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Mortality is a salient factor during capital sentencing. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role death plays in jurors’ decisions when sentencing a severely mentally ill defendant who is subject to possible discrimination in a capital trial because of that status.

The current experiment measured venire jurors’ (n=133) mental illness dangerousness beliefs, and then experimentally manipulated type of mortality salience (dual-focused: participants who contemplated their own mortality and were exposed to trial-related death references vs trial focused: only exposed to death references) and the type of defendant (severely mentally ill vs neutral) accused of a capital offense.

Mock jurors perceived mental illness to be an important mitigating factor when dual (i.e. self) focused mortality (DFM) salience was induced, whereas participants only exposed to trial-related death references considered mental illness to be an aggravating factor in sentencing and were more likely to evidence stereotype adherence toward the defendant.

The implications of the authors’ findings are problematic for the current legal system. During the majority of capital sentencing, jurors will only be exposed to trial-related death references, as individuals in the trial-focused mortality condition were. The findings suggest that these jurors are likely to engage in discriminatory stereotypes that do not consider fair process when making sentencing decisions. This research also suggests that mortality salience may be able to increase jurors’ attention to such concerns in a trial scenario even when negative mental illness stereotypes are present.

Research builds on existing terror management theory and offers a more nuanced perspective of how focusing on one’s own death can affect jurors’ reliance on stereotypes and lead to inappropriate decisions. Mortality salience can lead to decisions based upon procedural fairness when stereotypes and mortality salience are both present.

Films focusing on girls and women with anorexia have not found major producers and distributors in Hollywood, yet movies on subjects such as suicidality and bipolar disorder have been showcased. Eating disorders affect approximately 30 million people in the United States alone, and it has the highest mortality rate of any mental illness, so this invisibility seems incongruous. The authors theorize that Hollywood avoids this subject because of ontological anxiety. Movie plots are schemas and young females are inextricably associated with fertility and futurity. An anorexic’s appearance contradicts and nullifies this symbolic role because anorexia often leads to infertility and death. Psychological studies and philosophical arguments claim that a belief in an afterlife and the regeneration of humankind create coherence and meaning for individuals. An anorexic’s appearance and behavior represent images of self-destruction – images that inflame the viewer’s unconscious and primordial fears about the annihilation of the species. By avoiding the topic of anorexia, Hollywood defends against its symbolic fears of mortality but diminishes the importance of the subject through its absence; it ignores its place in women’s social history and erases its place in American history. Because of Hollywood’s social reach and because greater visibility is correlated with a reduction in stigma, the authors conjecture that a film on this subject would inspire necessary attention to women’s roles, public mores, public policies, and the social good.

Providing employees with meaning in their work has inspired numerous researchers to study the role of personal meaningful work and its related outcomes. Despite this high level of interest, the theoretical views and methodological approaches used to explore this concept still require refinement and development. Without a comprehensive review of these views and approaches, the concept of meaningful work will remain an ill defined notion. The purpose of this paper is to address this gap with a review of the theoretical and empirical research on meaningful work.

The paper includes a discussion on the concepts of “meaning” and “work”, and its importance and the sources for conceptual confusion, and a synthesis of the common features that form the idea of meaningful work in numerous empirical and theoretical studies.

The paper found meaningful work is derived when the employee has a perfect understanding of the nature and expectations of the task environment (i.e. the work has a clear goal, purpose and value that is connected to the employee), the employee feels a sense of fit or congruence between their own core values and the job requirements and organizational mission and goals, and when perfect understanding exists of how employees’ roles contribute to the purpose of the organization.

As part of an effective HRM strategy, organizations should actively encourage and develop managers’ abilities to redesign jobs and the climate to build enhanced feelings of meaning in work. Furthermore, organizations can promote greater experiences of meaningful work among employees by implementing the “job crafting” concept. Also, the role of top management is to focus on job elements that would possibly change personal needs of employees and hence perceive their jobs to be more meaningful.

Given the limited amount of recent literature focused on defining meaningful work, this paper provides valuable resources to help organizations succeed in their understanding of how to engage in creating meaningful work environment. It also examines the underlying features that constitute the meaningful work concept and offers guidance for future research by presenting the current state of knowledge about meaningful work.

In this article the author, Managing Director of the leading coaching and coach training company, Peter Bluckert Coaching, and founder member of the European Mentoring and Coaching Council, sets out a personal view on the current state of the coaching market. That market, and, indeed, the profession of coaching, is fairly young, but it is one that he expects will undergo significant changes in the next few years, spurred by the demands of an increasingly discerning client base. Clients will look to employ coaches who are truly adding value and coaches will need to differentiate themselves in the market place through the quality of their initial training, the extent to which they are committed to ongoing personal development and supervision and their ability to operate at a deeper level with individuals. The author welcomes the greater professionalisation of coaching and looks to a lead body to take forward that process of change.

This paper seeks to describe the development process for the Outcomes Stars as a suite of tools which are designed to simultaneously measure and support change when working with vulnerable people as service users. It describes the original process of development of the first Star, in homelessness services in the UK, and subsequent roll out to other client groups and in other countries. The paper indicates the theoretical and philosophical under‐pinning of an approach which aims to embody both research and values‐based practice in empowerment and respect for the individual.

As a case study of development by the development team, the paper is based on first‐hand knowledge but builds upon extensive consultations with practitioners and users and relates these to the needs and strengths of service users, the contemporary policy framework, and wider research in the field.

The Outcomes Star draws on the core principles of Action Research and Participatory Action Research and extends them beyond research into assessment and outcome measurement. As yet there has been no formal research on the usefulness of the Star approach; but, there is a rapid take up of this approach within the UK and further afield. The paper argues that the approach has proved popular, because the Outcomes Star is rooted in a philosophy that is more in tune with that of people delivering services and more closely reflects the reality of those receiving services, compared to traditional measurement techniques.

The paper aims to stimulate further thought and effective practice in measuring outcomes for vulnerable people, and on the most useful means to engage and support people in the co‐production of their own futures.

Although the development and take‐up of the Outcomes Star approach has been rapid in practice, this is the first paper in which these more theoretical and philosophical roots have been outlined and explored in such depth. It will be of use to service providers, to deepen their awareness, and to commissioners, policy makers and regulatory bodies wishing to promote practical approaches to quality assurance of evidence‐based and evidence‐generating practice. It will also be of interest to moral philosophers and others wishing to understand the translation of values into social practice.

This paper aims to look into the motivations of managers to commit their time and energies to look at environmental, social, and ethical issues. In short, this research set out to answer the following research questions: What are the different types of change agents for sustainability, in terms of their existential needs? What are the motivations and frustrations faced by sustainability managers as change agents? and How are the motivations and frustrations of sustainability managers framed by the sources of meaning in their life and work?

As the research is still at an exploratory stage, a qualitative methodology was adopted. This methodology was also appropriate for the purpose of this research, which was focused on studying how meaning emerges and changes in situated organizational settings. The authors were engaged in 27 value‐laden semi‐structured interviews where they were looking to build a close relationship between the researcher and what was studied. The interview process was divided into three phases to ensure the planning and validity of the process.

It identifies four such categories of sustainability managers, those being Scientist, Messenger, Artist and Storyteller. The findings suggest the key role of expertise, empowerment, values, inspiration, strategic thinking and social contribution as key meaning for these managers. The empirical findings help build on understanding of the different psychological dimensions of corporate sustainability management, and provides a useful tool for developing effective organizational leadership, enhancing recruitment and retention of sustainability talent, and improving individual and team performance for key sustainability growth.

This research has helped to deal application of existential psychology theories to complement corporate sustainability. The findings more or less confirm the usability of major existential psychology theories to find sources of motivations of sustainability managers.

The paper introduces a new model, the evolutionary-existential model of organizational decision-making. The purpose of the model is to provide an empirical framework for understanding the context for decision-making under conditions of existential threat to organizations, such as the global COVID-19 pandemic during the year 2020.

The model is built on an extensive interdisciplinary literature review, drawing from research in social psychology, management, behavioral economics, evolutionary psychology and consumer behavior. In general, the authors follow Bargal's (2006) call for action research in the spirit of Lewin (1951).

According to the model, organizational decision-making during the pandemic threat is influenced by (1) existential threat and (2) an unprecedented macroenvironmental context for decision-making. The authors argue that these psychological and macroenvironmental forces may lead to suboptimal decision-making, based on (1) their basic cognitive architecture and (2) specific evolutionary triggers activated by the pandemic. The authors highlight how the interaction between these inputs and the decision context manifest in various social psychological phenomena that are known to impact judgments and decisions.

Simply put, the magnitude and the urgency of the global pandemic call for new and integrative ways of understanding organizational decision-making.

The model is new. Although the authors draw on prior research and theory, the model is uniquely interdisciplinary; further, the authors are able to make specific and unique predictions about the inputs, decision context and their social–psychological consequences for decision-making.

This article aims to develop a conception consisting of insights from complexity theory and additional notions from Weick's sense‐making theory and existentialism for examining organization behaviour.

This paper carries out a literature review of Karl Weick's theory of sense‐making and some notions from existentialism to discuss the possible contributions to complexity theory and with this a further comprehension of organizational behaviour.

Four existential conditions, namely death, freedom, existentialism and meaninglessness, give a further comprehension of Weick's concept of equivocality. Equivocality is an important input for organizing processes. The complexity of organizing processes is an object for examining organizational behaviour from a complexity scientific standpoint. The authors argue that the concept of equivocality and with this the states of equilibrium in an organization can be approached with examining the states of the mentioned four existential conditions.

An important point of application for change managers in an organization is equivocality. The increase of equivocality will lead to a shift in the state of equilibrium in which new themes will emerge and corresponding organisational behaviour. The level of equivocality is due to the presence of existential fears. Hence, change managers should focus on existential themes and anxieties in an organization to advance emergent change.

New in this paper is the usage of notions from existentialism to elaborate Weick's conception of sense‐making. Also this paper discusses the possible contribution of this elaboration to research of organisational behaviour from the perspective of complexity theory.

This paper aims to explore a model, “The Four Roomed Apartment of Change” developed by Swedish psychologist claes Janssen which uses existential psychology to understand and manage the processes of change. The model has been used extensively in organisations as a diagnostic tool to facilitate changes in organisations, which involve some psychological discomfort. This paper specifically examines whether the model is equally useful when applied to the management of personal career change.

The paper considers the roots of existential psychology and outlines and critically reviews the “Four Roomed Apartment” model. The paper also provides evaluative analysis of the links between existential psychology and career development.

The paper finds that change may be thought of as a cyclical process involving different frames of mind and different emotions and that understanding those frames of mind is the key to successful, well managed change. The paper concludes that the model offered by the Four Roomed Apartment does provide a useful framework for understanding the emotions and feelings experienced during career change, and offers some guidance as to how to manage the process.

Career success today is measured against a broad raft of criteria, such as fulfilling work, work/life balance, skill utilisation and valued relationships. In order to achieve this success today, individuals must be acutely aware of their experiences and sufficiently reflective to understand their emotional significance. This model offers a helpful framework for that reflection and provides answers to some of the questions that must be answered for successful career management.