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1 – 10 of over 72000I aim to understand how informal relationships at work provide a supportive context for individuals and contribute to their engagement in an environment of disruptive change when…
Abstract
Purpose
I aim to understand how informal relationships at work provide a supportive context for individuals and contribute to their engagement in an environment of disruptive change when they are likely to be stressed.
Design
The research was conducted in three UK public service organizations during pre-Brexit disruption. An app was used to capture 400+ transient emotions, reactions, and diary entries of employees about their interactions with co-workers, colleagues, and close colleagues. This was followed by 25 interviews to reflect more deeply on those relationships documented in the app.
Findings
Interactions with co-workers, colleagues, and close colleagues are shown to contribute in different ways to emotions felt and different aspects of engagement. Closer relationships, less transactional and more emotional in nature, contribute to feelings of trust, significance, and mutual reliance. A typology of four close colleague relationship types also emerged variously driven by the depth of the relationship and sense of shared mutuality.
Value
This research documents employees' lived experience during disruption to show that relationships provide support for the meaningfulness, psychological safety, and availability aspects of personal engagement. It maps the process of developing supportive workplace relationships that form the relational context with four sub-contexts, distinguishing work, and personal engagement by their different foci. Practical and social implications are discussed.
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Ulrike Fasbender, Fabiola H. Gerpott and Dana Unger
Knowledge exchange between older and younger employees enhances the collective memory of an organization and therefore contributes to its business success. The purpose of this…
Abstract
Purpose
Knowledge exchange between older and younger employees enhances the collective memory of an organization and therefore contributes to its business success. The purpose of this paper is to take a motivational perspective to better understand why older and younger employees share and receive knowledge with and from each other. Specifically, this study focuses on generativity striving – the motivation to teach, train and guide others – as well as development striving – the motivation to grow, increase competence and master something new – and argues that both motives need to be considered to fully understand intergenerational knowledge exchange.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper takes a dyadic approach to disentangle how older employees’ knowledge sharing is linked to their younger colleagues’ knowledge receiving and vice versa. The study applied an actor-partner interdependence model based on survey data from 145 age-diverse coworker dyads to test the hypotheses.
Findings
Results showed that older and younger employees’ generativity striving affected their knowledge sharing, which, in turn, predicted their colleagues’ knowledge receiving. Moreover, the study found that younger employees were more likely to receive knowledge that their older colleagues shared with them when they scored higher (vs lower) on development striving.
Originality/value
By studying the age-specific dyadic cross-over between knowledge sharing and knowledge receiving, this research adds to the knowledge exchange literature. This study challenges the current age-blind view on knowledge exchange motivation and provides novel insights into the interplay of motivational forces involved in knowledge exchange between older and younger employees.
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Nancy A. Gigante and William A. Firestone
This paper aims to explore how teacher leaders help teachers improve mathematics and science teaching.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to explore how teacher leaders help teachers improve mathematics and science teaching.
Design/methodology/approach
Research focused on a purposive sample of seven teacher leaders selected to vary in their time allocated to teacher leader work and their content knowledge. Each teacher leader was interviewed, as were two teachers and at least one administrator working with that teacher leader. Each interview was first subjected to a mix of deductive and inductive coding before a case study was written for each teacher leader. Ultimately, a cross‐case analysis was written.
Findings
Teacher leaders conducted two sets of leadership tasks. The paper finds that support tasks helped teachers do their work but did not contribute to teacher learning. Developmental tasks did facilitate learning. All teacher leaders engaged in support tasks, but only four did developmental tasks as well. Teacher leaders who engaged in developmental tasks had access to one material resource and three social resources not available to other teacher leaders: time to work with teachers, administrative support, more positive relations with teachers, and opportunities to work with teachers on professional development
Practical implications
When teacher leadership is intended to facilitate teacher learning, the payoff comes from engaging in developmental tasks. A key to teacher leader success is administrative support. Schools and districts should not invest in teacher leaders unless they intend to support teacher leaders adequately through time, administrative follow through, and training to help teachers develop the positive social relations on which their work depends.
Originality/value
These findings have implications for how to integrate teacher leaders into larger school improvement efforts.
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The purpose of this study is to model and explore kindness as a factor in employment contexts. “Kindness among colleagues” is a particular context for the scientific study of…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to model and explore kindness as a factor in employment contexts. “Kindness among colleagues” is a particular context for the scientific study of kindness which has been under-researched. There is scope within the burgeoning study of kindness for research concerned with employment contexts and colleagues, adopting an employment context appropriate construct of kindness, generating and considering evidence that might be evaluated rigorously in the employment context where kindness is both advocated and critiqued.
Design/methodology/approach
The literature review identifies and explores the gaps in kindness research in the employment context. A construct distinguishing a set of antecedents of kindness among colleagues was developed to address these gaps. The relevance and usefulness of the construct was tested in semi-structured interviews among some work colleagues in a specific organization setting.
Findings
The results show that the four antecedents of kindness can be used to capture and explore perceptions and experiences of kindness among colleagues. There is scope for analysis at the levels of individuals, teams and organizations using data about these antecedents which allows for individual and more general workplace dynamics to be described and explored.
Research limitations/implications
The antecedents of kindness construct are validated to an extent by this initial study. The potential of this for describing and analyzing kindness and workplace relevant themes makes it worth further development; to refine and validate an instrument for measuring kindness among colleagues.
Practical implications
Kindness among colleagues, if understood in the nuanced way presented here, can help individuals, teams and organizations review and evaluate themselves in diverse contexts. Contexts can be expected to vary with workforce demographics, leadership style and organization cultures.
Social implications
Kindness is a burgeoning theme and concern across diverse social and cultural contexts for various reasons. The scientific contribution to the advocacy or critique of kindness, in this case kindness among colleagues, provides value in rigor, operationalization and evidencing of the case for and against advocacy of the value of kindness in general.
Originality/value
This is a focused review and study of kindness among colleagues which contributes to the nomological and methodological development of a scientific approach to organizational analysis concerns with this important theme in contemporary times.
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Kathi N. Miner, Samantha C. January, Kelly K. Dray and Adrienne R. Carter-Sowell
The purpose of this project was to examine the extent to which early-career women faculty in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) experience working in a chilly…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this project was to examine the extent to which early-career women faculty in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) experience working in a chilly interpersonal climate (as indicated by experiences of ostracism and incivility) and how those experiences relate to work and non-work well-being outcomes.
Design/methodology/approach
Data came from a sample of 96 early-career STEM faculty (Study 1) and a sample of 68 early-career women STEM faculty (Study 2). Both samples completed online surveys assessing their experiences of working in a chilly interpersonal climate and well-being.
Findings
In Study 1, early-career women STEM faculty reported greater experiences of ostracism and incivility and more negative occupational well-being outcomes associated with these experiences compared to early-career men STEM faculty. In Study 2, early-career women STEM faculty reported more ostracism and incivility from their male colleagues than from their female colleagues. Experiences of ostracism (and, to a lesser extent, incivility) from male colleagues also related to negative occupational and psychological well-being outcomes.
Originality/value
This paper documents that exposure to a chilly interpersonal climate in the form of ostracism and incivility is a potential explanation for the lack and withdrawal of junior women faculty in STEM academic fields.
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Richa Chaudhary, Madhu Lata and Mantasha Firoz
The purpose of this study is to present an empirical account of the prevalence and socio-demographic determinants of workplace incivility (experienced and instigated) in the…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to present an empirical account of the prevalence and socio-demographic determinants of workplace incivility (experienced and instigated) in the Indian workplace.
Design/methodology/approach
The study sample consisted of 1,133 employees working in service organizations mainly banks, hotels, academic institutions and information technology firms. The authors tested the proposed model on the same set of respondents in two different studies. The phenomenon of instigated incivility and its determinants were examined in Study 1, while Study 2 looked at experienced incivility and its antecedents. The data were analyzed using univariate, bivariate, and multivariate statistical operations in SPSS 24.
Findings
The results of both studies revealed that employees’ age, gender, educational qualification, position, nature of the organization, type of the organization and duration of working hours significantly predict the onset of workplace incivility. Nevertheless, marital status and tenure failed to predict the manifestation of uncivil behaviors in the organization.
Research limitations/implications
The scope of this study was restricted to the Indian service sector with a focus on only two types of workplace incivility (instigated and experienced).
Practical implications
The managers are advised to be mindful of employees’ socio-demographic differences while devising interventions to tackle the issues of uncivil acts at work.
Originality/value
This study is one of the pioneer attempts to explore the impact of socio-demographic factors on employees’ tendency to instigate and experience incivility at work in India. In doing so, the study enriches the scant literature on workplace incivility by establishing the role of individual differences in determining the occurrence of incivility in the workplace.
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Saeedeh Hazratzadeh and Nima Jafari Navimipour
Expert Cloud as a new class of cloud systems enables its users to request and share the skill, knowledge and expertise of people by employing internet infrastructures and cloud…
Abstract
Purpose
Expert Cloud as a new class of cloud systems enables its users to request and share the skill, knowledge and expertise of people by employing internet infrastructures and cloud concepts. Since offering the most appropriate expertise to the customer is one of the clear objectives in Expert Cloud, colleague recommendation is a necessary part of it. So, the purpose of this paper is to develop a colleague recommender system for the Expert Cloud using features matrices of colleagues.
Design/methodology/approach
The new method is described in two phases. In the first phase, all possible colleagues of the user are found through the filtering mechanism and next features of the user and possible colleagues are calculated and collected in matrices. Six potential features of colleagues including reputation, expertise, trust, agility, cost and field of study were proposed. In the second phase, the final score is calculated for every possible colleague and then top-k colleagues are extracted among users. The survey was conducted using a simulation in MATLAB Software. Data were collected from Expert Cloud website. The method was tested using evaluating metrics such as precision, accuracy, incorrect recommendation and runtime.
Findings
The results of this study indicate that considering more features of colleagues has a positive impact on increasing the precision and accuracy of recommending new colleagues. Also, the proposed method has a better result in reducing incorrect recommendation.
Originality/value
In this paper, the colleague recommendation issue in the Expert Cloud is pointed out and the solution approach is applied into the Expert Cloud website.
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Ho-Seok Kim, Minseong Kim and Dongwoo Koo
Although the positive impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives on personal and organizational outcomes has been studied in the fields of human resource…
Abstract
Purpose
Although the positive impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives on personal and organizational outcomes has been studied in the fields of human resource management and the hospitality industry, scholars in these fields still consider CSR as a promising area with potential. Drawing upon the dual concern and the attribution theories, this study aims to identify three stages of formations from teamwork with colleagues and personal benefits to organizational benefits from social responsibilities of hospitality companies via an integrated research model.
Design/methodology/approach
With the data collected from 324 frontline employees in hospitality enterprises in South Korea, this study empirically investigated the interrelationship to predict frontline employees’ job performance.
Findings
The empirical results from structural equation modeling indicated that perceived management support for CSR and perceived colleague support for CSR had significant influence on empathetic concern for colleague and anticipated positive affect, separately. Also, empathetic concern significantly affected psychological well-being and job satisfaction, while an anticipated positive affect significantly influenced job satisfaction. Finally, psychological well-being and job satisfaction had a significant impact on job performance.
Practical implications
This study provides several managerial implications for maximizing the effectiveness of hospitality companies’ CSR practices, enhancing frontline employees’ psychological well-being, job satisfaction and job performance.
Originality/value
Based on the empirical findings, this study provided meaningful theoretical and managerial implications to maximize the effectiveness of CSR initiatives and maximize frontline employees’ job performance in the hospitality industry.
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Yidong Tu, Yangmei Zhang, Xinxin Lu and Shuoli Wang
The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between ethical leadership and employee cross-team knowledge sharing via the differentiating mediating effects of…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between ethical leadership and employee cross-team knowledge sharing via the differentiating mediating effects of cognitive and affective trust in colleagues.
Design/methodology/approach
Multi-source and multi-wave data were collected from 214 dyads of employees and their supervisors. Linear regression was employed to examine the hypotheses.
Findings
Ethical leadership positively predicts employee cross-team knowledge sharing. Affective trust in colleagues mediates the relationship between ethical leadership and employee cross-team knowledge sharing, whereas cognitive trust in colleagues does not. The hypothesis – the mediating effect of affective trust in colleagues between ethical leadership and cross-team knowledge sharing is greater than that of cognitive trust in colleagues – is not supported.
Originality/value
This study extends understanding of the influence of ethical leadership on cross-team knowledge sharing. It further differentiates cognitive and affective trust in colleagues between ethical leadership and cross-team knowledge sharing. These findings are valuable for improving the research of leadership practices and knowledge sharing.
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Elina Weiste, Melisa Stevanovic, Inka Koskela, Maria Paavolainen, Eveliina Korkiakangas, Tiina Koivisto, Vilja Levonius and Jaana Laitinen
An “open communication culture” in the workplace is considered a key contributor to high-quality interaction and providing means to address problems at work. We study how the…
Abstract
Purpose
An “open communication culture” in the workplace is considered a key contributor to high-quality interaction and providing means to address problems at work. We study how the ideals of “open communication” operate in healthcare.
Design/methodology/approach
We use discourse analysis to investigate the audio-recorded data from 14 workshop team discussions in older people services.
Findings
We found four imperatives concerning the interactional conduct of their colleagues in problematic situations that nursing professionals prefer: (1) Engage in direct communication and avoid making assumptions, (2) Address problems immediately, (3) Deal directly with the person involved in the matter and (4) Summon the courage to speak up. Through these imperatives, the nursing professionals invoke and draw upon the “open communication” discourse. Although these ideals were acknowledged as difficult to realize in practice and as leading to experiences of frustration, the need to comply with them was constructed as beyond doubt.
Practical implications
Workplace communication should be enhanced at a communal level, allowing those with less power to express their perspectives on shaping shared ideals of workplace interaction.
Originality/value
The expectation that an individual will simply “speak up” when they experience mistreatment by a colleague might be too much if the individual is already in a precarious position.
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