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The results of a company‐wide quality improvement programme are usually new company policies. Implementation of these quality improvement policies can be extremely difficult, because employees may not comply with them. A survey of 67 middle managers and 174 front‐line workers was conducted in Hong Kong to investigate the role of social power in influencing compliance with quality policies. The results show that front‐line workers responded best to reward and legitimate power, with expert power receiving the lowest score. Managers were more responsive to expert and informational power and less to reward and legitimate power. The results also indicate that the response to coercive and referent power in both groups was fairly low.

The results of company‐wide quality‐improvement programmes are usually new company policies. Implementation of these quality‐improvement policies can be extremely difficult, because employees may not comply with them. A survey among 41 middle managers and 143 front‐line workers was conducted in Hong Kong to investigate how far influence tactics affect employees’ compliance with quality‐improvement policies. The results indicate that the companies’ commitment to quality‐improvement policies is very high. Front‐line workers responded best to exchange and upward appeals tactics, assertive tactics receiving the lowest score. Managers were more responsive to rational persuasion and consultation tactics and less to assertive and exchange tactics.

The purpose of this paper is to disseminate a new model that addresses the urgent social challenge of providing adequate long-term care in rural circumstances through innovative use of existing resources, and to suggest future research.

This paper is exploratory in and is based upon the analysis of qualitative observations (interviews and site visits) framed in the financial and operational records of the facility studied, macro- and micro-level demographics, and the scholarly and practice literatures.

Significant cost savings upon implementation, improvements in quality of care and both worker and client satisfaction were observed.

The model has been in operation only one year; the trend has been positive, however, more research is needed to identify its stability and develop a more refined description of its components: while essential features of this innovative model can be applied in any residential long-term care situation, replicating its success is obviously linked with the skill and authority of the director. Evaluation research is currently in progress.

The paper suggests budget-neutral solutions to persistent challenges of caring for older adults in rural circumstances.

Quality and financing of long-term residential care for elders is insufficient and worsening. This model addresses problems central to financing and quality of care by connecting existing resources in new ways. It does not require additional funding or changes in qualifications required for jobs.

The model is the original creation of a residential long-term care facility director working with a network of partnerships that he discovered and developed: partnerships include a broad range of organizations in the public and non-profit sectors, and the state university.

This paper investigates the focal role of close co-worker friendship in reducing incivility. Furthermore, this paper examines negative workplace gossip as a mediator and gender and promotion focus as moderators.

Using a time-lagged approach, 553 full-service restaurant front-line co-workers in Greater Cairo responded. Further, the data were analyzed using SmartPLS v.4.

Promotion focus weakened close co-workers’ friendships, causing them to speak negatively about each other with other co-workers. Multi-group analysis showed that males were more likely to spread negative gossip about their close co-workers and thus were subjected to incivility-related behaviors by their co-workers.

This paper is an early attempt to explore the focal role of promotion focus in the full-service restaurant context. This paper adds to affective events theory (AET) with a limited understanding of explaining and predicting co-worker incivility.

本文擬探討同僚間緊密的友好關係在減少不文明行為方面所扮演的重要角色。此外、本文擬把職場的流言蜚語看作是調解員而對其加以探索; 本文亦把性別和對晉升的關注看作是仲裁人而進行探究。

研究人員使用時間差距法進行研究和探討。數據來自553名於大開羅提供整套服務的餐館內工作的一線員工所給予的回應。研究人員以SmartPLS 結構方程建模軟體第四版 (SmartPLS v.4) 對數據進行分析。

研究人員發現，僱員對晉升的關注削弱了同僚間緊密的友好關係，並驅使他們在其他同事中對同僚作負面的評價。另外，多組分析顯示了男性員工更有可能散播關於其要好同僚的閒言閒語，因此，他們會遭受同僚不文明的待遇。

本研究是早期的嘗試，去探索在提供整套服務餐館的背景下，僱員對晉升的關注所扮演的重要角色。另外，本研究的結果將會添加至情感事件理論 - 該理論就解釋和預測同僚不文明行為所提供的闡釋似有點不足。

The purpose of this paper is to examine the attitudes of street-level bureaucrats from different agencies and sectors of the Finnish welfare state, namely municipal social workers, diaconal workers of the Lutheran church, benefit officials of the Social Security Institution and officials of private unemployment funds.

The authors are interested in the following questions: What are the attitudes of street-level bureaucrats towards the labour market allowance? What is the impact of individual characteristics? The study utilised the unique national survey data of different groups of street-level bureaucrats from the year 2011 (total N=2,313). The dependent variables focus on legitimacy of the basic level of labour market allowance and sanction policies. Analyses are built around five independent variables which measure professional, personal interest and ideological factors.

There are differences both between and within groups of Finnish street-level bureaucrats with regard to their attitudes concerning the labour market allowance. Social and diaconal workers believe more often than officials that the level of labour market allowance is too low, and offer less support for the idea that an unemployed person should take any job that is offered or have their unemployment security reduced. The results show that the attitudes of bureaucrats are explained by length of work history, economic situation and ideological factors.

There have been very few analyses comparing attitudes among different groups of bureaucrats. The present study is intended to fill this gap in the literature.

This paper aims to examine the role of information and communication technology (ICT) in the knowledge creation practices adopted by a health care organization. The organization is delivering care to patients of a genetic disorder, called the sickle cell, in tribal communities. The paper identifies how ICT intermediates knowledge creation practices across the organizational boundaries wherein tribal patients, front-line counselors and expert physicians interact, which then produces context-specific, evidence-based medicine (EBM).

The knowledge-in-practice approach is adopted to conduct an ethnographic study of sickle cell care practices in a non-profit health care organization in Western India. The analysis focuses on ICT-mediated interactional practices among the physicians, front-line counselors, tribal patients and their families, for more than a year-long observation. These are supplemented with informal and formal interviews, archival records and vignettes based on several episodes to explicate the key knowledge creation practices.

Technology-mediated informative interactions at organizational boundaries can bridge socio-linguistic and interpretive barriers between actors, while also providing a generative structure that leads to the creation of longitudinal clinical evidence about a rare genetic disorder. Three specific ICT-entwined knowledge creation practices emerge, namely, knowing the community, increasing interactional engagement and constructing gradients of socio-clinical history. These practices generate organization-wide knowledge about the social and clinical dimensions of the genetic disorder. The findings are presented through vignettes and a novel conceptual framework.

This study identifies various useful knowledge creation practices in health care delivery for resource-constrained emerging economy contexts. Further, the study suggests that the involvement of local front-line actors and ICT can become important resources in the delivery of health care in these settings.

A novel framework is developed which demonstrates knowledge creation at organizational boundaries wherein the actors use ICT-based practices for effective delivery of health care. The proposed framework may be used by health care organizations in similar contexts providing care to marginalized communities.

This paper aims to integrate the knowledge management and marketing literatures to examine the relationships between knowledge management (KM) practices during a service exchange and customers' satisfaction and behavioral intentions.

Data were collected in an experimental setting using video scenarios; hypotheses were tested using MANOVA and ANCOVA.

Results show that tacit rather than explicit KM practices used by service providers have a greater influence on customer satisfaction and behavioral intentions. The mediating effects of perceived control and fairness on the relationship between KM practices and customer satisfaction are also found.

This paper extends research in the area of knowledge management, customer relationship management and services management, and suggests future theoretical and methodological research directions. Although the sample is representative of the population, no claims are made to generalize the findings of the study to the broader population.

Managers need to understand the value of knowledge management in service encounters and specifically focus on the tacit knowledge that front‐line workers possess. Managers need to install organizational systems that encourage front‐line workers to develop and use tacit knowledge in service encounters.

The impact of knowledge management practices on consumer evaluations of service has received less research attention. No prior studies have investigated the influence of KM practices in a service encounter context. This paper focuses on the influence of two fundamental knowledge management components, namely tacit and explicit knowledge, on consumer reactions.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent and impact of customer-oriented norms on employment relations in voluntary sector social care, within the context of personalisation. Self-Directed Support (SDS) is premised on the notion that customer-led care enhances autonomy among service users and therefore improves quality of life, and additionally, gives employees more discretion in their work. However, by attempting to improve quality of service without additional funding – and in many instances, with funding cuts – it can be argued that SDS is in practice effectively attempts to achieve “more-for-less.” This paper examines the effect of this dynamic on employment relations, using the organisation as the unit of analysis.

This paper examines the existing literature on personalisation and SDS, and positions it alongside the sociology of service work. Particular focus is given to Korczynski's notion of Customer-Oriented Bureaucracies (COB). Data collection took place in four comprehensive case studies, comprised of fifty-five semi-structured interviews overall and a benchmarking survey of each.

Findings demonstrate that the influence of customer-oriented norms only affected certain features of the employment relationship, and tended to result from pressures other than service users, such as organisational strategy or funding constraints. In consequence, none of the individual case studies fit the description of COB in its absolute form. Instead, what can be observed is a strong pattern of influence across specific dimensions of the employment relationship. In relation to policies and procedures, the impact of customer-oriented norms was experienced in 70% of instances, 83.3% of incidences pertaining to terms and conditions, and 85.7% of incidences pertaining to work organisation.

The data itself is limited to fifty-five interviews across four case studies, and so only gives a “snapshot” of employee relations within the sector. Further research would be advantageous to address these issues geographically and temporally.

Firstly, it contributes academically to existing bodies of literature on both voluntary sector social care and the sociology of service work. Secondly, it provides practitioners with analysis of the issues that accompany personalisation, and how adopting customer-oriented norms impacts the employment relationship. Thirdly, it demonstrates to legislators and commissioners that existing shortfalls in funding are compensated for by the above-and-beyond efforts of those who work in the sector, and that this is an increasingly untenable situation.

This paper sheds much needed light onto employment relations in the doubly under-researched areas of voluntary sector social care in Scotland. It attempts to aid employee relations pertaining to the often low paid social care workforce, and the care of service users who include the most vulnerable in society. By identifying potential issues pertaining to employee relations, it seeks to avoid future disruptions to service provision which could have adverse effects on organisations, employees, and service users.

This paper makes a theoretical and conceptual contribution by utilising the sociology of service work as a means of better understanding employment relations in voluntary sector social care. It compares the impact of customer-oriented norms across four distinctly different service provision types Furthermore, the segmenting of findings across three key areas of employment relations allows for a systematic analysis which pinpoints the presence and extent of customer-oriented norms and their influence on the employment relationship.

Tourism and hospitality employment have long faced widely recognised challenges with regard to employment, its workforce and the workplace environment, issues that have been addressed by generations of policymakers and practitioners without evident success or solution. These wicked problems are frequently characterised by inherent paradoxes and, therefore, accepting the tenets of paradox theory provides the basis for recognising the need to accept contradictions as a reality which a search for solutions will not resolve. This chapter presents six examples of wicked problems in tourism and hospitality employment, which are underpinned by paradoxes as proxies for the much wider range of intractable problems that beset policy-making and practice in this vital area of tourism and hospitality. The chapter concludes by suggesting ways in which wicked problems can be accommodated, and stakeholders can learn to understand and live with paradoxes.

This paper investigates how outcomes-based performance management (PM) regimes operate in the partnerships known as social impact bonds (SIBs), which bring together partners from the public, private and third sectors. The findings are analysed in the light of the different cultural world views of the partners.

Published evaluations of 25 UK SIBs were analysed by a qualitative multiple case study approach. This study of secondary sources permitted the analysis of a wide range of SIB partnerships from near contemporary accounts.

Outcomes frameworks led to rigorous PM regimes that brought the cultural differences between partners into focus. While partnerships benefitted from the variety of viewpoints and expertise, the differences in outlook simultaneously led to strains and tensions. In order to mitigate such tensions, some stakeholders conformed to the outlooks of others.

The need to achieve a predefined set of payable outcomes embeds a “linear” view of intervention and effect on the SIB partners and a performance regime in which some partners dominate. In designing accountability systems for partnerships such as SIBs, commissioners should consider how the performance regime will affect the interests of all stakeholders.

This study adds to the cultural theory literature which has rarely considered three-way partnerships embodying hierarchical, individualist and egalitarian world views and how performance regimes operate in such partnerships. Three-way partnerships are thought to be rare and short-lived, but this empirical study shows that they can be successful albeit over a predefined lifespan.