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A major trend in the changing nature of work is the increasing use of temporary workers. Although common among students, older employees have joined the ranks of temporary workers as they extend their work lives. Temporary workers tend to report lower affective commitment and consequently poorer work outcomes. However, different generations of workers may conceive temporary work differently from each other. The purpose of this paper is to explore how different generations of temporary workers, respond to human resource practices (HRP), which in turn influences their affective commitment and work performance.

The sample is comprised of 3,876 temporary agency workers (TAWs) from seven temporary employment agencies in Portugal. The authors undertook multiple group SEM analyses to test a moderated mediation model that accounts for TAWs’ affective commitment (toward the agency and the client company) across three generations (Baby Boomers, Generation X and Millennials) in the relationship between human resources practices and overall perceived performance.

After controlling for gender, age and tenure, the authors find generational differences in the perceptions of HRP and perceived performance. The results support the moderator effect of generations in the direct and indirect relationships – through both affective commitments – between TAWs’ perceived HRP and perceived performance.

The cross-sectional design limits the possibility to make causal inferences.

This study contributes to a better understanding of how different generations respond to temporary employment relationships. The findings suggest important differences in the way in which the same HRP system relates (directly and indirectly thorough affective commitment toward the client) with their perceived performance across different generations.

This paper focuses on the need to revise the conceptualisation and measurement of evaluative style in future Reliance on Accounting Performance Measures (RAPM) research. Based on a review of the existing literature, we identify a number of issues in the conceptualisation and measurement of evaluative style and conclude that none of the existing measures is ideal for use in future research. We see two general dimensions of evaluative style that need specific attention in future research. The first dimension addresses the evaluative focus of the superior (e.g. budgets, other quantitative targets, short or long‐term targets, etc.). The second dimension addresses the superior’s way of handling the evaluation process (e.g. rigid or flexible, fixing blame, using it as a learning opportunity, etc.). Building on these two dimensions, there i a need for studies that assess how specific performance measures are used in different way within a particular organisational context, enabling a distinction between the design and the use of control tools. These conclusions suggest a need for qualitative indepth field studies within single organisations rather than quantitative survey research across organisations in future research on evaluative style and its behavioural consequences.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of multinational corporations (MNCs) in local institutional change. To what extent do multinational organizations help or hinder change, in particular new industry creation?

The paper presents a qualitative case study examining the role of multinational temporary work agencies in the development of temporary agency market in Spain.

The authors find that while multinational firms were less constrained by the norms, values and logics of the home environment, they also encountered specific challenges in the implementation of new practices. First, high‐profile introduction of a novel practice requires checks and balances to manage unanticipated developments, such as undesirable activities by opportunistic actors that may derail the change process. Second, rapid growth is not conducive to concerted efforts at industry level, leaving the public identity of the institutional innovation extremely vulnerable. Third, high‐profile change is also vulnerable to redefinition of the practice through misinterpretation or misuse by inexperienced users.

The findings highlight the interaction between global and local actors in the development of a novel market and the main findings provide three concrete aspects of the change process that need to be carefully monitored in processes of MNC‐driven institutional change.

MNCs have been argued to be important agents of change in an organizational field as they are less bound by the norms, values and logics of any particular institutional environment. The authors' analysis shows how this disconnectedness of MNCs can also hinder the change effort in three important ways.

This study aims to “bridge” two streams of HRM research: organisation level research on HRM and performance and individual level research on employee work perceptions and behavioural performance. This study seeks to analyse the value of organisation level HRM practices for individual level employees' assessment of the degree of violation of their psychological contracts. It also aims to examine the contribution of commitment HRM practices and traditional HRM practices in explaining perceptions of psychological contract violation.

Based on a sample of 49 organisations with 2,099 individual respondents, the paper analyses the relationship between organisation level HRM practices and individual level employees' assessment of the degree of violation of their psychological contracts, using multi‐level analysis.

The findings show a clear positive influence of a number of HRM practices. More use of HRM practices leads to lower levels of perceived psychological contract violation for individual employees, regardless of individual characteristics. Commitment HRM practices explain about half of the variance in psychological contract violation that is due to the total amount of HRM practices.

A limitation of the study is its cross‐sectional design and the measure of HRM practices, indicating more or less explicit attention for HRM in an organization, but not possible substitutable and synergetic effects between various HRM practices. Further research should therefore explore the effect of combinations of HRM practices. Findings however do indicate the relevance of organization level HRM for individual level perceptions of the employment relationship.

It is in the interest of managers to have a clear knowledge of which organisational activities will elicit those attitudes and behaviours necessary to achieve organisational goals. These findings highlight the importance of HRM practices to contribute to employees' realistic assessment of the mutual demands of their employment relationship with their organization. The more HRM practices the better in terms of employees' psychological contract violation. Furthermore, the findings show the importance of commitment HRM practices, but also the remaining relevance of more traditional practices.

This study combines insights on organisation level HRM with insights on individual level psychological contracts. Although the necessity of using multi‐level analysis in these kinds of studies has been argued by various researchers, this study is one of the first to use this analytical technique, thus genuinely showing the impact of organizational level HRM practices on individual level HR outcomes (in this case the psychological contract).

The following list is a first attempt to catalogue and describe systematically the British Museum's extensive holdings of early opera librettos and related plays. The great importance of these unpretentious booklets as supplementary and, more often than not, even primary sources for the history and bibliography of dramatic music, besides or instead of the scores, was already clearly recognized in the eighteenth century by Dr. Burney and other scholars. But it is only since 1914, the year in which O. G. T. Sonneck's Library of Congress Catalogue of opera librettos printed before 1800 appeared, that their documentary value could to any greater extent be put to general use in international musicological research. A similar bibliography of the British Museum librettos, while naturally duplicating many Washington entries, would produce a great number of additional tides, not a few of them otherwise unrecorded; it would provide the musical scholar with the key to a collection unequalled elsewhere in Europe, which owing to the peculiar nature of the material is not easily accessible by means of the General Catalogue.