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This paper conceptualises how managers psychologically experience and respond to crises via metaphor analysis.

This paper uses a discourse dynamics approach to metaphor analysis. Conceptual metaphors were analysed and developed into concept maps through 37 semi-structured interviews with senior managers from different portfolios within 16 public universities in South Africa after #FeesMustFall protests.

Five domains emerged, including (1) looming crisis, (2) crisis onset, (3) crisis triage and containment, (4) (not) taking action and (5) post-crisis reflection. These domains shape a framework for the crisis adaptation cycle.

This study suggests that organisations should pay more attention to understanding emotions in crises and can use the adaptation model to develop their managers. It shows how metaphors can help explain affective and cognitive experiences and how emotions shift and evolve during a crisis. Managers should be aware of early signs of the crisis and its potential impact on their business operation in the looming and recognition stages, analyse the situation and work collectively on possible actions to minimise losses and maximise gains.

This is a rare investigation into the emotions of senior managers in the public sector in a social movement and national crisis via unconventional research methods to advance cognitive appraisal theory in crisis management.

This paper aims to go through all Peter Senge’s books since his influential book The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization in 1990 and see what kind of ideas he has developed and the impact his books have created.

The author uses book review method to identify prominent ideas in those books that not only have significantly challenged but also contributed to transforming the world of business and management in both academia and practice.

Among many great ideas that Senge has developed, spirituality, mental models, systems thinking, and a sustainability mentality are prominent ones, which have set up trends for both researchers and practitioners in business and management.

Those ideas are interwoven, intertwined and have powerfully shaped new ways to see the world and act upon.

Underpinned by institutional legitimacy, this study explores how South African public university senior managers struggled to maintain legitimacy during an unplanned radical change process.

Gioia's grounded theory analysis approach is employed to analyse interviews with 37 senior managers of public-funded universities in South Africa.

This study's findings show that a change without proper planning severely damages institutions in all aspects of leadership's normative, empirical, moral and pragmatic legitimacy.

This study contributes to the literature on legitimacy by illustrating the importance of institutional legitimacy during unplanned social change and the factors that negate legitimacy.

Though other legitimacy models have been well developed, they do not apply to such unplanned social change in organisations. This study shows a different angle of the legitimacy crisis under unplanned social change conditions.

Drawing on the social exchange perspective, the authors explore the roles of satisfaction over material rewards, perceived organizational politics and career ambition in the relationship between harmonious workplace climate and employee altruistic behavior in the context of British public sector.

The authors employed SPSS software to estimate ordinary least squares models to test their hypotheses by analyzing data from 161 supervisor–employee dyads from a UK local government.

Satisfaction over material rewards mediates the relationship between harmonious workplace climate and employee altruistic behavior. Both perceived organizational politics and career ambition moderate the mediated effect of harmonious workplace climate on employee altruistic behavior via satisfaction over material rewards.

This study advances the social exchange theory by showing that the norm of reciprocity (e.g. harmonious workplace climate in this study) may not be the only key driver of exchange for altruistic behavior among public sector workers. Still, it can be mediated by satisfaction with pay and promotion opportunities and may be conditional upon individuals' career ambition or their perceptions of organizational politics.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between sexualization of the work environment and emotional exhaustion, and develop some key antecedents of sexualization of the work environment. It was conducted in an emerging society, India, which has a high rate of crime against women, particularly related to sexual harassment and sexual assault.

To test the hypotheses, structural equation modeling was performed. The hypotheses were tested with data from 1,098 white collar workers in India in three ways.

Contact with other gender and flexible work arrangements were positively associated with sexualization of the work environment; and sexualization of the work environment was positively associated with emotional exhaustion. In addition, sexualization of the work environment mediated the relationship between the two antecedent variables and emotional exhaustion.

There is a possible bias arising from the use of cross-sectional data. However, a number of methods were implemented to minimize it, including survey design and data analysis.

The study offers some important suggestions for workplaces with a greater proportion of young male employees, particularly in a societal context like India.

The paper provides evidence of the negative impact of sexualization of the work environment, and thereby contributes to current understanding of the “dark side” of behavior at work that might have significant impact on society.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between transformational leadership and employees’ work engagement based on fit theory. The paper reports an investigation into the way in which employees’ perceptions of transformational leadership and person-job fit affect their work engagement.

To test the authors’ hypotheses, the authors performed structure equation modeling with maximum likelihood estimation on Mplus with bootstrapping proposed by Hayes (2009) with data from 691 full-time employees in China.

The results indicate that transformational leadership has as significant influence on employees’ work engagement as person-job fit in China. Moreover, employees’ perception of person-job fit is found to partially mediate the relationship between transformational leadership and employees’ work engagement.

There is a possible bias arising from the use of cross-sectional data. However, certain methods were implemented to minimize it, including survey design and data analysis.

The paper proposes a number of practical implications for policy makers, HR managers and transformational leaders relating to issues associated with improving levels of employee engagement.

The study contributes to developing leadership and engagement theory by examining a previously unexplored mediator – person-job fit – in a neglected cultural setting. This study promises to open new research avenues in this area.

Based on regulatory focus theory and social exchange theory, the purpose of this paper is to explain how care service workers’ job attitudes, such as job satisfaction, organizational commitment and perceived organizational support, help form their promotion-focus or prevention-focus perceptions of firms’ HR practices.

A survey study of 709 residential care service workers was used to test the developed framework with structure equation modeling analysis.

The empirical results show that the adoption of HR practices in the British care service sector can simultaneously enhance workers’ job motivation and help to correct their work-life imbalance, which have different effects on workers’ job attitudes.

Perceptions of HR practices can create both promotion- and prevention-focussed perceptions from the workers’ perspective. The mixed perceptions about HR practices trigger both perceptions of job motivation and perceptions of work-life imbalance that can then lead to different outcomes with regard to job attitudes.

This study helps practitioners apply HR practices suitably, to certain types of employees in order to drive positive, rather than negative impacts. It is important for managers in the care service industry to take into account the conditions that determine the impacts of HR practices on workers’ job attitudes when deciding to adopt HR practices.

This study contributes to the management literature by providing empirical evidence of the critical role played by job motivation and work-life imbalance in the perceptions of HR practices and job attitudes link.

The importance of foresight is discussed in relation to why traditional scenario planning methodology is problematic at achieving it. The “survivor syndrome” is borrowed from the human resources literature and presented as a metaphor for foresight to illustrate how better “scenarios” can be achieved by understanding the syndrome better. A practice perspective is given on the use of a seven-theme framework as a method of interviewing survivors. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The paper draws from an empirical research that took place during the 2008 global financial crisis to illustrate the richness of the insights that would otherwise not be obtainable through scenario planning methods that do not involve “survivors.” In that research, semi-structured interviews were employed with key personnel at multiple levels of one private and one public organization that had undergone a redundancy process at the time of the crisis to explore its effect on the remaining workforce.

The “survivor syndrome” itself would be minimized if managers consider the feelings of survivors with more open communication. Survivors in private firms were found generally to experience anxiety, but are more likely to remain more motivated, than their counterparts in the public sector. These detailed insights create more accurate “scenarios” in scenario planning exercises.

Organizational performance can be better enhanced if the survivor syndrome can be better managed. In turn, scenario planning, as a form of organizational foresight, is better practiced through managing the survivor syndrome. Scenario planning methodology has proliferated well in the human resource management literature.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate recent healthcare reform in the USA, which allows insurance companies to proactively intervene in improving the long-term health of employees, by providing wellness programs as part of their benefits package.

The authors present and analyze data on how employees of a large US Midwest “media and education” company (n=154) perceive economic incentives toward well-being. Data are collected using survey methods and analyzed with a logistic regression.

This study suggests that fairness, accessibility, intention to switch to a healthier lifestyle and desire to see more health-related initiatives affect the way employees seek to participate in the new involuntary wellness programs. By contrast, satisfaction, participation, and income to not affect how these new programs are perceived.

These findings suggest that human resource managers should pay attention to employees who are not active in existing wellness programs, and provide support during the transition toward the new involuntary programs, to avoid potential frustration, demotivation, disengagement and, ultimately, decreasing performance among employees.

The study is among the first to analyze involuntary wellness programs in the USA, and it provides a basis on which to expand further studies. This research contributes to support the idea that employee wellness is unlikely to be enforced by rule or policy.