future investigations. It is limited due to its sample size and considered as an exploratory study.

This research provided suggestions for technology designers that game design features vary in their motivational influence, and therefore, game design features should be used accordingly to meet users’ motivational needs.

This research is one of initial studies which explored the association between game design features and basic motivational needs. The findings of this study provide the groundwork for guidelines and strategies to facilitate motivational design in information technology.

This study aims to introduce the perceived systems intelligence (SI) inventory, developed based on the earlier published self-report SI inventory (Törmänen et al., 2016). It can be used together with earlier managerial level tools for building a learning organization and included in general 360-style evaluations in personnel development.

The inventory is validated with confirmatory factor analysis with a model based on the self-report SI inventory, using data from full-time used employees and managers in the USA and UK. Perceived SI factor scores are correlated with the perceived study performance of the individual.

The perceived SI inventory is found to have good factorial validity, and it correlates strongly with evaluations of perceived study performance. Managers perceived high in performance are also found to score high in perceived SI. Perceived SI does not depend on gender, age, organization size or industry.

The perceived SI inventory is the first personnel level peer evaluation tool suggested for developing learning organizations. The new inventory makes peer evaluations possible and provides a new grassroots level tool for personnel development programs in learning organizations.

The Voice of the Clinician project commenced during an era when practitioner burnout, dissatisfaction, and turnover became an increasingly global health workforce concern. One key problem is clinical staff not being empowered to voice their concerns to decision-makers, as was found in this case study of an Australian public health organization. The following research question informed the present study: What is a better committee system for clinician engagement in decision-making processes? The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The Mid North Coast Local Health District in New South Wales aspired to improve engagement between frontline clinicians and decision-makers. Social network analysis methods and mathematical modeling were used in the discovery of how committees are connected to each other and subsequently to other committee members.

This effort uncovered a hidden organizational architecture of 323 committees of 926 members which overall cost 84,729 person hours and AUD$2.923 million per annum. Furthermore, frontline clinicians were located far from centers of influence, just 37 percent of committees had terms of reference, and clinicians reported that meeting agendas were not being met.

In response to the findings, a technological platform was created so that the board of directors could visually see all the committees and the connections between them, thus creating ways to further improve communication, transparency of process, and – ultimately – clinician engagement.

The breakthrough idea is that all organizational meetings can be seen as a system of engagement and should be analyzed to determine and describe the points and pathways where clinician voice is blocked.