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The aim of this paper is to discuss how theories and practitioner-led theorising allow frontline workers to iteratively co-construct solutions that work in the real world.

This paper addresses the authors’ aim by proposing a social care theorising model

This study adopts a socio-ecological and epistemological lens when describing theorising and unpacks what this means when frontline workers adapt their practice and programs to work effectively with individuals and families. As frontline workers move towards a grand theory that determines their overarching theoretical perspectives through which they interpret their “social work” world, leadership, organisational culture and governance become crucial in supporting their use of discretion. This support is mostly manifested as supervision and coaching, and the authors argue here that a “researcher in residence” narrows the barriers to embedding research and evidence into practice. Discretion implies the choice of a practitioner to deliver program components in a way that fits the family, which may not align with rigid program protocols, and this calls in to question how to measure fidelity and compensate for adaptation. Furthermore, it highlights the limitations of some research methods and suggests that rapid data collection and analysis may be useful during this theorising process.

This paper conceptualises how frontline social care workers theorise in their practice, the ways these theories are shaped and suggests an option to narrow the research–practice gap.

This research focuses on exploring a psychological mechanism between abusive supervision and job engagement via job insecurity and job alternative to understand how frontline construction workers' perceived abusive supervision impacts on their work engagement.

This study draws on the conservation of resources theory (COR) to postulate that workers' job insecurity acts as a mediation between abusive supervision and work engagement, and the perception of job alternative moderates the impact of abusive supervision on job insecurity. This study empirically tests survey data from 357 frontline construction workers and adopts partial least square structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to test the proposed model.

This paper proved the dark-side of abusive supervision, dual character of job insecurity and moderating role of job alternative. The game-changing mediation effects of job insecurity were examined, which suggested that work engagement would be higher when abusive supervision stimulates stronger job insecurity. Furthermore, the result indicated that the relationship between abusive supervision and job insecurity should be weaker when job alternative is high.

This research suggests construction project managers (CPMs) must take steps such as enhancing supervisors' emotional management skills to control frequency of abuse and thus lessen compromising engagement. Moreover, overall understanding frontline workers' job insecurity is meaningful for better construction performance management.

This research contributes to the disputed leadership style (abusive supervision) and positive psychology knowledge (work engagement) in construction projects by unveiling the psychosocial mechanism (game-changing effects of job insecurity) of construction frontline workers positive engaged feeling. This study highlights the function of personal and job resources in process of resource conservation.

This paper examines how digital reforms affect the relationship between frontline workers and citizens in Danish public sector institutions. Using ethnographic research in two branches of public administration, the study highlights how frontline workers act in accordance with seemingly contradictory modes of ordering. Their acts problematize linear conceptualizations of change that often prevail in digital reforms.

The paper is based on a comparative ethnographic study of frontline workers in the Danish tax and customs administration and municipal citizen service centers. The concept of modes of ordering is used to highlight new tensions that arise as frontline workers adapt to make digital reforms work.

Frontline workers act according to two different modes of ordering based on the separation between helping citizens help themselves and helping citizens directly. National policies and strategies promote the underlying rationale of the first mode but, as this paper shows, this mode is sustained by a second mode, which involves the intervention of professionals when citizens cannot be helped to help themselves.

The paper, which contributes to our understanding of how digitalization is changing public administrations and the relationship between frontline workers and citizens, challenges applying a linear, technocratic focus in discourses on public sector digitalization and highlights the contradictory practices of frontline work. It demonstrates the necessity of going beyond policy narratives and calls for increased attention to how frontline workers adapt to make reforms work.

The on-going COVID-19 pandemic has drastically impacted healthcare systems worldwide. Understanding the perspectives and insights of frontline healthcare workers caring for and interacting with patients with COVID-19 represents a timely, topical, and important area of research. The purpose of this qualitative action research study was to assist one US healthcare system that has an expansive footprint with the implementation of a needs assessment among its frontline healthcare workers. The leadership within this healthcare system wanted to obtain a deeper understanding of how the COVID-19 pandemic was impacting the personal and professional lives of its workers. Further, the organisation wanted to solicit employees’ feedback about what they needed, understand the issues they were facing, and solicit their ideas to help the organisation know where to take action.

This qualitative research employed 45 focus groups, referred to as virtual listening calls (LCs) in this organisation, which were held over a four-week period. A total of 241 nursing staff, representing healthcare facilities across the country, attended 26 of the LCs. A total of 19 LCs were held with 116 healthcare workers who are employed in other clinical roles (e.g. therapists) or administrative functions.

Extending beyond the available research at the time, this study was initiated from within a US healthcare system and informed by the frontline healthcare employees who participated in the LCs, the findings of this study include the perspectives of both nursing and other healthcare workers, the latter of which have not received considerable attention. The findings underscore that the COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on the personal and professional lives of all of these healthcare workers and has exacted an emotional toll as noted in other studies. However, this study also highlights the importance of listening to employees’ concerns, but more importantly, their recommendations for improving their experiences. Notably, the organisation is in the midst of making changes to address these frontline workers’ needs.

The study, inclusive of nursing and other healthcare staff, demonstrates how an organisation can adapt to a crisis by listening and learning from its frontline employees.

This paper analyses how neighbourhood governance of social care affects the scope for frontline workers to address health inequities of older ethnic minorities. We critically discuss how an area-based, generic approach to service provision limits and enables frontline workers' efforts to reach out to ethnic minority elders, using a relational approach to place. This approach emphasises social and cultural distances to social care and understands efforts to bridge these distances as “relational work”.

The authors conducted a two-year multiple case study of the cities of Nijmegen and The Hague, the Netherlands, following the development of policies and practices relevant to ethnic minority elders. They conducted 44 semi-structured interviews with managers, policy officers and frontline workers as well as 295 h of participant observation at network events and meeting activities.

Relational work was open-ended and consisted of a continuous reorientation of goals and means. In some cases, frontline workers spanned neighbourhood boundaries to connect with professional networks, key figures and places meaningful to ethnic minority elders. While neighbourhood governance is attuned to equality, relational work practice fosters possibilities for achieving equity.

Further research on achieving equity in relational work practice and more explicit policy support of relational work is needed.

The paper contributes empirical knowledge about how neighbourhood governance of social care affects ethnic minority elders. It translates a relational view of place into a “situational” social justice approach.

Building on organizational support theory and social exchange theory, the purpose of this paper is to study the impact of organizational support on employee performance (EP) in the context of flexible manufacturing. In particular, the authors aimed to investigate the mediating role of employee attitude between organizational support and EP, and the moderating role of organizational justice (OJ).

A total of 180 participants from 36 work teams employed in 7 large automotive manufacturing enterprises in China were surveyed using a questionnaire designed by the authors. Multiple linear regressions were used to test the proposed hypotheses.

The results revealed four new performance indicators of frontline workers in the context of flexible manufacturing: continuous learning, teamwork, problem solving and active work. Organizational support can be divided into reinforcing support and inhibitive support. Reinforcing organizational support has a positive effect on new performance of frontline workers, and a sense of belonging plays a strong mediating role between them. Inhibitive organizational support plays an important role in the sense of awe (SA) of employees, but the SA has no influence on new performance of frontline workers. OJ plays a strong moderating role between organizational support and employee attitudes.

This study is one of the first attempts to explore the performance of frontline workers in the context of flexible manufacturing and contributes to the existing literature on the relationship between organizational support and EP.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the impact on manufacturing performance of human resource management (HRM) practices across two job levels within manufacturing firms in Argentina and Uruguay: that of line managers and frontline workers. HRM practices are categorised into three bundles defined by the AMO theoretical framework: ability, motivation and opportunity.

The article uses data from a survey to 301 manufacturing plants in Uruguay and Argentina. Given the characteristics of the dependent variable, linear regression models have been estimated in order to test the hypotheses.

The results show that the ability and opportunity bundles for line managers are positively associated with manufacturing performance. However, only the motivation bundle affects manufacturing performance for frontline workers.

The main limitations are the use of cross-sectional data, the focus on two specific countries and the analysis of two employee categories that are not completely homogenous. The paper extends the contingency perspective in HRM by examining the relevance of job level as a contingent factor in the HRM-performance relationship in the manufacturing industry.

The results suggest that manufacturing companies should target HR investments more towards line managers than to frontline employees. More specifically, they should concentrate efforts on the ability and opportunity bundles.

The article contributes to the very limited empirical evidence on the impact of HRM differentiation on firm performance by analysing sub-dimensions in a context not previously analysed.

El objetivo del trabajo es analizar el impacto sobre los resultados de manufactura de la aplicación de prácticas de Dirección de Recursos Humanos en dos niveles de empleados dentro de las empresas industriales argentinas y uruguayas: los supervisores y los operarios de producción. Las prácticas de DRH son clasificadas en tres paquetes de acuerdo con el marco definido por el modelo AMO: capacidad, motivación y oportunidad.

El artículo utiliza datos procedentes de una encuesta realizada a 301 plantas industriales en Uruguay y Argentina. Dadas las características de la variable dependiente, se estiman modelos de regresión lineal para contrastar las hipótesis.

Nuestros resultados muestran que los paquetes de prácticas orientados a la capacidad y la oportunidad para los supervisores están asociados positivamente con los resultados de manufactura. Sin embargo, solo el paquete de prácticas orientado a la motivación afecta a los resultados de manufactura para los operarios de producción.

Las principales limitaciones son el uso de datos transversales, el enfoque en dos países concretos y el análisis de dos ocupaciones que no son completamente homogéneas. Este trabajo extiende la perspectiva contingente analizando la importancia del nivel jerárquico del puesto como un factor de contingencia en la relación DRH-resultados en la industria manufacturera.

Los resultados sugieren que las empresas industriales deberían dirigir sus inversiones en DRH más hacia los supervisores que hacia los operarios. Más concretamente, deberían concentrar sus esfuerzos en los paquetes de capacidad y oportunidad.

El artículo contribuye a la escasa evidencia empírica sobre el impacto de la diferenciación de la DRH sobre los resultados de manufactura analizando subdimensiones en un contexto no estudiado con anterioridad.

In this chapter, we analyze the interactions between local governments and citizens’ initiatives. In the Netherlands, local governments take up the role of civic enabler based on a modest approach that leaves citizens room to invent and design initiatives on what they deem to be public issues by facilitating and activating their efforts. We focus on how a proactive form of this approach toward citizens’ initiatives in deprived neighborhoods affects citizen–government relations. Our research is based on a case study in the city of Amsterdam. We find that particularly more women and migrants took up a wide variety of initiatives, which suggests that the neighborhood approach is more inclusive than deliberative approaches. We also find that initiators developed a positive attitude toward public institutions that enable them and that they started to see frontline workers as collaborators in their initiatives with whom they could have personal and authentic interactions, as opposed to the cool bureaucratic response from government officials that they were used to. To close the chapter, we discuss some risks of the proactive enabling approach, we compare our findings to problems that citizens’ initiatives often face during their interactions with local institutional actors in the Netherlands found in other literature, and we briefly discuss possible implications of practicing a modest enabling approach for developments in governance.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the literature on service quality and value co-creation and co-destruction by unpacking the phenomenon described as “difficult customers”, which has many associated costs for service organizations. The paper examines how frontline service employees make sense of and react to client behaviors that disrupt service processes.

This is a qualitative study with 128 frontline workers, who were interviewed about their perceptions, explanations and reactions to problem-related customers, using a sensemaking perspective.

Content analysis revealed 17 themes related to workers' perceptions, explanations and reactions to problem-related customers. Workers classify behaviors of problem-related customers in terms exceeding the single notion of intentionality that dominates the literature, instead referring to the degree of both controllability and malevolence of customers. Service workers choose a wide range of behavioral reactions that have not been studied before.

A convenience sample, although large, limits generalizability. Suggestions for future quantitative research are proposed.

Based on the findings, the authors suggest specific directions related to managerial policy and organizational practices related to training and employee empowerment and service recovery routines.

The study introduces a new theoretical notion of “problem-related customers”, set within a value co-creation context. It presents findings that enable deeper understanding of the emotional and behavioral reactions of frontline workers to service disruptions and offers multiple scholarly contributions, new research directions and managerial insights that can help to improve service recovery and service quality

Mental health frontline workers can and do provide fundamental support in the wellness of people with serious mental illness. The City University of New York offered a non‐credit Certificate in Wellness Coaching to this group. The purpose of this paper is to describe the certificate and the program outcomes.

Primary data collected through course evaluations, reports, and observations to describe perceptions of personal and professional usefulness and applicability, as well as challenges.

Participants reported using wellness concepts personally and professionally and perceived personal development in communication and leadership. Participants and faculty identified internal and external supports and barriers to transitioning into the role of wellness coach.

The paper presents a replicable model which taught frontline workers wellness concepts that benefit themselves and consumers and helped participants identify ways to expand capacity within their mental health agencies.