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I aim to understand how informal relationships at work provide a supportive context for individuals and contribute to their engagement in an environment of disruptive change when they are likely to be stressed.

The research was conducted in three UK public service organizations during pre-Brexit disruption. An app was used to capture 400+ transient emotions, reactions, and diary entries of employees about their interactions with co-workers, colleagues, and close colleagues. This was followed by 25 interviews to reflect more deeply on those relationships documented in the app.

Interactions with co-workers, colleagues, and close colleagues are shown to contribute in different ways to emotions felt and different aspects of engagement. Closer relationships, less transactional and more emotional in nature, contribute to feelings of trust, significance, and mutual reliance. A typology of four close colleague relationship types also emerged variously driven by the depth of the relationship and sense of shared mutuality.

This research documents employees' lived experience during disruption to show that relationships provide support for the meaningfulness, psychological safety, and availability aspects of personal engagement. It maps the process of developing supportive workplace relationships that form the relational context with four sub-contexts, distinguishing work, and personal engagement by their different foci. Practical and social implications are discussed.

Global virtual teams (GVTs) – composed of members in two or more countries who work together primarily using information and communication technologies – are increasingly prevalent in organizations today. There has been a burgeoning of research on this relatively new organizational unit, spanning various academic disciplines. In this chapter, we review and discuss the major developments in this area of research. Based on our review, we identify areas in need of future research, suggest research directions that have the potential to enhance theory development, and provide practical guidelines on managing and working in GVTs.

This chapter applauds the growing move toward social science collaboration with colleagues in other fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Drawing on several decades of experience in working with biophysical scientists and engineers, as well as on prior literature, I offer three main observations. First, STEM colleagues will often expect social scientists to play the role of public relations specialists, helping to “educate” the public, or to convince people that our STEM colleagues already have the right answers. Second, part of our job is a different kind of “science education” – educating STEM colleagues about basic principles of democratic governance. Third, we have an opportunity and an obligation to ask not just what social science can contribute to STEM, but also, what working with STEM colleagues can contribute to the social sciences. There appear to be particularly important opportunities for gaining insights into some of the less visible or obvious dynamics of power and privilege.

Evidence continues to accumulate that human resource management (HRM) practices associated with a commitment-based management approach can generate more energy, initiative, and engagement among workers and meaningful performance gains for an organization. Despite the business case for adoption, many organizations still fail to implement commitment-based HRM practices, or even refuse to attempt such a transition. The health care industry, in particular, has been resistant to moving away from a control-based management philosophy. We identify a potential enabling factor in making the transition as the willingness and ability of senior leadership to establish fair process and a climate of procedural justice throughout the organization, and we examine the lessons offered by a high-performing pharmaceutical plant organized according to commitment-based principles.

New ways of working (NWW) change some fundamental processes in the workplace. NWW practices like teleworking, flexible workspaces, and flexible working hours lead to different behaviors of employees. But does the employment of NWW practices also have an impact on the innovation behavior of employees? This chapter explores this relationship and uses qualitative data from case studies to illustrate the complex linkages between three components of NWW and IWB.

Trust has been identified as key to students’ academic improvement. The purpose of this paper is to identify the conditions that build trust in teachers, both towards their colleagues and school leaders, and to explore the emotions triggered among these participants. This study uses the critical incident technique to conduct interviews with 34 teachers from the Valparaíso Region (Chile). Results show that incidents are easily remembered when a subordinate relationship is involved. Many critical incidents are related to situations in which teachers are particularly vulnerable. Hence, teachers value the treatment received and support provided. The arrival of new teachers to a school is crucial when building bonds of trust. Benevolence is the facet that stands out the most in incidents reported by teachers and school leaders, while satisfaction is the most recurrent emotion. In the case of school leaders, benevolence is closely followed by competence. In the case of teachers, benevolence is followed by honesty, openness and competence. In this case, the associated emotion is affection.

The phenomenon of teachers taking on leadership tasks beyond their classroom duties has become widespread internationally. Although presented as a catalyst for school improvement and professional development, the practices and experiences of teacher leaders are more complex than that. The change in roles blurs the traditional division between teaching and leading and therefore challenges the conventional professional relationships in schools. We conducted semi-structured interviews of 28 ‘teacher leaders’ in Flemish primary and secondary schools. We explored their perceptions and evaluation of their position in schools as well as the way their position and role as teacher leaders affected their professional relations with teacher colleagues and school leaders. The results demonstrate how the introduction of new positions and roles in the school as an organisation affects the professional relationships and collegiality. From a micro-political perspective, we show that the new positions also create emotional labour for the teacher leaders, since they find themselves juggling two different agendas of professional interests: on the one hand, receiving recognition by others of their position as teacher leaders, while on the other hand maintaining their former social–professional relationships as teachers with their former colleagues.