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The first article on the subject, which appeared in the August issue of Industrial and Commercial Training, described the development of a training course in BEA for Passenger Services Staff. The aim of this training is to improve personal service. Its most important element is role‐playing of typical interactions between staff and passengers; these are recorded on video‐tape and replayed for viewing and discussion. A good deal of reading, thinking and research was done before and during the training development. Visits were made to the training centres of several airlines, in Britain and the USA; research workers in both countries were also consulted. Five relevant views of the subject will be examined. These are: • the concept of social skill — Michael Argyle • the analysis of verbal behaviours — Neil Rackham • T‐group training — particularly the research by Cary Cooper and Henry Odie for the Hotel and Catering ITB • transactional analysis — work in Pan American Airways and American Airlines • applied learning in management training — by Mel Sorcher and Arnold Goldstein of Syracuse, USA A reading list giving references to these ideas and authors is given at the end of the article. The intention here is briefly to describe these views, evaluate their relevance to Customer Service Training generally, and show how they have influenced the philosophy and the design of the BEA training. Naturally, more weight will be given to one view than to another in the analysis that follows, but it should be emphasised that there is no intention to choose nor to reject any particular theory or training development. The different approaches are often complementary, each provides insight into the problems of human interaction.

Drawing on work from home (WFH), job demand-control and street-level bureaucracy literature streams, this paper specifically focuses on the emerging trend of WFH for public sector employees in a developing country context of Egypt.

The empirical sample comprises focus group discussions with a total of 40 public sector employees in Egypt. Thematic analysis was subsequently used on focus group discussion transcripts to bring out main themes linked to this topic.

Our findings show that employee (marginal discretion power, pharaonism, corruption), citizen (unfamiliarity with digital services) and country (lack of proper info-structure, overstaffing in the public sector)- level challenges hinder and/or slow down the potential for WFH in Egyptian public sector.

A major implication of our paper relates to highlighting the criticality of e-governance and WFH for public sector employees, as well as highlighting multilevel challenges associated with those. At the same time, socio-economic and political consequences of offering such options need to be considered in a country like Egypt where most public organisations are overstaffed, and those employees lack modern day employability skills. Hence, there needs to be an open debate in countries such as Egypt on the consequences of e-governance and WFH and whether it may facilitate delivering citizen services digitally. Also, high power distance culture plays a role in this context, and any change cannot be successful unless that specific aspect is confronted.

This study contributes to the emerging WFH literature by being one of the pioneering studies to offer a multilevel (micro, meso and macro) assessment of this phenomenon in the under-researched fragile developing country’s context.

Cary Cooper, CBE, is Professor of Organizational Psychology and Health at Lancaster University and Director of Robertson Cooper Limited. Formerly he was the BUPA Professor of Organizational Psychology at UMIST. He is a Chartered Occupational Psychologist and a Fellow of the British Psychological Society. He is widely acknowledged as a world leading authority on workplace stress. He is the author of an extensive and diverse range of over 300 publications. Here he answers questions about his work.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an interview with Cary L. Cooper, Distinguished Professor of Organizational Psychology and Health at Lancaster University

Interview.

In this wide‐ranging interview, Professor Cooper discusses numerous prevalent workplace issues, including productivity, wellbeing, job insecurity and presenteeism.

The interview offers insight for HR professionals from one of the foremost thinkers in organizational psychology and behavior.

This article has been withdrawn as it was published elsewhere and accidentally duplicated. The original article can be seen here: 10.1108/02683949510081356. When citing the article, please cite: Kathryn M. Young, Cary L. Cooper, (1995) “Occupational stress in the ambulance service: a diagnostic study”, Journal of Managerial Psychology, Vol. 10 Iss: 3, pp. 29 - 36.

This article has been withdrawn as it was published elsewhere and accidentally duplicated. The original article can be seen here: 10.1108/02683949510081356. When citing the article, please cite: Kathryn M. Young, Cary L. Cooper, (1995) “Occupational stress in the ambulance service: a diagnostic study”, Journal of Managerial Psychology, Vol. 10 Iss: 3, pp. 29 - 36.