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Research on perceptions of organizational politics has mostly explored the negative aspects and detrimental outcomes for organizations and employees. Responding to recent calls in the literature for a more balanced treatment, we expand on how positive and negative organizational politics perceptions are perceived as stressors and affect employee outcomes through their influence on the social environment. We propose that employees appraise positive and negative organization politics perceptions as either challenge or hindrance stressors, to which they respond with engagement and disengagement as problem-focused and emotion-focused coping strategies. Specifically, employees who appraise the negative politics perceptions as a hindrance, use both problem- and emotion-focused coping, which entails one of three strategies: (1) decreasing their engagement, (2) narrowing the focus of their engagement, or (3) disengaging. Although these strategies result in negative outcomes for the organization, employees’ coping leads to their positive well-being. In contrast, employees appraising positive politics perceptions as a challenge stressor use problem-focused coping, which involves increasing their engagement to reap the perceived benefits of a positive political environment. Yet, positive politics perceptions may also be appraised as a hindrance stressor in certain situations, and, therefore lead employees to apply emotion-focused coping wherein they use a disengagement strategy. By disengaging, they deal with the negative effects of politics perceptions, resulting in positive well-being. Thus, our framework suggests an unexpected twist to the stress process of politics perceptions as a strain-provoking component of employee work environments.

We explore what health-capital theory has to offer in terms of informing and directing research into health inequality. We argue that economic theory can help in identifying mechanisms through which specific socioeconomic indicators and health interact. Our reading of the literature, and our own work, leads us to conclude that non-degenerate versions of the Grossman (1972a, 1972b) model and its extensions can explain many salient stylized facts on health inequalities. Yet, further development is required in at least two directions. First, a childhood phase needs to be incorporated, in recognition of the importance of childhood endowments and investments in the determination of later-life socioeconomic and health outcomes. Second, a unified theory of joint investment in skill (or human) capital and in health capital could provide a basis for a theory of the relationship between education and health.

The association between education and health is one of the most robust empiric findings over the past several decades. At each higher level of education, prevalence of most types of chronic disease decreases. However, understanding of the mechanisms through which education is related to chronic disease is limited. Specifically, the literature provides little evidence of the explanatory factors in the pathways linking education and health. Better scientific understanding of the pathways through which education influences health may help to explain the well-documented association between socioeconomic position (SEP) and health and could lead to improved intervention strategies for health disparities. We review the potential pathways through which education may influence health and the evidence that explicitly tests these hypothesized pathways and provide direction for future research in this field.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight important issues in the study of dysfunctional customer behavior and to provide a research agenda to inspire, guide, and enthuse. Through a critical evaluation of existing research, the aim is to highlight key issues and to present potentially worthy avenues for future study.

In reviewing recent and past advances in the study of customers behaving badly, an overview of existing research into customers behaving badly and addressing issues of terminology and definition is provided. Thereafter, three perspectives that provide the most opportunity and insight in studying the darker side of service dynamics are outlined. This leads to a review of some of the research design and methodological problems and issues that are faced when rigorously studying these issues. Subsequently, the paper devotes a section to the provocative idea that while dysfunctional customer behavior has many negative influences on customers, employees, and service firms, there are actually some positive functions of customers behaving badly.

A research agenda is provided that is believed to identify and discuss a range of projects that comprises not only insightful theoretical contributions but is also practically relevant.

The paper identifies a range of issues about which managers should be aware and proactively manage.

Much has been written about how methods of working and communicating can improve the productivity of innovation for industry. Less has been related to this from the overall development of science and policies that assist this. The changing organisational context of industrial research brings the need for scientific publishers to reinvent themselves for this market segment. Scientific communication, including one of its key functions, awareness, is examined and it is concluded that functions and processes in scientific communication may be organised more efficiently to increase the productivity of industrial research. The new context of virtual communities, exploiting the opportunities for interactivity, provides the organisational basis for introducing new methods for inculcating new approaches to knowledge management, for innovation in industry to occur more effectively. An approach to better understanding knowledge synthesis and the potential role of the publisher, as communications facilitator, is discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effects of leadership on work-family spillovers. Specifically, we analyze the relationships between leadership (leader-member exchange (LMX) with one negative work-family spillover effect (work-family interference) and one positive work-family spillover effect (work-family facilitation). The authors hypothesize that LMX influences work-family spillover via different mediators, rather than one all-encompassing mediator, such as empowerment.

The authors hypothesize that a good relationship with your supervisor (high LMX) diminishes work pressure, which in turn reduces work-family interference. Furthermore, the authors expect that a good relationship with your supervisor positively relates to the meaningfulness of work, as you could get more interesting work and more understanding of your role within the organization. In turn, this will increase work-family facilitation. These hypotheses are tested using a nation-wide survey among Dutch healthcare professionals.

Findings of structural equation modeling (SEM) indeed indicate that high-quality LMX is negatively related to work-family interference, and that this is mediated by work pressure (53 percent explained variance). Furthermore, the authors found that a good relationship with your supervisor is positively related to meaningfulness of work, which in turn positively correlates to work-family facilitation (16 percent explained variance).

The added value of the paper lies in introducing two mediators – work pressure and meaningful work – which worked adequately both theoretically and empirically, instead of the sometimes problematic mediators empowerment and stress; a focus on healthcare professionals; and using sophisticated techniques to test the model (SEM with bootstrapping).