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This study examines the management rostering systems that inform the ways medical scientists are allocated their work in the public healthcare sector in Australia. Promoting the contributions of medical scientists should be a priority given the important roles they are performing in relation to COVID-19 and the demand for medical testing doubling their workloads (COVID-19 National Incident Room Surveillance Team, 2020). This study examines the impact of work on medical scientists and rostering in a context of uncertain work conditions, budget restraints and technological change that ultimately affect the quality of patient care. This study utilises the Job-Demands-Resources theoretical framework (JD-R) to examine the various job demands on medical scientists and the resources available to them.

Using a qualitative methodological approach, this study conducted 23 semi-structured interviews with managers and trade union officials and 9 focus groups with 53 medical scientists, making a total 76 participants from four large public hospitals.

Due to increasing demands for pathology services, this study demonstrates that a lack of job resources, staff shortages, poor rostering practices such as increased workloads that lead to absenteeism, often illegible handwritten changes to rosters and ineffectual management lead to detrimental consequences for medical scientists’ job stress and well-being. Moreover, medical science work is hidden and not fully understood and often not respected by other clinicians, hospital management or the public. These factors have contributed to medical scientists’ lack of control over their work and causes job stress and burnout. Despite this, medical scientists use their personal resources to buffer the effects of excessive workloads and deliver high quality of patient care.

Findings suggest that developing mechanisms to promote sustainable employment practices for medical scientists are critical for the escalating demands in pathology.

Against the backdrop of the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Finance Services Industry in Australia, this study on ethical leadership is timely. The purpose of this paper is to examine the mediating effects of organisational identification, customer orientated behaviour, service climate and ethical climate on the relationship between ethical leadership and employee in-role performance.

The hypotheses were tested using a two-wave survey study of 233 bank employees in Australia.

Evidence from the study indicated that organisational identification, service climate and ethical climate mediate the relationship between ethical leadership and employee in-role performance. Surprisingly, the proposed mediation effect of customer orientation was not supported. However, ethical leadership was positively associated with customer orientated behaviour among employees.

Limitations of the study include collecting data at two time points, thereby rendering the study cross-sectional. Employee in-role performance was a self-rated measure.

This study showed that ethical leadership is critical to improving employee perceptions and experience of an organisation’s service climate, ethical climate, organisational identification, customer orientated behaviour and employee in-role performance. The authors raise a number of HRM implications for the development and enablement of ethical leaders in the banking context.

The findings presented in this paper highlight that ethical leadership is critical to improving employee perceptions and experience of an organisation’s service climate, ethical climate, organisational identification, customer orientated behaviour and employee in-role performance.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the moderating effect of organizational politics on the relationships between work engagement, in-role performance and organization citizenship behavior – organization (OCBO).

Theoretical hypotheses were tested using a sample of 107 supervisor-subordinate dyads in China. Outcome variables, such as in-role performance and OCBO, were rated by supervisors.

Contrary to the established literature on positive work engagement-work outcomes relationships, the findings supported the prediction that work engagement was negatively related to supervisor-rated in-role performance and OCBO when the organizational is perceived as highly political.

The sample size for this study is relatively small. In addition, the authors measured organizational politics from employees’ perspectives, which might not reflect reality objectively. Furthermore, the data were collected at a single time point, so causal relationships could not be validated.

When employees perceive the work environment as political, organizations need to be aware of non-work factors that may influence supervisors’ evaluation of employee performance to ensure they do not demotivate and discourage highly engaged employees.

Considerable research has shown that work engagement is positively related to in-role performance and OCBO. The present study, however, challenges and extends previous research by suggesting that work engagement can lead to low supervisor evaluation of in-role performance and OCBO when the organization is perceived to be political.

In this paper, the authors argue that multicultural skills and relational leadership act as enablers for open innovation, and thereby examine the process through which teams can utilize multicultural skills to support the development of relational leadership and knowledge sourcing and sharing (KSS) through individual interaction and relationship building. The authors address the following research question: How does relational leadership enable open innovation (OI) among employees with multicultural skills?

This paper applies a multi-level approach (team and individual level) and builds on interviews with 20 employees, middle and senior managers with multicultural experiences, working in open innovation environments.

The authors’ findings shed light on the process through which social exchange relationships among team members (e.g. R&D teams) and knowledge exchange partners are enhanced by the use of multicultural skills and support the development of relational leadership to facilitate KSS and ultimately OI. The decision for participants to collaborate and source and share knowledge is motivated by individual reward (such as establishing network or long-lasting contacts), skill acquisition (such as learning or personal growth in decision-making) and a sense of reciprocity and drive for group gain. The authors encourage greater human resource (HR) manager support for relational leadership and the development and use of multicultural skills to promote KSS.

Despite the value of our findings, this paper is not without limitations. The authors explained that the focus of this study design was on the work activities of the participants and their skill development and not specific projects or organizations. It was outside the scope of this study to examine variations across organizations and individuals as the authors wanted to focus on multicultural skills and relational leadership as enablers for OI. The authors recommend that future studies extend our research by unpacking how various boundary conditions including relational leadership and multicultural skills impact KSS and OI over the life cycle of innovation teams within large multinational organizations, across countries and ethnicities.

The study’s findings provide managers with improved understandings of how to enable an individual's willingness and readiness to source and share knowledge through multicultural skills and relational leadership. Managers need to ensure that human resource management (HRM) practices celebrate multicultural skills and support relational leadership in innovation teams. The authors suggest managers engaged in OI consider the components of social exchange as described by Meeker (1971) and utilize reciprocity, group gain, rationality and status consistency to support the emergence relational leadership and KSS in innovation teams.

In this paper, the authors contribute to the dearth of literature on the boundary conditions for OI by examining the role of relational leadership and characteristics/skills of the workforce, namely multicultural skills and contribute to the scarce research on the role of employees with multicultural skills and their impact on OI and present multicultural skills/experiences and relational leadership as enablers for OI.

Does client embeddedness lead to improved employee quality of life, such as job satisfaction, affective commitment and employee engagement? If so, is this relationship affected by gender, age, tenure and psychological contract breach (PCB)? The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Regression and ANOVA analysis of a two-wave sample (n=121) of employees working for an aged care provider.

Client embeddedness at Time 1 predicts employee quality of life at Time 2. However, in this sample, this relationship is unaffected by gender, age and length of service. High levels of PCB weakens the relationship between client embeddedness and job satisfaction.

The employee-client relationship directly improves quality of working life. However, it is unclear whether this finding is unique to this organisation, or whether client embeddedness can be cultivated over time or is a characteristic of an employee.

Organisations can substantially benefit from encouraging appropriate client-employee relationships. By adopting HR practices aimed at acquiring and cultivating client embeddedness through recruitment, performance management and training practices, organisations may increase employee quality of working life, and reduce employee turnover.

This paper substantially increases the understanding of client embeddedness by clarifying the direct effects of the client-employee relationship, and by identifying boundary conditions on the effect of client embeddedness. It also points to a distinct approach to recruiting and developing employees in client-facing industries.