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The purpose of this paper is to analyze the conceptual framework about human resources downsizing and restructuring and how organizations of the public sector can do that effectively and efficiently. These facts drive to the conclusion that the implementation of early retirement incentives requires the most elaborate planning and execution to be effective, predictable and safe in the long term.

This paper adopts an analytical, descriptive methodology approach to describe the basic features of the data by using the descriptive research design. Data have been collected through different sources, which include secondary data, to introduce the theoretical literature of the subject as books, journals, articles, published working papers and referred previous studies related to the same subject.

Downsizing process is a deliberate administrative process that includes, but is not limited to, workforce reduction and is primarily aimed at achieving efficiency in public organizations. The definition of workforce downsizing may be narrowed to reducing the number of workers, or more likely to refer to general efforts to restructuring human resources in public organizations, Early Retirement Incentive Programs (ERIP) represents a viable alternative for organizations seeking to reduce staff. For the ERIP to be successful, the program coordinator must understand the business objectives and goals that the organization is trying to obtain.

Human resources strategies concerning downsizing public administration workforce should be more appropriate to those who leave the organization and those who stay at work, reducing the negative psychological, administrative and economical effects. This could be achieved through a strategy called early retirement incentive programs.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically explore the financial well-being (FWB) of Malaysian households and to construct a subjective FWB index with present and future time perspectives.

Data were collected from 1,867 respondents across five major regions in Malaysia. Adapting the InCharge Financial Distress/Financial Well-being (IFDFW) Scale by Prawitz et al. (2006) and the method of computing an index by Devlin (2009), this study develops an FWB index using subjective measures that include future time perspectives (retirement). The index was employed to measure the FWB across low-, middle- and high-income groups and socio-demographic characteristics.

This study finds evidence that Malaysians' FWB is at an average level (46.8). Middle-income households' FWB (46.1) flanks between the financial well-being index (FWBI) levels of the low-income (37.4) and high-income households (58.7). Across age groups, education levels and employment sectors, the FWB of Malaysians significantly varies, although not across different ethnics, religions, zones and residential areas. Overall, the results suggest that the detrimental effects of FWB are perceived by all Malaysian households nationwide regardless of their religion, ethnicity and residential areas.

The results of this study complement the other well-being indices used by policymakers and may serve as a useful input for government and policymakers for them to formulate appropriate strategies to promote higher FWB of Malaysian households based on their socio-demographic characteristics.

This study used primary data and developed a subjective FWB index that leverages on people's perceptions of their own financial well-being while including present and future time perspectives. The main contribution of this paper is to construct an index that is easily interpretable and that complements the existing FWB indices, and to identify the segments of society that have low vis-à-vis high FWB.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the impact of living wages on organisational pay systems.

The research draws on 23 semi-structured interviews with HR managers, trade union representatives, and politicians at four UK local government case study sites.

The findings suggest that living wages can have a positive impact on directly employed workers in cleaning, catering and care services, but the research also finds that the localised adoption of living wages can lead to significant wage compression, resulting in a broad band of “low skill-low wage jobs”.

The theoretical contribution is twofold. In-line with earlier research the “first-order” effects of living wages are clear: hourly wages for a large number of women in part-time roles increased sharply. However, this is only part of the story as “second-order” effects such as ripples and spill-overs are less extensive than suggested by other studies. This is due to the limited scope for trade unions to restore wage differentials through collective bargaining, the slow progress in extending the living wage to contracted staff, and parallel processes of downsizing and outsourcing.

This study focuses on HR practices that foster employee engagement during Covid-19. Companies in transition economies are particularly vulnerable to crisis and downsizing and other recessionary practices are frequently used.

Drawing on the model of caring human resource management, we utilise interviews with human resource representatives of 10 banks in the transition economy of Bosnia and Herzegovina. We analyse the banks at two different times to demonstrate how and why companies adapt their HR practices.

Our findings show a changing mindset in the deployment of highly context-specific HR practices. Strengthening company culture through a sense of community and communication ensure stability and continuity in work. Rather than layoffs, flexible work has become standard.

By highlighting the interplay between HR practices and employee engagement, we contribute to the discussion on engagement in exceptional circumstances and challenging settings and demonstrate how caring responsibilities “migrate” into HR practices in the professional context of a transition economy.

We propose a context-specific “protective caring approach” to foster employee engagement during crises.

This study examines trust-repair practices at the team level after organizational change.

A qualitative research approach was adopted, and data were collected from key informants through focus group discussions and interviews. The data analysis involved thematic coding and followed the structured procedure.

This study found that after organization change, trust can be repaired at the team level by improving team leaders' information sharing and knowledge in change management, and by enforcing communication, collaboration and ethical behaviour among team members.

This paper makes three key contributions by (1) identifying trust violations in teams, (2) proposing trust-repair mechanisms and (3) extending the understanding of trust-repair and preservation at the team level following organizational change.

This paper provides practical information from a real-work context and can improve managers' understanding of active trust-repair.

This paper outlines active trust-repair mechanisms in an organizational change context and expands the current theory by presenting novel insights into organizational trust-repair at the team level. This study contributes to trust literature by proposing promising avenues for future trust-repair research.

Employability is a key concept in higher education. Graduate employment rate is often used to assess the quality of university provision, despite that employability and employment are two different concepts. This paper will increase the understandings of graduate employability through interpreting its meaning and whose responsibility for graduate employability from the perspectives of four key stakeholders: higher education institutions, students, government and employers.

There are two stages to this literature review which was undertaken across bibliographic databases. The first stage builds a conceptual understanding of employability, relating to definition and how employability can be achieved and enhanced from the perspective of stakeholders. A structured search employing Boolean searches was conducted using a range of terms associated with key stakeholders. The second round of review drew on documentary analysis of official statements, declarations, documents, reports and position papers issued by key stakeholders in the UK, available online.

It reveals that responsibility for employability has been transferred by the UK government to higher education institutions, despite clear evidence that it needs to be shared by all the key stakeholders to be effective. In addition, there is a gap between employers' expectation for employability and the government's employability agenda.

This article highlights that solely using employment rate statistics as a key indicator for employability will encourage the practice of putting employers' needs above knowledge creation and the development of academic disciplines, with the consequence that higher education will become increasingly vocation driven.

Social media management is an emerging profession that is growing as companies increasingly adopt social media. The purpose of this paper is to analyze social media managers’ personal branding.

In-depth qualitative data is drawn from 20 semi-structured interviews with social media managers and supported by three years of orienting fieldwork in Toronto, Canada.

Social media managers are responsible for managing and executing organizations’ brands and presence on social media and digital platforms. As lead users of social media, social media managers provide critical insight into the emerging practices of personal branding on social media. “The future audience” is introduced to describe how individuals project a curated brand for all future unknown and unanticipated audiences, which emphasizes a professional identity. Due to workplace uncertainty, social media managers embody the mentality of being “always-on-the-job-market”, which is a driver for personal branding in their attempt to gain or maintain employment.

While personal branding is largely discussed by industry professionals, there is a need for empirical research on personal branding that examines how various employee groups experience personal branding. This research fills this gap by analyzing how people working in social media brand their identity and how their personal branding is used to market themselves to gain and maintain employment. The development of “the future audience” and “always-on-the-job-market” can be used to understand other professions and experiences of personal branding.

The purpose of this paper is to assess ways in which informality can be understood and reviews an emerging area of management scholarship. The origins and nature of informality are discussed with the aid of two different theoretical tools: “workplace sociology” (WS) and “mixed embeddedness” (ME).

The analysis is grounded in empirical material reflecting different aspects of informality mainly within the ethnic economy, such as a study on the implementation of the National Minimum Wage regulations (Ram et al., 2007; Jones et al., 2004, 2006).

The authors argue that the combination of WS and ME provides a valuable means of content and character of informality. It can also help to explaining variations and patterns within the informal economy, as well as understanding new forms of informality in the ethnic economy and beyond in “superdiverse” contexts.

This paper bridges two different theoretical approaches to explain the interactions between the firm and state regulations, as well as the workplace relations between employer and employees.

The purpose of this study is to examine the role of organisational conditions and workplace characteristics in midcareer and senior employees’ intention to volitionally provide career support to junior organisational members, their protégés.

Hypotheses are tested using multilevel linear modelling on a heterogeneous sample of Dutch employees ages 29 to 69 who participated in a vignette study in the autumn of 2017.

In line with the hypotheses, the findings of this study show that volitional (informal) mentoring is positively related to an organisation’s endorsement of intrinsic values (e.g. learning opportunities) and negatively to the presence of hindrance demands (e.g. time pressure).

Practitioners could facilitate co-mentor consultation, employ autonomy-supportive direct supervisors and fulfil psychological contract obligations by providing job security and learning opportunities. Organisations could also lower time pressures through job carving.

This study extends extant mentoring research by combining insights from perceived organisational support (POS) and self-determination theory (SDT) to examine the role organisational conditions and workplace characteristics play in aiding or hindering volitional mentoring. It enriches extant knowledge management studies on the link between organisational aspects and (intended) knowledge sharing behaviour by showing that similar organisational motivators predict volitional mentoring, thereby launching a call to study knowledge management through volitional mentoring using a SDT- and POS-based lens. A methodological novelty is the reliance on a vignette study.

The current study focuses on the role of antecedents to prevent perceived job insecurity and mitigate its negative impacts on work-related well-being. The study examined variables of the resourceful environment (effective organizational communication and involvement), conserved resources (perceived employability and emotional exhaustion) and resource loss (job insecurity) by drawing on the Conservation of Resources (COR) theory for predicting the work-related well-being adding the moderating role of boundaryless career orientation.

A sample of 306 salespersons of pharmaceutical companies working in Pakistan was obtained. The hypothesized relationships were tested through structural equation modeling in SmartPLS.

The results confirmed showed that the organizational communication, employee involvement and perceived employability reduce the perceived job insecurity; however, the emotional exhaustion was positively related. It also confirmed the moderating effect of boundaryless career orientation on relationship of job insecurity and well-being.

To make employees engaged, the organizations are required to involve employees by sharing knowledge, information and power to make decisions, value their opinion and ensuring the employability. Further, salespersons having a preference of a boundaryless career proved to mitigate negative impact of job insecurity on work-related well-being.

Many empirical studies have identified that the perceived job insecurity is one of the major concerns affecting employee's well-being. However, few studies simultaneously have sought to prevent the perceived job insecurity among employees. The findings are important in developing the understanding that how salespersons perceive their capabilities and the work environment of the organization, this perception; resultantly, can influence their behaviors particularly the work engagement dimension of well-being.

本研究的焦點為探討導致僱員感到缺乏職業安全的成因, 對防止該感覺的產生扮演著什麼角色，並研究導致缺乏職業安全感的成因，就減少缺乏職業安全感給和工作有關的幸福感所帶來的負面影響方面扮演著什麼角色。研究應用了可預測與工作相關的幸福感的資源保留理論 (COR) ，來探討資源豐富的環境 (有效的機構溝通及參與) 、節約資源 (感知的受僱能力與情緒耗竭) 及資源耗損 (缺乏職業安全) 這些變數，並加入了無邊界職業生涯定向的調節角色。

研究樣本為在巴基斯坦工作的306名製藥公司營業員。研究人員透過SmartPLS的結構方程模型來測試各假設的關係。

研究結果確認了組織溝通、僱員參與及感知的受僱能力均會減輕職業不安全的感覺；唯情緒耗竭則成正相關。研究結果亦確認了無邊界職業生涯定向在缺乏職業安全與幸福感之間的相互關係上起著調節效應。

過去許多實證研究均已證實缺乏職業安全感是影響僱員幸福感的一個主要因素，唯很少研究會同時透過探討資源豐富的環境 (有效的機構溝通及參與) 和節約資源 (感知的受僱能力和情緒耗竭) 等變數，來嘗試防止僱員產生職業不安全的感覺。本研究的結果至為重要、因它使我們更了解營業員對自己的能力及機構的工作環境的看法、最終會影響他們的工作行為，特別是幸福感的工作投入層面。

缺乏職業安全感、營業員、工作投入、與工作相關的幸福感、無邊界職業生涯定向

研究論文