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1 – 10 of 16Rikke Amalie Agergaard Jensen, Charlotte Jonasson, Martin Gartmeier and Jaana Parviainen
The purpose of this study is to investigate how professionals learn from varying experiences with errors in health-care digitalization and develop and use negative knowledge and…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to investigate how professionals learn from varying experiences with errors in health-care digitalization and develop and use negative knowledge and digital ignorance in efforts to improve digitalized health care.
Design/methodology/approach
A two-year qualitative field study was conducted in the context of a public health-care organization working with digital patient communication. The data consisted of participant observation, semistructured interviews and document data. Inductive coding and a theoretically informed generation of themes were applied.
Findings
The findings show that both health-care and digital communication professionals learn through experiences with digital “rule-” and “knowledge-based” errors in patient communication and develop negative knowledge and awareness of digital ignorance. In their joint efforts, they use negative knowledge to “bend the rules” and to explore digital ignorance in efforts to improve patient communication.
Originality/value
This study provides insight into the importance of collaboration between professionals with varying experience of errors in digitalizing patient communication. Such collaboration is required to acknowledge own shortcomings and create complementary negative knowledge to improve digital patient communication. This is particularly important when working with innovative digitalization in health care.
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Charlotte Jonasson, Jakob Lauring, Jan Selmer and Jodie-Lee Trembath
While there is a growing interest in expatriate academics, their specific role as teachers with daily contact to local students seems to have been largely ignored when examining…
Abstract
Purpose
While there is a growing interest in expatriate academics, their specific role as teachers with daily contact to local students seems to have been largely ignored when examining their adjustment and work outcomes. Based on the job demands-resources model the authors predict that good teacher-student relations, as a supportive job resource, will have a positive effect on expatriate academics’ job satisfaction. This effect, however, will be even stronger for individuals experiencing high job demands and challenges in terms of intercultural job adjustment. In other words, expatriate academics that have difficulties adjusting will benefit more from the social support that can originate from good relations to their students. The paper aims to discuss these issues.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors surveyed expatriate academics adjusting to a university position in China by use of 124 responses from foreign university employees.
Findings
The authors found that teacher-student relations had a positive association with job satisfaction and that positive teacher-student relations increased job satisfaction more for individuals being slow to adjust.
Originality/value
This is one of the few papers to explore the impact that students can have on expatriate academics and treat this relationship as a potential resource for universities to capitalize upon in socializing their new foreign academic staff members.
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Charlotte Jonasson, Anne Mette Kjeldsen and Maria Shubhra Ovesen
Mergers have become an influential part of public hospital development, and the successful implementation of such mergers requires skillful management. Recent studies have pointed…
Abstract
Purpose
Mergers have become an influential part of public hospital development, and the successful implementation of such mergers requires skillful management. Recent studies have pointed to the impact of the distribution of leadership tasks amongst employees for implementing planned radical changes, yet this lacks examination with regard to hospital mergers. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the emergence of distributed leadership and this leadership’s influence on the implementation of a hospital merger.
Design/methodology/approach
The emergence of distributed leadership is examined through a qualitative case study of two Danish hospital units in the context of a large hospital merger. The data consist of 21 interviews and documents collected over a three-year period.
Findings
The findings suggest dynamics of widened and restricted distributed leadership being influenced by and influencing the merger at hospital and local-unit levels, respectively. Importantly, the perceived purpose of widened and restricted distributed leadership mediated the actual effects of widened and restricted distributed leadership on the implementation of a merger. Moreover, the findings show that mergers on both the hospital and local level lead to variations in top-down and bottom-up distributed leadership across pre-merger organizational boundaries.
Practical implications
Perceived purposeful widening and restriction of distributed leadership at various hospital levels enables merger integration and collaboration across organizational boundaries and hierarchies.
Originality/value
The paper addresses the need to understand the complex dynamics of widened and restricted leadership distribution in a merger context.
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Charlotte Jonasson, Jakob Lauring and David S.A. Guttormsen
A growing number of academics relocate abroad to work as expatriates in the university sector. While this employee group seems to have a highly constructive influence on the…
Abstract
Purpose
A growing number of academics relocate abroad to work as expatriates in the university sector. While this employee group seems to have a highly constructive influence on the performance of university organizations, some problems in relation to effective inclusion of these individuals have been noted. In order to further advance the theoretical understanding regarding integration efforts in international university organizations, the purpose of this paper is to explore how two types of inclusive management, empowering management (identity-blind) vs English management communication (identity-conscious), affect local and expatriate academics.
Design/methodology/approach
Using responses generated from a survey of 792 local and 620 expatriate academics, this paper assesses the effects of inclusive management on job engagement and stress among the two groups.
Findings
The results show that one type of inclusive management, empowering management (identity-blind), has a favorable influence on job engagement and stress in both subsamples. The other type, English management communication (identity-conscious), increases stress for local academics but has no effect on the expatriates. These findings are useful for theory development in relation to employee inclusion in international organizations.
Originality/value
The authors have little knowledge about how inclusive management functions in international organizations. Testing the effect of identity-blind and identity-conscious inclusive management practices among two different groups of local and expatriate academics provides new insight to this area. In particular, the use of English management communication provides new knowledge on the integration of majority and minority groups in international organizations.
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Yvonne McNulty, Jakob Lauring, Charlotte Jonasson and Jan Selmer
The purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptual framework of severe expatriate crises focusing on the occurrence of “fit-dependent” crisis events, which is when the crisis is…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptual framework of severe expatriate crises focusing on the occurrence of “fit-dependent” crisis events, which is when the crisis is “man made” and triggered by expatriates’ maladjustment or acculturation stress in the host country. The authors focus on the causes, prevention and management of fit-dependent expatriate crises.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors develop a conceptual framework of fit-dependent expatriate crises that involves different levels of analysis.
Findings
The conceptual framework shows that crises can be triggered at micro, meso and macro levels ranging from the personal and family domains (micro), to the network and organisational domains (meso) as well as the host country domain (macro). The authors conceptualise these “domains of causes” as triggering maladjustment and acculturation stress that ultimately leads to a severe crisis event with correspondingly serious and potentially life-changing consequences. Furthermore, using a process perspective, the authors outline strategies for preventing and managing crises before, during and after the crisis occurs, discussing the support roles of various internal (organisational) and external (specialist) stakeholders.
Originality/value
Studying the link between expatriation and crises is a highly relevant research endeavour because severe crisis events will impact on HRM policies, processes and procedures for dealing with employees living abroad, and will create additional challenges for HRM beyond what could normally be expected. Using attribution theory to explain why organisational support and intervention to assist expatriates during a crisis is not always forthcoming, and theories of social networks to elucidate the “first responder” roles of various support actors, the authors contribute to the expatriate literature by opening up the field to a better understanding of the dark side of expatriation that includes crisis definition, prevention, management and solutions.
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Jan Selmer, Jakob Lauring, Ling Eleanor Zhang and Charlotte Jonasson
In this chapter, we focus on expatriate CEOs who are assigned by the parent company to work in a subsidiary and compare them to those who themselves have initiated to work abroad…
Abstract
Purpose
In this chapter, we focus on expatriate CEOs who are assigned by the parent company to work in a subsidiary and compare them to those who themselves have initiated to work abroad as CEOs. Since we do not know much about these individuals, we direct our attention to: (1) who they are (demographics), (2) what they are like (personality), and (3) how they perform (job performance).
Methodology/approach
Data was sought from 93 assigned expatriate CEOs and 94 self-initiated expatriate CEOs in China.
Findings
Our findings demonstrate that in terms of demography, self-initiated CEOs were more experienced than assigned CEOs. With regard to personality, we found difference in self-control and dispositional anger: Assigned expatriate CEOs had more self-control and less angry temperament than their self-initiated counterparts. Finally, we found assigned expatriate CEOs to rate their job performance higher than self-initiated CEOs.
Originality/value
Although there may not always be immediate benefits, career consideration often plays a role when individuals choose whether to become an expatriate. For many years, organizations have used expatriation to develop talented managers for high-level positions in the home country. Recently, however, a new trend has emerged. Talented top managers are no longer expatriated only from within parent companies to subsidiaries. Self-initiated expatriates with no prior affiliation in the parent company are increasingly used to fill top management positions in subsidiaries.
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Charlotte Jonasson and Jakob Lauring
Intercultural communication problems are most often argued to be caused by differences in cultural values. This exploratory paper aims to argue that attention should not only be…
Abstract
Purpose
Intercultural communication problems are most often argued to be caused by differences in cultural values. This exploratory paper aims to argue that attention should not only be directed at national differences. Alternatively, it aims to argue that more interest should be paid to the actual use of those differences in communication.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper is an ethnographic field study including 12 interviews and observations. It uses a short case on interaction between expatriates and local managers in a Chinese subsidiary of a Danish multinational corporation.
Findings
The paper illustrates how individuals and groups may essentialize cultural differences during intercultural business encounters and how this fixation of cultural traits can be used in social stratification.
Originality/value
Only scant extant research has focused on the active use of cultural differences in an intra‐subsidiary context.
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