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The purpose of this study is to examine the nature of interdisciplinary thinking and the conditions and processes that foster it among first-year undergraduate students.

This study with 510 Australian students drawn from 2 cohorts explored an initiative to promote interdisciplinary teaching in an undergraduate ethics-based subject. The study focused on a case-study-based reflective essay intervention to compare the teaching and learning outcomes in the two student cohorts.

The results show how a case-study-based reflective essay intervention impacted on interdisciplinary learning. Introducing the case-study-based reflective essay improved interdisciplinary thinking. Findings show that integral to engaging students in interdisciplinary learning is a need for more experiential and active approaches built into education itself.

The study findings extend Spelt et al.’s (2009) model in the business education context to link student learning outcomes to the learning processes, learning environment and interdisciplinary thinking. A key limitation of this study is that the intervention is limited to only two student cohorts.

The study recommends the use of reflective practice in interdisciplinary subjects to support a variety of learning outcomes across disciplines including classroom-based and assignment-based reflective practices which influence interdisciplinary thinking and active learning.

There is limited understanding on how business schools should or could attempt to promote interdisciplinary teaching and the actual methods for doing so. This study highlights the significance of integrating reflective practice in undergraduate business education to promote students’ interdisciplinary thinking.

Research on coping at work has tended to adopt a between-person perspective, producing inconsistent findings on well-being outcomes. This focus on interindividual differences is in contrast to many theories that position coping as process, hence, as an intraindividual process that unfolds over time in response to job stressors and appraisals. The authors propose that focusing more on the within-person coping processes and integrating them with learning perspectives has the potential to advance our understanding. More specifically, coping behavior and well-being can be seen as an outcome of current and past learning processes. In this chapter, the authors discuss three mechanisms that explain how coping processes can produce positive versus negative effects on well-being, and how coping can be integrated into a learning framework to explain these pathways. First, the stress process entails encoding and evaluation of the situation and, as a consequence, deployment of suitable coping behavior. Over and above the efforts that have to be invested to understand the stressful situation, the coping behavior itself also requires time and energy resources. Second, coping behavior likely co-occurs with learning processes such as reflection, exploration, and exploitation. These learning processes require further time and cognitive resources. Third, although coping behaviors and their accompanying learning processes have the potential to drain resources at the within-person level, they can also build up interindividual coping resources such as a broader repertoire and coping flexibility. These between-level differences equip employees to deal with future stressors.

How can customer service be so bad in an era when companies collect endless data on customer interactions? The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the important challenge of elevating customer service delivery by providing guidelines for when and how to select optimal measures of customer service measurement using a new decision framework.

The paper uses a comprehensive, multi-dimensional review of extant literature related to customer service, journey mapping and performance measurement and applied a qualitative, taxonomic approach for model development.

A process model and customer journey mapping framework can facilitate the selection and application of appropriate and relevant customer service experience metrics to enhance customer service experience strategies, creation and delivery.

The taxonomy of customer service metrics is limited to current publicly and commercially available metrics. The dynamic nature of the customer service environment necessitates continuous updates of the model and framework.

Selection of customer service performance measures should match relevant stages of the customer journey; use perception-based, operational and outcome-based metrics that track employee and customer behaviours; improve omni-channel measurement; and integrate data-sharing and benchmark measurement initiatives through collaboration with customer service communities.

A reimagined perspective is offered to the complex challenge of measuring and improving customer service, providing a new decision-making framework for customer service experience measurement and guidance for future research.

A distinction must be drawn between a dismissal on the one hand, and on the other a repudiation of a contract of employment as a result of a breach of a fundamental term of that contract. When such a repudiation has been accepted by the innocent party then a termination of employment takes place. Such termination does not constitute dismissal (see London v. James Laidlaw & Sons Ltd (1974) IRLR 136 and Gannon v. J. C. Firth (1976) IRLR 415 EAT).

The number of rendundancies is growing at a steadily increasing rate. Although a great deal has been written about it in the popular press, not enough systematic work has been done to assess the impact of this phenomenon on the psychological state of the redundant worker, his family and the wider community. It was felt, therefore, that it might be useful here to review what is available, to help chart the direction of future work in this very important and currently relevant area.

After examining the nature and significance of ‘integrative’ leadership, a distinction is drawn between five different formal leadership roles. It is suggested that they tend to be associated with different kinds of problem (‘wicked’, ‘tame’ and ‘crisis’). The paper goes on to consider (1) the different leadership competencies required (political, strategic and operational), and evidence of a cause‐effect relationship between an engaging style of leadership and productivity, and (2) evidence of the impact of leadership behaviour on others. Finally, the paper advocates a modified version of the model of leadership development proposed by Bennington and Hartley (2009).

Many academics in the area of personnel management and industrial relations tend to take the problems that they are dealing with as given. This may not be too much of a problem when highly trained and perhaps overtly scholastic academics and their associates (eg econometricians and manpower planners) are currently providing the dominant framework in which many of these problems are to be tackled. But what is alarming is the increasing tendency to begin with the solution to the problem and then proceed to justify this as the answer to the problem with little or no analysis of its nature.