Search results

Healthcare delivery faces increasing pressure to move from a provider-centered approach to become more consumer-driven and patient-centered. However, many of the actions taken by clinicians, patients and organizations fail to achieve that aim. This paper aims to take a paradox-based perspective to explore five specific tensions that emerge from this shift and provides implications for patient experience research and practice.

This paper uses a conceptual approach that synthesizes literature in health services and administration, organizational behavior, services marketing and management and service operations to illuminate five patient experience tensions and explore mitigation strategies.

The paper makes three key contributions. First, it identifies five tensions that result from the shift to more patient-centered care: patient focus vs employee focus, provider incentives vs provider motivations, care customization vs standardization, patient workload vs organizational workload and service recovery vs organizational risk. Second, it highlights multiple theories that provide insight into the existence of the tensions and how they may be navigated. Third, specific organizational practices that engage the tensions and associated examples of leading organizations are identified. Relevant measures for research and practice are also suggested.

The authors develop a novel analysis of five persistent tensions facing healthcare organizations as a result of a shift to a more consumer-driven, patient-centered approach to care. The authors detail each tension, discuss an existing theory from organizational behavior or services marketing that helps make sense of the tension, suggest potential solutions for managing or resolving the tension and provide representative case illustrations and useful measures.

Inter-firm collaborative innovation typically requires knowledge sharing among individuals employed by collaborating firms. However, it is also associated with considerable risks, especially if the knowledge sharing process is not handled using proper judgment. Such risks have been acknowledged in the literature, but the underlying empirical evidence remains unclear. This study aims to examine how sharing of business-critical knowledge with external collaboration partners affects firm’s innovation performance.

The authors develop a mediating model and hypotheses predicting that the uncontrolled sharing of knowledge leads to accidental knowledge leakage, which, in turn, hinders particularly firm’s radical innovation performance. The authors test the model by using a survey of 150 technology-intensive firms in Finland and a partial least squares structural equation model. The mediating model is tested with incremental and radical innovation performance, and the authors control for firm size, age, R&D intensity and industry.

The authors find strong support for the model in that uncontrolled external knowledge sharing leads to accidental knowledge leaking and to lower radical innovation performance. The same results are not found for incremental innovation, implying that uncontrolled knowledge leakage is especially detrimental to radical innovation.

These findings help in better understanding some of the downsides of too much openness and lack of judgment about knowledge sharing beyond the boundaries of the firm. Thus, firms pursuing radical innovation should carefully guide their employees with regard to what knowledge they share, to what extent they share it and with whom they share it.

The threatened status of social studies instruction in elementary schools demands strong methods instruction to preserve the subject. This threatened status and other factors create issues specific to elementary social studies methods instruction. Moreover, university-level methods instruction can be idiosyncratic due to the various educational and professional backgrounds of the instructors. This study examined individuals serving in the “dual roles” of inservice teacher and elementary social studies methods instructor. While teaching the methods, participants encountered issues related to methods students, the filling of dual roles, and the status of elementary social studies and field placements. In addition, filling these dual roles facilitated their methods instruction through their ability to relate/react to methods students’ experiences and concerns.

This paper considers the question: what would happen if healthcare providers, like their counterparts in the hospitality industry, adopted the principles of customer experience management (CEM) in order to facilitate a more holistic and personalized patient experience? It proposes an alternative vision of the patient experience by adding to an emerging hospitality–healthcare literature base, this time focusing upon CEM. A hospitality-oriented patient experience (HOPE) framework is introduced, designed to enhance the patient experience across all the touchpoints of the healthcare journey.

This is a conceptual paper that draws upon three distinct literatures: hospitality literature; healthcare literature; and CEM literature. It utilizes this literature to develop a framework, the HOPE framework, designed to offer an alternative lens to understanding the patient experience. The paper utilizes descriptions of three unique patient experiences, one linked to chronic pain, a second to gastro issues and a third to orthopedic issues, to illustrate how adopting the principles of hospitality management, within a healthcare context, could promote an enhanced patient experience.

The main theoretical contribution is the development of the HOPE framework that brings together research on CEM with research on cocreative customer practices in health care. By selecting and connecting key ingredients of two separate research streams, this vision and paradigm provide an alternative lens into ways of addressing the key challenges in the implementation of person-centered care in healthcare services. The HOPE framework offers an actionable roadmap for healthcare organizations to realize greater understanding and to operationalize new ways of improving the patient experience.

This paper applies the principles of hospitality and CEM to the domain of health care. In so doing it adds value to a hospitality literature primarily focused upon extensive employee–customer relationships. To a healthcare literature seeking to more fully understand a person-centered care model typically delivered by a care team consisting of professionals and family/friends. And to a CEM literature in hospitality, which seeks to facilitate favorable employee–customer interactions. Connecting these separate literature streams enables an original conceptual framework, a HOPE framework, to be introduced.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the prevalence of somatisation as a determinant of burnout amongst drug and alcohol staff in the UK.

The study employed a cross-sectional design utilising a self-completion online questionnaire. Data were collected from substance misuse workers across England and Wales. In total, 165 responses were eligible for analysis, yielding a response rate of 5 per cent. Burnout and somatization were measured with Maslach’s Burnout Inventory and the Physical Symptoms Inventory.

The prevalence of somatic symptoms was relatively low in the sample studied. The reported levels of burnout were moderate. Personal accomplishment remained high in the sample. There was a strong association between burnout and incidence of stress-related somatic symptoms, with higher levels of burnout correlating with multiple symptoms.

It was not possible to determine the extent of non-response bias, as at the time of the study there was no information available relating to the characteristics of drug and alcohol staff in the selected services. Therefore, as the response rate was very low (5 per cent) it was recognised that non-response bias might have affected the findings, in such way that non-respondents may have differed in their experiences of work stress, satisfaction, burnout and health outcomes.

Despite the limitations, the study provided practical information relating to burnout vulnerability and associated physical symptoms in this specific occupational group. These findings can support employers to address staff wellbeing with a view to prevent burnout and reduce existing levels of burnout and related somatic symptoms, and improve job performance, job satisfaction and staff retention through making appropriate adjustments, such as developing staff-wellbeing programmes. These adjustments could potentially contribute to improvement in substance misuse practice, through maintenance of healthy and satisfied workforce.

There are very few studies looking at burnout in drug and alcohol staff. This study is also novel in a way that it reveals correlations between a variety of specific stress-related physical symptoms and the three components of burnout.

This chapter explains how SYRIZA managed to build international support up to the January 2015 election with very limited resources, and against mainstream coverage, by relying essentially on grassroots movements and social media. It also shows how, approaching to power, SYRIZA's political, but also communication strategy, became more institutionalised and relied less on grassroots campaigning. Methodologically, our research is based on the following research techniques: First, interviews with activists and members of the party as well as observations inside its social media team. Second, the study of online content and data from 2006 to 2015. Overall, this chapter shows that SYRIZA's campaign on the Internet relied mainly on alternative media activists who acquired a specific savoir faire and developed international networks during the intense antiausterity social movement that took place in Greece between 2010 and 2013. The campaign was also supported by young experts from the private sector that contributed on a voluntary basis. Nevertheless, its success was mainly due to the European political context and the opportunities it offered to the radical Left, rather than the communication strategy, which in any case suffered from a lack of means and from a somewhat chaotic (non) organisation.

For at least three decades, inter-organizational collaboration (IOC) has attracted scholarly attention and many studies have unveiled its inner dynamics. More recently, new phenomena have appeared in the changing landscape of IOC, affecting the way in which organizations are open to interact with, and rely upon, other actors that may be standalone entities as well as representatives of other organizations. These actors operate “betwixt and between” the organizational core and its external environment(s), populating a liminal space located at the organization’s boundary in which activities take place according to non-proprietary and non-employment logics. The authors focus on the forms of collaboration, which blur the lines between organizations, calling into question the fundamental label of crowd-focused IOCs. The authors consider two forms: crowd-open and crowd-based organizations. The authors show the organizational design impact of openness spans from the mere scalability associated with organizational growth to the phenomena of reshaping formalization and standardization of roles and processes, and self-organizing over time.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the impact of organizational culture on the conflict handling style in non-profit organizations. Conflicts in non-profit organizations and especially in associations are more numerous, mainly because of the search for compromise in the decision-making phases and the high level of loyalty in mission that strongly stimulates the voice of one’s opinion. The authors observe that a modification of the organizational culture, through symbolic changes, can resolve the conflicts sequence.

Culture is measured through the organizational culture profile tool and the culture deciphering technique. The authors detail two cases of non-profit organizations, in which conflicts sequence resolution was handled through organizational culture change while conflicts resolution at the individual level could not bring an end to the conflicts sequence.

These cases highlight how organizational culture shapes behaviors and conflicts handling styles. These cases also give insights on how an organizational culture can be changed to setup new default conflict handling styles in an organization. The cultural change management only worked when it was planned on critical cultural change readiness factors with a strong enforcement of the change by the governing bodies.

This study complements research studies on how organizational culture shapes attitudes and behaviors and shows how and under which conditions a cultural change could resolve a conflict sequence. This study also presents a conflict resolution method when the roots of conflicts are embedded in the existing organizational culture. In such conflicts situation, interpersonal conflict resolution technique did not solve the conflicts sequence and only cultural change finally brought an end to the sequence.

A combined search on two levels, the individual level and the organizational culture level, will thus show convergent conflict sources and get a great deal of knowledge before solving individual-level conflicts.

The non-profit sector is sometimes subject to high-conflict situation and this research contributes to more efficient conflict resolution protocols with an applicable method of conflict analysis, change management and conflict resolution.

The work showed how the organizational culture is a key element in the explanation of conflict sources and conflict handling in case of high and repeated conflict situation. It is thus possible to resolve conflict sequence by changing a carefully chosen cultural trait. Nevertheless, the culture change management program is complex and risky. In a high-conflict situation, the authors identified several key conflict resolution factors: the careful identification of the organizational culture traits explaining conflict handling style; the alignment of the management team on the cultural change plan to raise up the intensity of the new set of behaviors; and the selection of the most efficient symbolic change decision.