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The purpose of this study is to investigate the phenomenon of defensive biasing in work stress surveys, which occurs when employees trivialize potential stressors and strains due to fear of negative consequences from their supervisors or management. This study aims to better understand the factors that influence this behavior and to develop a scale to measure it.

The study used an online survey of 200 employees to investigate the factors influencing defensive biasing behavior. The researchers developed a scale for defensive biasing with the help of subject matter experts and derived possible factors from the literature. Participants were presented with a hypothetical scenario in which they imagined a work stress survey in their organization and were asked to answer related items. The data were analyzed using regression analysis.

The study found that defensive biasing behavior was significantly predicted by perceived anonymity and neuroticism. Participants who felt less anonymous and had higher levels of neuroticism were more likely to engage in defensive biasing. Job insecurity and trust in supervisors were not found to be significant predictors of defensive biasing.

This study contributes to the literature on work stress surveys by developing a scale for defensive biasing and investigating the factors that influence this behavior. The study highlights the importance of making the survey process more transparent to reduce defensive biasing and obtain trustworthy results.

Data used to develop the case included primary data from employees and supervisors of a commercial floorcovering manufacturing plant in Northwest Georgia. The case company is not disguised.

The survey was developed using existing instruments from the Organizational Behavior and Human Resources Literature. Instruments were listed in Exhibits 2 through 7. The survey administration had the support of the Vice President for Resources and Facilities, and employees and their supervisors were given time to complete the surveys. The data gathered was analyzed by the researcher using SPSS statistical software.

Established in 1957, J&J started as a family-owned business but had grown and diversified its product offerings by focusing on commercial flooring. It survived several economic downturns and remained competitive in a market dominated by more prominent flooring manufacturers. J&J Industries strived to empower its 800 employees with various incentive programs. Employees remained loyal to J&J; many had worked for the company for over 15 years. However, management wanted to measure the impact of empowering and initiatives on employee performance and satisfaction to determine the real power of employee incentive programs. The Resources and Facilities Vice President employed Professor Lopez, a Management Professor, to develop a survey to measure these constructs and analyze the data to guide future incentive programs. Data from the employee and supervisor survey was provided along with the statistical analysis results for interpretation and recommendations for VP Fordham.

The target audience for this case is primarily students in a research methodology course and students studying quantitative regression analysis and interpretation. The focus is predominantly on graduate-level students in Master of Business Administration or Master of Accounting programs in business. Graduate students should have completed courses in management or organizational behavior, business statistics or quantitative methods or data visualization and cleaning as background knowledge for this case. Specifically, students should understand regression analysis and know when and how the tool is used for managerial decision-making.

Over 2.7 million workers are employed in the UK construction industry and with the fragmented nature of the construction sector; cases of poor mental health of workers are on the increase. This upsurge in the number of workers experiencing poor mental health could directly impact construction safety with significant financial adverse consequences on employers and the UK economy. Studies have identified lapses within the construction sector emphasising the lack of transparency regarding reporting of mental health and well-being of construction workers due to the inadequate engagement from employers and the lack of genuine leadership commitment to tackle mental health.

This study adopted a non-probability purposive sampling strategy, using a self-selected sample. A self-administered questionnaire benchmarked against the mental health core and enhanced standards tools by the “Stevenson/Farmer review of mental health and employers” served as the basis for the methodology. A total of 106 industry managers from highways, construction, maritime, utilities, home building, rail and haulage/fleet were involved in this study.

The findings indicate that the industry is making good strides towards addressing mental health issues; poor mental health have significant financial burdens on businesses and the economy; some contractors have mental health initiatives and programmes in place; there is inconsistency of support available to employees; some contractors now integrate leadership training; the level of engagement vary based on the strategy and action plan adopted by organisations; different mechanisms are adopted for monitoring mental health issues, and there are cross-industry initiatives.

A limitation of this study is the number of participants which is not representative of the entire UK construction workforce. Therefore, the findings from this study as much as it presents some understanding of employee mental health and well-being cannot be overtly generalised across multiple industries, different geographic regions or contexts.

Employers should have a clear representation of the mental health of their employees to help them understand what affects worker’s mental well-being and how they can support them. Disregarding the multifaceted causes of mental ill-health due to the perceived financial implications could be more devastating for the industry.

This study investigates whether prolonged durations of work from home (WFH) leads to workplace ostracism (WO), and whether such relationship is moderated by perceived organizational support (POS). The context of this research is based on the post-COVID-19 pandemic period, when most organizations have either recalled their employees back to their physical workplaces, or in other cases employees are relegated to continued WFH or to a hybrid model that combines both in-office and remote work. The importance of this study is the spotlight it brings to employees who feel ostracized from their workplace due the continued practice of WFH.

A conceptual model is developed, by leveraging the conservation of resources (COR) theory. The hypotheses are tested by using cross-sectional survey data collected from 240 employees working in various organizations in the Sultanate of Oman from both public and private sectors. The data are analyzed using R Core Team software.

The findings of the study reveal that WFH does not have any direct impact on WO. However, when POS is applied as moderator, the results indicate that at low levels of POS, the relationship between WFH and WO becomes significant, but not at moderate to high levels of POS.

This study provides insights into how the phenomenon of WFH is likely to influence perceptions of employees in terms of feeling excluded from the organization by being asked to continue to work remotely, while many of their colleagues have returned to their prepandemic workplaces. The implications of the findings are relevant to the growing literature on employee experiences in the realm of emerging work models being introduced by organizations. Among the limitations of this study is the fact that there may be missing mediators that link WFH with WO, and the possibility that such a study if replicated in other cultural contexts may yield different results.

This study presents evidence to managers on leveraging the power of organizational support to ensure that negative emotions among employees such as WO are mitigated.

This appears to be among the first studies that attempts to provide insights into employee perceptions about WO in the postpandemic period, especially with regards to the emerging work arrangements that are primarily based on WFH that are being widely adopted by many organizations around the world. The results of this study provide useful information about how WFH and POS come together to influence emotions of individuals who have been longing to get back to their normal workplace once the social distancing guidelines of the pandemic were lifted.

The paper traces the development of employee ownership in the UK since the 1980s. It proposes that employee ownership is a function of macro-level contexts and micro-level decisions, with the latter framed and guided by the former. The macro context comprises the regulatory framework and the provision of incentives to adopt employee ownership. The paper shows how the evolution of these has led to a steep increase in employee ownership in the last eight years.

The paper draws on several sources of empirical data to chart the development of employee ownership in the UK since the 1980s and to identify the current features of employee ownership. Two firm-level surveys conducted in 2015 and 2020/21 are supplemented by qualitative case study data collected in the early 1990s. An annual census of all employee-owned firms facilitates a comprehensive overview of the current state of UK employee ownership.

It is found that there has been a steep increase in the number of UK employee-owned firms since 2014 after several decades of uneven growth. This is attributed to the introduction of new incentives and to refinements of the regulatory framework. Over the period, there has been a shift from hybrid employee ownership, combining direct and indirect forms, to indirect ownership associated with the employee ownership trust model.

The paper provides an original history of employee ownership in the UK using rich and unique data, along with the most comprehensive picture of current employee ownership to date.

This study's purpose is to explore the difference in employee voice behavior along with its modalities and employee perceived control in a remote vs an in-office work situation.

Employees who worked remotely and in-person at a local municipal government in the Great Lakes Region of the United States were surveyed.

Findings suggest voice behavior and perceived control are stable attitudes and not impacted by a move from in-person to remote work. Participants indicated both Zoom staff meetings and Zoom one-to-one meetings with their supervisor were important; however, only Zoom one-to-one meetings with the supervisor were indicated to be satisfactory.

This study suggests that organizations considering moving some of their operations to a fully remote work situation would not experience differences in employee voice or perceived control. Implications related to utilizing specific communication modalities are also discussed.

This is the only study that focuses on differences in employee voice, its modalities and perceived control comparing in-person vs remote work.

Occupational safety issues among employees remains a contemporary and omnipresent concern. In developing countries, safety-related problems are amplified, resulting in higher incidences of serious accidents and occupational diseases. This study aims to evaluate employees’ knowledge and attitudes toward occupational health and safety, and how these influence overall occupational health and safety compliance. Ghana’s oil and gas industry provides the contextual backdrop for this research, given it is characterized by high rates of injury.

A positivist and deductive research strategy was used to quantitatively analyze both primary and secondary data sources. A structured survey was administered to industry employees, and multiple linear regression was used to establish the effects of employee’s knowledge and attitude toward occupational health hazards on overall health and safety compliance.

The findings indicate that most employees had both a high level of knowledge and positive attitude toward mitigating occupational health hazards. Moreover, the study reveals that most employees complied with occupational health safety practices. However, the study also reveals that the effect of employees’ knowledge and attitude toward occupational health hazards does not translate into deployment of comprehensive safety practices. Interestingly, female employees were found to be more knowledgeable and compliant with occupational health and safety practices than their male counterparts.

Premised upon the findings, the study recommends: implementation of relevant education and training programs encompassing the proper usage of machinery and equipment, tailored hazard safety training appropriate to specific employee job requirements, effective dissemination of risk information and governance initiatives that enforce strict adherence to correct safety procedures.

The study uniquely examines the influence of employee’s knowledge of health and safety to overall compliance within the oil and gas industry. Cumulatively, the study’s findings and recommendations contribute to improving the occupational health and safety outcomes within the industry.

This study investigates how employees' experience of resource-depleting workplace loneliness may steer them away from performance-enhancing work efforts as informed by their propensity to engage in negative work rumination. It also addresses whether and how religiosity might serve as a buffer of this harmful dynamic.

The hypotheses tests rely on three-round survey data collected among employees who work in various organizations in Pakistan – a relevant country context, considering the importance of people's religious faith for their professional functioning and its high-uncertainty avoidance and collectivism, which likely make workplace loneliness a particularly upsetting experience.

An important channel through which a sense of being abandoned at work compromises job performance is that employees cannot “switch off” and stop thinking about work, even after hours. The role of this explanatory mechanism is mitigated, however, when employees can draw from their religious beliefs.

For human resource (HR) managers, this study pinpoints a notable intrusion into the personal realm, namely, repetitive thinking about work-related issues, through which perceptions of work-related loneliness translate into a reluctance to contribute to organizational effectiveness with productive work activities. It also showcases how this translation can be subdued with personal resources that enable employees to contain the hardships they have experienced.

This study helps unpack the connection between workplace loneliness and job performance by detailing the unexplored roles of two important factors (negative work rumination and religiosity) in this connection.

AI-based chatbots are revamping employee communication in organizations. This paper examines the adoption of AI-based employee experience chatbots by employees.

The proposed model is developed using behavioral reasoning theory and empirically validated by surveying 1,130 employees and data was analyzed with PLS-SEM.

This research presents the “reasons for” and “reasons against” for the acceptance of AI-based employee experience chatbots. The “reasons for” are – personalization, interactivity, perceived intelligence and perceived anthropomorphism and the “reasons against” are perceived risk, language barrier and technological anxiety. It is found that “reasons for” have a positive association with attitude and adoption intention and “reasons against” have a negative association. Employees' values for openness to change are positively associated with “reasons for” and do not affect attitude and “reasons against”.

This is the first study exploring employees' attitude and adoption intention toward AI-based EEX chatbots using behavioral reasoning theory.

While the potential for HR practices (HRPs) to improve organisational performance is well-established, the mechanisms by which this occurs are complex. Individual HRPs may affect organisational performance either by mutual gains (improving both organisational performance and employee well-being) or by conflicting outcomes (organisational performance is improved at the expense of employee well-being). Models which combine HRPs may mask these differences and this study therefore tests pathways for four individual HRPs.

HRPs (employee involvement, pay, performance management and training) were hypothesised to influence organisational performance directly and indirectly via employee experiences of work (communication, autonomy) and employee well-being. The study used a large secondary dataset, the UK Workplace Employee Relations Survey 2011, to test these relationships in a multi-level model.

Employee experiences of work strongly predicted well-being. In addition, three different pathways from HRP to organisational performance were identified. Pay showed indirect negative effects, involvement had direct positive effects and performance management had a mixture of both positive direct and negative indirect effects on performance.

Using a disaggregated analysis of HRP and demonstrating their differing effects, this study questions the feasibility of a universal model of HRP effects. By using multi-level modelling (MLM), the study develops understanding of employee perspectives and integrates these into organisational-level models, demonstrating that performance effects are partially mediated by both employee experiences of work and employee well-being. Finally, the study highlights the complexity of performance effects achieved via both employee benefits and an intensification of employee experiences.