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The purpose of this paper is to report and discuss the principal findings of a recent study of thinking and practice about workforce health and wellbeing among UK accounting and finance and human resource management professionals.

The data informing the paper were collected using postal questionnaires to two samples of 1,000 UK accounting and finance and human resource directors. The research design incorporated the facility for a full second mailing to respondents.

The responses received from the sample of human resource directors were generally more supportive of viewing workforce health and wellbeing as a valuable organisational asset. Accounting and finance professionals employed in private sector organisations were the least enthusiastic about such issues.

While the design of the questionnaire afforded the opportunity for commentary on answers by respondents, semi‐structured interviews will allow a more detailed exploration of the issues.

The UK accountancy profession has yet to fully appreciate the significance of the intellectual capital phenomenon. In seeking to engage health and wellbeing issues, it may be desirable to consider collaboration with the human resource management profession.

Health and wellbeing have seldom been recognised as key constituents of human capital. Consequently, this is the first such study to be carried out.

The purpose of this paper is to identify employee wellness as a further component of intellectual capital and to illustrate how it might be possible to account for it in ways that depart from accounting's traditional focus on costs and valuations.

The paper is discursive in approach, considering a range of ideas relevant to visualising employee wellness as intellectual capital and how to account for it as such.

Employee wellness a component of primary intellectual capital, being something that employees bring to their organisations together with their experience, expertise, know‐how, leadership skills, creativity, etc. It is also a component of secondary intellectual capital envisaged as initiatives designed to promote greater levels of health and fitness among employees. While it is not possible to place financial valuations on employee wellness, individual or collectively, it is possible to develop metrics that will communicate useful information to a variety of stakeholders. In addition, employee wellness is a suitable topic for the development of self accounts by organisational participants.

The paper is an early contribution to a new field of enquiry and seeks to encourage further studies both empirical and conceptual.

Legalists and social scientists have not been able to explain the expansion of gay rights in a conservative age because they refuse to respect the special qualities of judicial decision making. These qualities require the Supreme Court to look simultaneously at the past, present, and future, and, most importantly, to determine questions of individual rights through a consideration of how citizens are to live under a continuing rights regime. Unless scholars understand how and why Supreme Court decision making differs from that of more directly politically accountable institutions we can expect no greater success in explaining or predicting individual rights in the future.

Presents an exploratory study on travel agents’ attitudes towards automation. Surveys 167 travel agents from both Canada and New Zealand. Shows that there are four distinct groups of agents whose attitudes towards automation differ quite substantially and that these attitudes are related not so much to current use of technology but more to perceived future usage.

Part I of this paper addressed the environmental and leadership factors that contribute to employee engagement. Next, the purpose of this paper is to add the job and person to the engagement equation.

Summarizes the characteristics of engaging jobs. Then, reviews individual personality traits that engaged individuals are more likely to exhibit: hardiness, internal locus of control, active coping style, high self esteem, low neuroticism, and high extraversion. Finally, discusses the importance of a “match” between the employee's preferences and the general work conditions and offers performance improvement implications.

Engagement is a complex topic and a challenging goal. An engagement‐friendly culture values the diversity of talents employees bring to the table, respects individual needs, and inspires all employees to pursue a common and exciting vision of the future. Logically, engagement will not be impacted by a single training program, regardless of its quality. Enhancing engagement is a long‐term proposition.

Individuals are unlikely to become engaged because someone told them they should. Engagement occurs naturally, when the conditions are right, when the leaders are inspiring, when individuals find the ideal place in which to apply their strengths. If this is true, performance improvement professionals might consider the following interventions: educate the leaders; focus on career development; champion work‐life balance; encourage relationships.

The Equal Pay Act 1970 (which came into operation on 29 December 1975) provides for an “equality clause” to be written into all contracts of employment. S.1(2) (a) of the 1970 Act (which has been amended by the Sex Discrimination Act 1975) provides:

We discuss how attachment theory can help leaders maintain security in their relationships with followers during crisis, using the COVID-19 worldwide pandemic as an example. We describe how the COVID-19 pandemic has undermined the typical ways leaders may have fostered secure relationships with their followers. Guided by Lewin's action research paradigm, we integrate research on attachment theory with recent research on the COVID-19 pandemic to present leader interventions to maintain attachment security in spite of the disruption caused by COVID-19. We then discuss how these propositions can guide leader interventions in other types of crisis.

Attachment theory has received considerable attention in recent years from management and leadership scholars. We extend this line of inquiry by drawing parallels between the strange situation, a now classic paradigm for researching infant–caregiver attachment systems, to understand attachment security in leader–follower relationships during times of crisis.

We find that the crises such as COVID-19 present a challenge to attachment security in leader–follower relationships. We also find that research on adult attachment in response to crises and traumatic events is relevant to understanding how leaders can foster positive relations with followers during times of crisis when physical proximity is not possible.

We apply attachment theory and leadership research to present a framework for leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic; however, many of our theoretical assertions and related interventions could be applied to other unprecedented crises that disrupt leader–follower relationships. Hence, our paper offers a unique lens that is centered on the attachment security within the leader–follower relationship during crisis.

Research on perceptions of organizational politics has mostly explored the negative aspects and detrimental outcomes for organizations and employees. Responding to recent calls in the literature for a more balanced treatment, we expand on how positive and negative organizational politics perceptions are perceived as stressors and affect employee outcomes through their influence on the social environment. We propose that employees appraise positive and negative organization politics perceptions as either challenge or hindrance stressors, to which they respond with engagement and disengagement as problem-focused and emotion-focused coping strategies. Specifically, employees who appraise the negative politics perceptions as a hindrance, use both problem- and emotion-focused coping, which entails one of three strategies: (1) decreasing their engagement, (2) narrowing the focus of their engagement, or (3) disengaging. Although these strategies result in negative outcomes for the organization, employees’ coping leads to their positive well-being. In contrast, employees appraising positive politics perceptions as a challenge stressor use problem-focused coping, which involves increasing their engagement to reap the perceived benefits of a positive political environment. Yet, positive politics perceptions may also be appraised as a hindrance stressor in certain situations, and, therefore lead employees to apply emotion-focused coping wherein they use a disengagement strategy. By disengaging, they deal with the negative effects of politics perceptions, resulting in positive well-being. Thus, our framework suggests an unexpected twist to the stress process of politics perceptions as a strain-provoking component of employee work environments.