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Workplace silence impedes productivity, job satisfaction and retention, key issues for the hospital workforce worldwide. It can have a negative effect on patient outcomes and safety and human resources in healthcare organisations. This study aims to examine factors that influence workplace silence among hospital doctors in Ireland.

A national, cross-sectional, online survey of hospital doctors in Ireland was conducted in October–November 2019; 1,070 hospital doctors responded. This paper focuses on responses to the question “If you had concerns about your working conditions, would you raise them?”. In total, 227 hospital doctor respondents (25%) stated that they would not raise concerns about their working conditions. Qualitative thematic analysis was carried out on free-text responses to explore why these doctors choose to opt for silence regarding their working conditions.

Reputational risk, lack of energy and time, a perceived inability to effect change and cultural norms all discourage doctors from raising concerns about working conditions. Apathy arose as change to working conditions was perceived as highly unlikely. In turn, this had scope to lead to neglect and exit. Voice was seen as risky for some respondents, who feared that complaining could damage their career prospects and workplace relationships.

This study highlights the systemic, cultural and practical issues that pressure hospital doctors in Ireland to opt for silence around working conditions. It adds to the literature on workplace silence and voice within the medical profession and provides a framework for comparative analysis of doctors' silence and voice in other settings.

The aim of this paper is to examine the impact of organisational restructuring on the devolution of HRM to middle managers in the Irish health service.

The study involved interviews with a cross‐section of 48 HR and line managers in one area of the Irish health service.

Decision making by both HR and middle managers was adversely affected by the increased layers of bureaucracy that had resulted from the restructuring process. HR managers were devolving HR activities but were still retaining control of information systems and this was both slowing down middle management decision making and leading to the creation of new databases by the managers themselves. HR managers were emerging as regulators of HR activities.

The study was conducted in only one area of the Irish health service and with a limited number of respondents.

The study examines the way in which organisational context impacts on the devolution of HR activities to line managers and adds to an understanding of the relationship between HR and middle managers in the devolution of HR activities to line managers.

The aim of this paper is to contribute to understanding the nature of specialist and generalist human capital by exploring the ways in which knowledge workers view their experience of working in specialist and generalist roles in pharmaceutical firms in Ireland and the UK.

The findings are based on interviews with 55 knowledge workers employed in a range of scientific, technical and managerial positions in four Irish and two UK firms located in the pharmaceutical sector. Interviews were also conducted with nine human resource/training and development managers within these six firms.

The findings suggest that the categorisation of human capital as either specialist or generalist is too rigid and does not take account of the fact that individuals may themselves choose to shape their careers by investing in a range of education, training and development opportunities that will enable them to move between specialist and generalist roles.

The paper unpacks the concepts of specialist and generalist human capital from an employee perspective and challenges the sharp distinction that is made between specialist and generalist human capital.

The purpose of this study is to investigate hotel industry employers' expectations of, and satisfaction with, graduate competencies in comparison with graduate perceptions of what is required for their roles and their satisfaction with how well their education experience prepared them.

The research involved a questionnaire survey of 41 employers and 33 graduates in the Irish hotel sector, supplemented by a series of interviews. This sector was chosen because it represents the main destination of graduates who specialise in hospitality and tourism management.

The competencies consistently regarded as important across both samples related to interpersonal and professional knowledge skill domains. However, a number of gaps were evident with regard to satisfaction with how the education experience prepared graduates for careers in the industry.

The study was confined to graduate and employer views on hospitality and tourism management education in Ireland. Its findings would benefit from a future comparative analysis including generic business graduates, as well as support from different national contexts.

The findings highlight the need for greater collaboration and partnership between the industry and education providers in preparing students to meet the needs of the hotel industry. In particular, the focus of the curriculum and the pedagogical approaches used need to be reviewed to ensure closer alignment.

The research focuses not only on the critical competencies needed by hotel managers but also on the level of satisfaction experienced by both graduate and employer samples.

Although we know that HRM practices can have a huge impact on employees’ innovative work behaviour (IWB), we do not know exactly which practices make the difference and how they affect IWB. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to determine the best HRM practices for boosting IWB, to understand the theoretical reasons for this, and to discover mediators and moderators in the relationship between HRM practices and IWB.

Based on a systematic review of the literature, the authors carried out a content analysis on 27 peer-reviewed journal articles.

Working with the definitions and items provided in the articles, the authors were able to cluster HRM practices according to the ability-motivation-opportunity framework. The best HRM practices for enhancing IWB are training and development, reward, job security, autonomy, task composition, job demand, and feedback.

The results of this study provide practical information for HRM professionals aiming to develop an HRM system that generates innovative employee behaviours that might help build an innovative climate.

A framework is presented that aggregates the findings and clarifies which HRM practices influence IWB and how these relationships can be explained.

This paper aims to examine the impact of thinking about an event as an antecedent to subsequent talk about this event with others (i.e. word-of-mouth). Thinking has been a neglected variable in word-of-mouth research, despite the fact that several conceptual arguments indicate that thinking is likely to enhance talking. Here, the thinking–talking association is examined in the context of service encounters.

Data were collected with a critical incident method, and the main variables were measured with questionnaire items.

Thinking about a service encounter – after it has been completed – had a positive influence on subsequent talk to others about the encounter. The association was mediated by the memorability of the service encounter and the extent to which what had happened had been subject to rehearsal with the purpose of telling others about it. In addition, with respect to antecedents of consumer thinking, the results indicate that service encounter incongruity had a special role in why the consumer thinks about encounters after they have been completed.

The findings should be seen in relation to the dominant position of customer satisfaction as an antecedent to word-of-mouth in the existing literature. The present results, however, indicate that satisfaction’s contribution to the variation in talking about the encounter was modest.

The evening meal is an important, regular event in the lives of many people and its daily practices lead consumers to develop habits that determine their food choices. The objective of the present work is to further investigate how consumers make choices by determining the stages as well as the content of the family's daily food (i.e. seafood and meat‐related) decision‐making process.

Twenty‐four families in Denmark, Norway and Iceland were asked to fill in a one‐to‐two‐week semi‐structured diary regarding any thoughts they had about the decision‐making sequence regarding their evening meals. Data were analysed by means of content analysis so as to gain insight into the main themes and distinctive patterns with respect to the four stages of the decision‐making sequence by identifying a number of codes and sub‐codes of high and lower abstraction level.

The main results were similar across the three countries. Planning was the most important phase of the evening meal decision‐making sequence, where Nordic respondents considered practical issues, and engaged in a more rational type of thinking, allowing cognitive aspects to prevail at this particular stage. The presence of rational thoughts was repeated in the successive stages of purchasing, whereas affective thoughts were elicited mainly during the later stages of preparation and consumption. Furthermore, the comparison of seafood and meat as choices that complied with respondents' demands and expectations revealed that the two food types were perceived as substitutes for each other; however, meat was considered a choice that respondents felt more confident with in terms of pre‐ and post‐purchasing experience.

This paper offers substantial insights into the factors that influence the decision making process, as well as the importance that consumers assign to those factors across most stages of the decision making process. This valuable, in‐depth information can only be collected by using qualitative methods such as the present diaries. Gaining insights into the factors that influence various stages of the evening meal decision‐making process enables researchers to identify the importance that consumers assign to cognitive and affective factors across the food provisioning stages for a variety of food products (including seafood).