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This research explores perceptions of knowledge management processes held by managers and employees in a service industry. To date, empirical research on knowledge management in the service industry is sparse. This research seeks to examine absorptive capacity and its four capabilities of acquisition, assimilation, transformation and exploitation and their impact on effective knowledge management. All of these capabilities are strategies that enable external knowledge to be recognized, imported and integrated into, and further developed within the organization effectively. The research tests the relationships between absorptive capacity and effective knowledge management through analysis of quantitative data (n = 549) drawn from managers and employees in 35 residential aged care organizations in Western Australia. Responses were analysed using Partial Least Square-based Structural Equation Modelling. Additional analysis was conducted to assess if the job role (of manager or employee) and three industry context variables of profit motive, size of business and length of time the organization has been in business, impacted on the hypothesized relationships.

Structural model analysis examines the relationships between variables as hypothesized in the research framework. Analysis found that absorptive capacity and the four capabilities correlated significantly with effective knowledge management, with absorptive capacity explaining 56% of the total variability for effective knowledge management. Findings from this research also show that absorptive capacity and the four capabilities provide a useful framework for examining knowledge management in the service industry. Additionally, there were no significant differences in the perceptions held between managers and employees, nor between respondents in for-profit and not-for-profit organizations. Furthermore, the size of the organization and length of time the organization has been in business did not impact on absorptive capacity, the four capabilities and effective knowledge management.

The research considers implications for business in light of these findings. The role of managers in providing leadership across the knowledge management process was confirmed, as well as the importance of guiding routines and knowledge sharing throughout the organization. Further, the results indicate that within the participating organizations there are discernible differences in the way that some organizations manage their knowledge, compared to others. To achieve effective knowledge management, managers need to provide a supportive workplace culture, facilitate strong employee relationships, encourage employees to seek out new knowledge, continually engage in two-way communication with employees and provide up-to-date policies and procedures that guide employees in doing their work. The implementation of knowledge management strategies has also been shown in this research to enhance the delivery and quality of residential aged care.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between aged care employees’ perceived job quality and intention to stay in current aged care facilities, mediated by work-life interference.

This paper uses the nationally representative employee–employer matched data from the 2012 National Aged Care Workforce Census and Survey in Australia. It applies the theoretical lens of the Job Characteristics Model and a mediation analytical model that controls for a rich set of employee, employer and regional characteristics.

This paper finds that higher perceived job quality positively correlates with greater intention to stay and that work-life interference mediates the relationship between perceived job quality and intention to stay.

This paper cannot make inference about causal relationship. Future studies on the aged care workforce should collect longitudinal data so that time-invariant unobservables can be eliminated in econometric modelling.

Efforts by the aged care sector to design quality jobs are likely to have significant positive correlation with the intention to stay, not only because employees are less likely to leave higher quality jobs per se, but also because higher quality jobs interfere less in the family lives of aged care workers, which itself is associated with greater intention to stay.

The results add to a small literature that has investigated how work-family variables can mediate between interventions that organisations put in place to improve work-life balance, and employee outcomes.

This paper aims to determine the effects of leadership style (LS) on organisational identification (OID) in aged care provider organisations to inform talent management strategies for the sector, which has quite severe workforce shortages.

This paper reports on a mixed-methods study. Study 1 was quantitative in approach that measured responses to an online questionnaire containing the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire and the Identification with a Psychological Group scale. The analytical strategy provided results that demonstrated the socio-demographic characteristics of the sample, the reliability and distributions of data and calculated the correlations between the factors of the deployed tools. The relationship between the factors that comprise both tools was measured, and any differences between the two natural groups were labelled leaders and raters. Study 2 was qualitative in approach, using interpretive phenomenological analysis to provide an in-depth analysis of phenomena.

The results and findings of this study are that OID was not evident in the quantitative or qualitative samples. There are recommendations for future research relating to the social capital of organisations and the use of social media to determine how these could be harnessed in support of workforce recruitment and retention strategies.

This research was conducted in Australia with participants from the workforces of aged care providers in three eastern states of Australia. The results and findings may be limited to the Australian aged care context. The researcher evaluated the limitations of this research relating to: Methodology: There may be an overstatement of the strength of the relationships between variables among those motivated to participate in the survey in the quantitative study; Transferability: The qualitative study required the researcher to be thorough in describing the research context, and it may be that those who wish to transfer the results of this study to a different context are responsible for making the judgement on the suitability of the transfer; Credibility: The qualitative analysis was not designed to directly reflect a relationship between each leader and their direct report raters’ experiences; and Confirmability: The researcher maintained an awareness and openness to the dynamism of the results. Frequent reflection and self-criticism about preconceptions that may have affected the research were recorded in field notes after each interview.

Aged care providers who must compete in the labour market for staff may use the results and findings of this research to inform recruitment and retention strategies relating to brand recognition and loyalty and social capital strategies.

Providing an appropriate, skilled and well-led workforce will assist in providing the appropriate level of aged care service at a high standard of quality and safety that will benefit the community as a whole.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper reports on original research conducted following ethical clearance in part fulfilment of a successful conferral of a Doctor of Philosophy programme. After an extensive search of the literature, no research reports returned that examined LS and OID in the aged care service provision.

The purpose of this paper is to explore career identity within the aged care sector.

The research employs a descriptive interpretive methodology using 32 in-depth, semi-structured interviews.

This paper shows that social processes and occupational and professional status issues shape career identity in an aged care context. Individuals seek positive career identities through emphasising job fit in relation to their personal experience and values in order to counteract the impact of “taint”.

This study was based in one organisation. Future research could explore its findings in the context of multiple organisations, and include the concept of career identity in other low status, “tainted” occupations, such as childcare, in order to develop a more complete understanding of identity construction processes.

The findings suggest that aged care providers could employ a values-driven approach to recruitment, complementary to pay and career development, to enhance recruitment and retention of aged care employees. Universities and professional bodies could consider more active use of aged care student placements to highlight the opportunities that aged care offer to new graduates in allied health professions.

This paper extends our understanding of career identity in relation to “taint” and “dirty work” in the context of two occupational groups in the understudied sector of aged care.

The themes that emerged from the qualitative data of a mixed methods study that explored the effects of leadership style on the job satisfaction of aged care workers.

The study is a mixed methods study with the qualitative approach informing the interpretative phenomenological analysis from the transcripts of semi-structured interviews.

Three themes related to the effects of leadership style on job satisfaction of aged care employees emerged from the IPA. These themes were, The Context of Aged Care, Employee Engagement and Voice and Leader Behaviour. Job burnout and organisational disengagement were prevalent in participants of the qualitative study.

The research deployed quantitative measurements to determine the differences between aged care leaders and their followers and used these to explore participants’ lived experiences and how they made sense of their personal and social worlds at work. In the quantitative study, there may be an overstatement of the strength of the relationship between variables among those motivated to participate in the study. The qualitative study requires the researcher to be thorough in describing the research context, and it may be that those who wish to transfer the results of this study to a different one are responsible for making the judgement on the suitability of the transferability of findings.

Decreasing job disengagement and burnout will positively impact reducing attrition and turnover and, thus, the availability of the aged care workforce. It will inform leadership development programs and training in aged care and other health and social care sectors.

The workforce is a primary consideration for aged care in Australia and globally. Reducing burnout and disengagement will reduce workforce attrition, thus, improving the care for some of the most vulnerable in the population.

This report is from original research with ethical clearance from a university human research ethics committee contributing to the knowledge of leadership practice in aged care in Australia.

The purpose of this paper is to explore job satisfaction, and how the work-life interface might affect job satisfaction, among residential aged care staff. The statistical package PROCESS was used to analyse the impacts of workplace stressors (poor safety climate, poor relationships with colleagues and poor relationships with management) and potential mediating variables that measured aspects of the work-life interface, specifically work-family conflict (WFC) and work-life balance.

This survey research was carried out through distribution of a paper-based questionnaire to approximately 800 permanent, fixed term and casual employees working in residential aged care. All job roles, including both direct care and support staff, were represented in the sample.

WFC and work-life balance act serially to mediate the relationships between workplace stressors and job satisfaction.

Study participants were restricted to residential aged care facilities in the metropolitan Melbourne area, Australia, limiting generalisability of the findings.

The work-life interface is a legitimate concern for human resources managers. Implications include need for greater understanding of the contribution of work-life fit to job satisfaction. Interventions to improve job satisfaction should take into account how workplace stressors affect the work-life interface, as well as job-related outcomes. Enhanced work-life fit should improve job-related outcomes.

This paper explores the potential mediating roles of WFC and work-life balance on job satisfaction and demonstrates a pathway through which the work-life interface affects job satisfaction for workers in residential aged care.

This study aims to mediate the impact of workplace stress and job satisfaction on nurses’ perception of training. It sheds light on the links between job satisfaction, Certified Nursing Assistants’ perception of training and workplace stress in nursing homes.

A cross-sectional questionnaire was distributed in 12 different elderly home care centres in Northern Cyprus during September to October 2017. The sampling frame consists of 317 full-time Certified Nursing Assistants who completed measures of perception of training, job satisfaction and workplace stress. This paper used structural equation modelling to test a theoretical model and hypothesis.

The findings emphasize that Certified Nursing Assistants’ perception of training has a positive impact on their job satisfaction and negative impact on workplace stress while workplace stress mediates the relationship between their perception of training and job satisfaction. The results indicate that while the motivation for training and support for training have an effect on job satisfaction, access to training and benefits for training do not yield any significant impact on it and workplace stress plays a mediating role.

This study confirms that the CNAs’ perception of training and job stress affect the emergence of job satisfaction, and workplace stress mediated the relation between training and satisfaction posited by social exchange theory.

This study aims to explore how not-for-profit organisations (NFPs) adopt service innovation and improve their employee resilience capabilities as a response to environmental changes arising from marketisation of public services.

Using a multiple case-study research design, this study involved 32 interviews with frontline employees working in a not-for-profit care-providing organisation.

This study finds that the development of absorptive capacity can facilitate service innovation adoption in NFPs and improve employee resilience in times of transition.

This study offers theoretical insights on service innovation, absorptive capacity and employee resilience in NFPs. It makes practical recommendations that will enable NFPs to help frontline employees better adopt service innovation practices in business models endorsed by the private sector.

The broader challenges of youth employment and ageing population have collectively received global attention in the Sustainable Development Goals. Under the assumption that there are fertile opportunities to judiciously address the youth unemployment and labour shortages within the aged care sector, the purpose of this paper is to draw on the experiences of millennial aged care workers (MACWs) in Western Australia (WA).

The paper makes use of an exploratory research approach which involved three aged care facilities in WA. A total of 19 semi-structured interviews with MACWs (n=14), human resources managers of aged care facilities (n=3), government official (n=1), and a union representative (n=1) were carried out.

The results revealed that millennials prefer positive working relationships with managers, co-workers and residents, flexible work schedules and value the altruistic nature of the profession. In addition, unsupportive work environment and workplace pressure to satisfy the needs of elderly residents reduced millennials’ desire to remain in the industry.

These findings have the potential to inform human resources managers, aged care service providers and policy makers to formulate strategies to retain the millennials, especially the unemployed, considered vital to the vitality of the Australian aged care industry.

Following a recent government initiated change to a consumer-directed care model across the Australian community aged care sector, the purpose of this paper is to explore frontline home support workers’ perceptions of relational changes with clients in power and subordination within the triadic relationship between employer, employee and client.

Contextual interviews were held with managers (n=4), coordinators (n=10) and semi-structured face-to-face interviews with support workers (n=17) in three organizations. Interview transcripts were analyzed.

Some workers did not perceive a power change in their relationships with clients. Others perceived minimal change but were concerned about the incoming client generation (baby boomers) that were more aware of their rights. Others felt subordinated to the client, perceived a loss of control or that felt treated like an employee of the client. Consistent with the philosophy of consumer-directed care, senior staff encouraged clients to treat workers in this way.

Further research is recommended on worker and client perceptions of relationships within the context of a consumer or client focused model.

A clear and realistic understanding of the locus of power within a triadic relationship by all actors is important for positive workplace outcomes.

The increasing ageing population makes it essential that workers’ relationships with clients and with their organization are unambiguous.

This study makes a contribution to theories about change and power transfer in the implementation of consumer-directed care through the perceptions of support workers. Examination of power and subordination transfer through the perceptions of the actors of rather than through the prism of organizational policy deepens the understanding of frontline service work and relationships.