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Gareth English, senior consultant with business psychology experts, OPP, details how enhancing awareness levels and using psychometric profiling systems can help leaders identify how to interact with different groups of people and see the impact this can have on working relationships throughout the business.

Following a number of management team changes, WH Smith Travel wanted to establish how its employees viewed the company’s organizational culture. Here, Gareth English, senior consultant with business psychology experts, OPP, explains how conducting workforce surveys helped to gauge the impact of the changes, identify areas for improvement and encourage employee engagement.

Welcome to a somewhat revitalized and invigorated issue of Strategic HR Review. Technology is advancing at an increasingly fervent pace and the HR world, along with the rest of the global industry, is gradually beginning to adopt a more sophisticated approaches.

The decision by the British Olympic Association to enter a soccer team into the Olympic Games of 2012, having not participated in the Olympic soccer competition since 1960, provided an opportunity to study representation as a predictor of fan identification. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

Using a quasi-experimental research design, the authors empirically validated the value of representation by comparing the identity levels of homogeneous samples of English and Scottish respondents toward the Great Britain Olympic National Football, participating in the Olympic Games of 2012.

Only partial support for four sets of hypotheses was found. In general, there seemed to be low levels of identity of each of the samples with the football team, because neither English nor Scottish respondents perceived the team to be representative of them. Nevertheless, the results support the general notion that representation is a valuable predictor of consumer identification.

Representation has been proposed as a central component of a sport team’s ability to serve as a symbol to their community, which enables the team to benefit from existing fan identities and the community the team is associated with. Yet, an empirical assessment of this phenomenon is lacking.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the social climate of therapeutic wings and mainstream wings within one prison, to identify positive areas of social climate that can be built upon and areas for improvement.

In total, 1,054 social climate questionnaires (the Essen Climate Evaluation Schema – EssenCES) were sent to prisoner-facing staff and all prisoners within an English Category B prison holding indeterminate sentenced prisoners. Perceptions of social climate on therapeutic wings and mainstream wings and perceptions of social climate between staff and prisoners were compared.

The results showed that the therapeutic wings felt safer, there were better staff-prisoner relationships and there was better peer support among prisoners than people on the mainstream wings. Also, prisoners felt safer than staff, staff rated the overall social climate as more positive than prisoners and staff felt that they supported prisoners, but prisoners did not feel the same.

The main limitation is that the EssenCES measure does not explain the participants’ ratings of the social climate.

There is a need to transfer the principles and values of therapeutic wings to mainstream wings. In addition, there is significant room for improvement in the social climate of this prison.

This is the first study to compare the social climate of therapeutic and mainstream wings within one single prison. The research has a valuable contribution to the development of positive social climates conducive to better clinical outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how trustees of small English registered charities understand and own the reporting and accounting requirements with which their charities must comply.

The research described is a multi-pronged qualitative and inductive study of three small Yorkshire charities as they approve their annual accounts. The case studies are based on observations of trustee meetings and interviews with a range of trustees and their independent examiner or auditor. The use of a practice lens focuses on the behaviours of individuals to understand the sense that they make of their charity’s accounts.

Trustees' understanding of their financial statements is limited; they tend to rely on key individuals who have knowledge. Group responsibility creates a shared way of understanding the financial statements. Treasurers and independent examiners simplify information for the trustees even resorting to corner cutting and rule bending. Narrative reporting is given very little attention. Trustees read their financial statements as a report to them not by them; accountability notwithstanding, thus ownership of their financial statements is conferred not intrinsic.

The findings are drawn from three specific case studies and therefore cannot be generalised, but they offer rich qualitative insights into small charities’ accounting and reporting.

This research provides a unique multi-viewpoint analysis of charity practices, and through its use of a practice lens dives deeper into examining trustees’ understanding and behaviour.

It has been argued that gender segregation within the labour market leads to women being overrepresented in a narrow range of jobs that offer limited promotion prospects. Presents the results of a questionnaire and interview study of women working in one such occupation, secretarial work, in England, France and Germany, and in the sectors of management consultancy and publishing. The results confirmed that secretaries in all three countries experience poor and unsystematic promotion prospects, despite the fact that many secretaries aspire to leave secretarial work. Sectoral differences are not as great as had been anticipated, and barriers to promotion were found to be especially acute in France and Germany. Promotion within secretarial work itself is shown to lack real value, and the implications of this for organizations are discussed.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate children’s perceptions and attitudes towards sponsorship transition, specifically the change from Nike to PUMA as kit sponsors for Manchester City Football Club (MCFC) in July 2019.

A sample of 368 children, between 7 and 16 years of age were recruited for the study. Using electronic diaries, 1,577 diary entries were captured between February 2019 and March 2020.

Data reveals that children conceptualise sponsorship as a social exchange, with sponsoring brands seen as human entities and interaction with them reflecting the dynamism of social and familial relationships. Consequently, children in this study demanded prosocial and interpersonal behaviours from sponsors and sponsee during the transition period.

The research has an immediate and direct application for brand managers and the sponsee when considering terminating long-term sponsorship. Both the departing and incoming sponsors can maximise their relationships with these younger fans through an orchestrated departure, arrival and dedicated handover.

The findings enable marketing brand managers to effectively evaluate sponsor transition to maximise opportunities to maintain, and indeed start, brand relationships with younger fans.

This is the first study that has examined sponsorship children’s responses to sponsorship transition.