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This study focuses on assistant principals, the “forgotten future workforce” of educational leadership. We explored the current landscape of assistant principalship within the context of work performance, including both task and discretionary performance, and the future career aspirations of assistant principals from a cross-national perspective. Specifically, the study aimed to fulfill the following objectives: (a) to identify the factors affecting the task and discretionary performance of assistant principals, (b) to identify the factors affecting three future career aspirations of assistant principals, and (c) to determine whether the influences of these factors differ by national origin. Personal initiative and perceived organizational support (POS) were the independent variables. This study also examined the demographic attributes of the participants and their schools. Two randomly selected samples, which composed of 227 Turkish and 144 American assistant principals were the participants. The data-gathering instrument incorporated the revised versions of the Personal Initiative Scale (Fay & Frese, 2001), the Perceived Organizational Support Scale (Eisenberger, Huntington, Hutchison, & Sowa, 1986), and the School Organizational Citizenship Behavior Scale (DiPaola & Tschannen-Moran, 2001). The findings of the study showed that personal initiative and POS significantly predicted the task performance, discretionary performance, and certain future career aspirations of assistant principals. National origin appeared to be a significantly differentiating factor of the assistant principals' task performances, discretionary performances, and future career aspirations. We drew conclusions and provided suggestions for future research.

This chapter provides an updated review of research examining the relationship between occupational stressors and job performance. We begin by presenting an eight-category taxonomy of workplace stressors and we then review theories that explain the relationships between workplace stressors and job performance. The subsequent literature review is divided into two sections. In the first section, we present a summary of Jex's (1998) review of research on the job stress–job performance relationship. In the second section, we provide an updated review of the literature, which includes studies that have been published since 1998. In this review, we evaluate how well the contemporary research has dealt with weaknesses and limitations previously identified in the literature, we identify and evaluate current trends, and we offer recommendations and directions for future research.

For decades organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) has been of interest to scholars and practitioners alike, generating a significant amount of research exploring the concept of what citizenship behavior is, and its antecedents, correlates, and consequences. While these behaviors have been and will continue to be valuable, there are changes in the workplace that have the potential to alter what types of OCBs will remain important for organizations in the future, as well as what types of opportunities for OCB exist for employees. In this chapter we consider the influence of 10 workplace trends related to human resource management that have the potential to influence both what types of citizenship behaviors employees engage in and how often they may engage in them. We build on these 10 trends that others have identified as having the potential to shape the workplace of the future, which include labor shortages, globalization, immigration, knowledge-based workers, increase use of technology, gig work, diversity, changing work values, the skills gap, and employer brands. Based on these 10 trends, we develop propositions about how each trend may impact OCB. We consider not only how these trends will influence the types of citizenship and opportunities for citizenship that employees can engage in, but also how they may shape the experiences of others related to OCB, including organizations and managers.

The design of work has been shown to influence a host of attitudinal, behavioral, cognitive, well-being, and organizational outcomes. Despite its clear importance, scholarly interest in the topic has diminished over the past 20 years. Fortunately, a recent body of research has sought to reenergize research into work design by expanding our view of work design from a narrow set of motivational work features to one that incorporates broader social and contextual elements. In this chapter we seek to review the literature on work design and develop a framework that integrates both job and team design research. We begin by briefly reviewing the history of work design in order to provide needed historical context and illustrate the evolution of job and team design. We then define work design, particularly as it relates to incorporating job and team design elements and transitioning from a view of jobs to one of roles. Following this, we identify a comprehensive set of work design outcomes that provide the basis for understanding the impact that different work characteristics can have on individuals and teams. We then offer an extended discussion of our integrative model of work design, which includes three sources of work characteristics (task, social, and contextual) and the worker characteristics implied by these characteristics. Having defined the range of work and worker characteristics, we then discuss some of the fit and composition issues that arise when designing work, as well as discuss the mechanisms through which the work characteristics have their impact on outcomes. Finally, we discuss research into informal forms of work design.

Organizational behavior scholars have long recognized the importance of a variety of emotion-related phenomena in everyday work life. Indeed, after three decades, the span of research on emotions in the workplace encompasses a wide variety of affective variables such as emotional climate, emotional labor, emotion regulation, positive and negative affect, empathy, and more recently, specific emotions. Emotions operate in complex ways across multiple levels of analysis (i.e., within-person, between-person, interpersonal, group, and organizational) to exert influence on work behavior and outcomes, but their linkages to human resource management (HRM) policies and practices have not always been explicit or well understood. This chapter offers a review and integration of the bourgeoning research on discrete positive and negative emotions, offering insights about why these emotions are relevant to HRM policies and practices. We review some of the dominant theories that have emerged out of functionalist perspectives on emotions, connecting these to a strategic HRM framework. We then define and describe four discrete positive and negative emotions (fear, pride, guilt, and interest) highlighting how they relate to five HRM practices: (1) selection, (2) training/learning, (3) performance management, (4) incentives/rewards, and (5) employee voice. Following this, we discuss the emotion perception and regulation implications of these and other discrete emotions for leaders and HRM managers. We conclude with some challenges associated with understanding discrete emotions in organizations as well as some opportunities and future directions for improving our appreciation and understanding of the role of discrete emotional experiences in HRM.

Over one million individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) will be entering adulthood and attempting to cultivate fulfilling, meaningful life experiences. These young adults with ASD represent Generation A. The workplace will be a major element in cultivating fulfilling lives for Generation A. Social interaction is an integral component for functioning within most postsecondary and occupational settings. It is necessary to understand the interaction between autistic adults and organizations to understand potential social and behavioral deficits. The workplace is inherently a social place. Understanding both formal and informal social information in the workplace may be critical to successful job performance. Fit, particularly person–organization fit, is used to address this social nature of the workplace. Understanding this interaction helps provide a means for crafting both individual and organizational interventions which support autistic adults in the workplace. This chapter provides an analysis of interventions that support those with ASD in the workplace. It is proposed that these interventions will help create a more supportive work environment for those with ASD. As important, it is proposed that the accommodations for those with ASD are reasonable for any organization seeking to improve both satisfaction and performance for all its employees. By addressing these issues, organizations have the potential to create a more satisfying workplace for all workers, not just those in Generation A.

The chapter examines why growth in African economies between 1996 and 2016 appears not to have led to improvements in the key governance indicators (GIs) of government effectiveness, rule of law and control of corruption. Comparative data from other continents are presented to provide a contextual perspective for the case of Africa. The central research question is why has the continent been witnessing economic growth in real terms but simultaneously regressive movements in these three key indicators of governance which are central to the concept of ‘development’ itself? The data span the period from 1996 to 2016 inclusive using the WGI database of the World Bank for 171 countries including 43 African countries. The country sample is selected to ensure the same countries are included in the WGI database across all years of the sample period. The data are analysed numerically in terms of relative and absolute deviations and graphically. The results demonstrate a clear trend in several continents of worsening GIs while real economic growth has been positive. However, the distribution of this negative trend is highly skewed towards the African countries in the sample. The findings suggest that, despite real growth, economic and social development (in the widest sense) is actually regressing in many countries. We offer alternative theoretical explanations for this (apparent) contradiction and a number of possible policy solutions. The data are from the WGI database and all efforts have been taken to ensure its reliability in this analysis. Although there are small differences in how indicators have been measured, these do not seriously affect the underlying trends found in the data. A new approach to establishing value for money in public sector organisations is suggested which at the same time will help strengthen public accountability, transparency and efficiency in the delivery of the government services to the general public. The chapter may provide a new or a different perspective on how societies should perceive government and its various agencies in order to raise accountability. The chapter is conceived from a very old debate: growth versus development but argues that the latter is almost impossible in the absence of good governance and provides analytical evidence as the basis for this conclusion.

As more companies and employees become involved in telecommuting, researchers and managers will need to understand the effects of this relatively new working arrangement on the work perceptions and behaviors of the individual telecommuter. The extant empirical literature provides mixed results and is limited by a lack of theory; consequently, neither researchers nor managers can rely on this literature for clear direction on how telecommuting will likely affect individual telecommuters. There is a critical need for theoretical frameworks to guide research on how telecommuting may affect the telecommuter’s job perceptions, working relations, and work outcomes. We present a multi-dimensional framework of telecommuting design, and focus on how telecommuting design may affect the telecommuter’s work environment and outcomes through its effects on the social system of the telecommuter, autonomy and self-management opportunities and requirements, and role boundaries, particularly in terms of the work and non-work interface. Our goal is to provide a framework to assist managers and researchers in systematically addressing questions of how to design telecommuting arrangements to maximize their potential benefits while minimizing their potential drawbacks.

Group incentive schemes have been shown to be positively associated with firm performance but it remains an open question whether this association can be explained by the motivating characteristics of the group-incentive scheme itself, or if this is due to factors that tend to accompany group-incentive schemes. We use a controlled experiment to directly test if group-incentive schemes can motivate sustained individual effort in the absence of rules, norms, and institutions that are known to mitigate free-riding behavior.

We use a controlled lab experiment that randomly assigns subjects to one of three compensation contracts used to incentivize an onerous effort task. Two of the compensation contracts are group-incentive schemes where subjects have an incentive to free-ride on the efforts of their coworkers, and the third (control) is a flat-wage contract.

We find that both group-incentive schemes resulted in sustained, higher performance relative to the flat-wage compensation contract. Further, we do not find evidence of free-riding behavior under the two group-incentive schemes.

Although we do find sustained cooperation/performance over the three work periods of our experiment under the group-incentive schemes, further testing would be required to evaluate whether group-incentive schemes can sustain cooperation over a longer time horizon without complementary norms, policies, or institutions that mitigate free-riding.

By unambiguously showing that group-incentive schemes can, by themselves, motivate workers to provide sustained levels of effort, this suggests that the “1/n problem” may be, in part, an artifact of the rational-actor modeling conventions.