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Whereas job crafting and idiosyncratic deals (i-deals) have primarily been studied in white-collar jobs, there is a lack of research on job design in less skilled and highly structured work. Our study addresses this gap by analyzing the effects of transformational leadership on job crafting and i-deals in blue- and white-collar jobs.

To test our hypotheses, we surveyed 285 employees (31.9% blue-collar employees and 68.1% white-collar employees) in the German craft industry, using structural equation modeling for data analysis.

Our results show that transformational leadership is a strong predictor of job crafting and i-deals but that its influence depends on the occupational group. More specifically, the moderating role of the occupational group in the relationship between transformational leadership and job crafting differs regarding job crafting’s dimensions. Concerning i-deals, transformational leadership’s influence on both development and task i-deals is stronger in white-collar jobs than it is in blue-collar jobs.

The study provides new insights into the important role of the work context in which leadership takes place. In particular, these insights can guide leaders in how to manage different occupational groups to engage them in proactive behaviors.

This study is the first to compare the contextual roles of blue- and white-collar jobs with regard to job design. By examining the influence of transformational leadership on job crafting and i-deals in two occupational groups, our study contributes to research on the role of work context in the effectiveness of transformational leadership in encouraging employees to engage in proactive behaviors.

Given the detrimental effects of job content plateau, the paper aims to study the impact of job content plateau on employees’ career commitment. In doing so, the authors examine whether the lapses in job content plateau can be addressed through developmental i-deals. A final purpose is to examine whether proactive employees are better positioned to obtain work arrangements that help them develop and remain committed to their careers.

Data were collected from full-time working executives employed in different organizations. These executives enrolled in a part-time MBA program. Data was collected at different time points and analyzed using the process macro (Preacher and Hayes, 2004).

The results suggest that developmental i-deals mediated the relationship between job content plateau and career commitment. In addition, proactive employees were better disposed to seal the deal and develop themselves – helping them to stay committed to their careers.

Prior studies highlight the negative consequences of job content plateau because it does not provide avenues to learn and develop. This paper addresses the gap in locating opportunities to learn and develop (an aspect that was missing in the job content plateau) through developmental i-deals. First, the study helps answer how to address learning gaps in jobs. Second, who can capitalize on their efforts once the organization sponsors learning opportunities.

The current inquiry advances the public relations field and practice in several ways. First, this research addresses a clear gap in research on subjective well-being, specifically among PR professionals across career stages and generations. Second, the findings reveal important generational similarities and differences in how PR practitioners talk about well-being. This provides an empirical basis for developing tailored, multi-generational approaches to supporting well-being in PR workplaces. Lastly, this research provides practical implications for PR professionals to understand generational perspectives and to implement flexible policies to improve well-being.

The current study explored subjective well-being (SWB) across generations of public relations professionals. Using a qualitative approach, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 PR practitioners at various career levels – entry, mid-level and senior.

Analysis revealed several similarities but a key disparity among cohorts. Senior-level professionals specifically reported struggling with work–life balance and the perceived ability to be autonomous, while entry-level professionals expressed commitment to setting boundaries on their time. These findings highlight a need for the PR industry to establish flexible workplace standards that enable employees at different career stages to collaborate and support one another’s well-being.

Our findings will appeal to your readers who seek to cultivate employee subjective well-being and understand generational issues via qualitative methods. By conducting a qualitative study in an understudied area, PR industry leaders and managers can support employee well-being across generations and career stages.

Our study is the first to examine generational dispositions as it relates to SWB across the public relations industry.

This study aims to identify the role of e-learning for the continuing professional development (CPD) of university librarians in Pakistan to deliver value-added library services.

Explanatory sequential design was applied to address this study’s objectives. First, quantitative data were gathered from 341 respondents working in 244 universities and then qualitative data were gathered through an interview guide from 27 subjects working in different university libraries of Pakistan.

The findings of this study revealed that respondents realized the benefits of e-learning for continuing professional development positively. E-learning enabled university librarians to perform IT-based tasks through an adequate usage of digital technologies. The findings also manifested that the majority of the respondents faced the challenges of the lack of technical support, and inadequate organizational support to adopt e-learning for CPD. Results displayed e-learning courses should be conducted by local trainers.

This study has provided pertinent theoretical, practical and social contributions by identifying the role of e-learning for the CPD of university librarians of Pakistan to deliver value-added services.

Previous research suggests the crucial role of parents in developing social behaviors of their children. However, less evidence is available on the role of parents in shaping responsible financial management behavior among children for their later life. This study bridges this gap by investigating the role of financial parenting in improving well-being among young Saudi people. Particularly, this study examines the role of financial parenting, childhood financial socialization and childhood financial experiences in developing responsible financial self-efficacy and financial coping behaviors to determine financial well-being among young adults in Saudi Arabia.

This study uses a two-step mixed-method approach comprising analyses of symmetric (net effects) and asymmetric (combinatory effects) modelling to test the proposed model. A symmetrical analysis examines the role of financial parenting factors that are sufficient for improving financial well-being among Saudis. An asymmetrical analysis is used to explore that a set of combinations of financial parenting conditions lead to high performance of financial well-being. Data have been collected from 350 students enrolled in undergraduate and postgraduate programs in Saudi Arabia.

According to asymmetric modeling (i.e. fsQCA) analysis, parents and practitioners can combine financial parenting, childhood financial socialization and childhood financial experiences along with financial self-efficacy and financial coping behaviors in a way that satisfied the conditions (i.e. causal antecedent conditions) leading to high financial well-being. Importantly, the condition of high financial well-being is not mirror opposite of causal antecedent conditions of low financial well-being.

This study contributes to the current knowledge by applying both symmetrical and asymmetrical modelling to indicate a high level of financial well-being. Besides, there is sparse empirical evidence available in the context of Saudi Arabia on how financial parenting, socialization and financial experiences in childhood improve children's financial well-being in their later life.

According to asymmetric modeling (i.e. fsQCA) analysis, parents and practitioners can combine financial parenting, childhood financial socialization and childhood financial experiences along with financial self-efficacy and financial coping behaviors in a way that satisfied the conditions (i.e. causal antecedent conditions) leading to high financial well-being. Importantly, the condition of high financial well-being is not mirror opposite of causal antecedent conditions of low financial well-being. The parents and practitioners must be cautious to regulate the condition in which the combination of the antecedents is not in line with the causal recipes of financial well-being negation.

This study deepens the current knowledge by employing both symmetrical and asymmetrical analysis for testing structural and configurational models indicating the high performance of financial well-being . The study proposes and tests an integrated model to bring new contributions to prior literature. This study also attempts to propose valuable research directions for future researchers interested in the topic.

By aligning the “Small is beautiful” and “Bleak house” theories, this study aims to examine how robotic working patterns affect employees’ working life and job satisfaction (JS) in Bangladeshi-owned ethnic minority businesses.

The study uses information from 40 face-to-face interviews of employees from 20 Bangladeshi restaurants in Greater London.

The findings suggest that workers are treated as “robots”, consistent with the “Bleak house” view of small businesses in this segment of the restaurant and hospitality industry. Owners expect employees to perform multiple tasks, to assume many responsibilities, to work long shifts, without any holiday allowances. Consistent with the “Small is beautiful model”, the findings underscore the lack of written employment contracts and the emergence of acute staff shortages.

The findings can inform owner-managers’ decisions to refine their HR strategies and improve the work conditions of employees in ethnic minority-owned restaurants. The “Small is beautiful” model highlights five key interventions for improving ethnic minority business work quality: recruit employees with first preferences for restaurant jobs, introduce flexible work arrangements, formalise work, improve market research and tackle acute staff shortages.

The study contributes novel insights into the small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and job quality literature by offering new qualitative-based findings on the negative impact of robotic work patterns on work quality and JS in ethnic minority SMEs.

This paper investigated the intrinsic and extrinsic sources of academic well-being among university teachers at one university in Qatar, to understand how different factors influence their well-being within academia.

Drawing on systems theory, this study employs Q methodology research. Data were collected and analyzed using 35 statements (Q-items) related to academic well-being. Twenty-one university teachers participated in the study, providing a range of perspectives on the factors that influenced their academic well-being.

The analysis revealed two distinct perspectives among the participants concerning the sources of academic well-being. Factor 1 (F-1) emphasized workplace conditions as the primary source of well-being, whereas Factor 2 (F-2) highlighted individual conditions. Additionally, a significant portion of participants did not align strongly with either factor, indicating diverse and individualized sources of well-being that suggest a complex interplay of various elements affecting academic well-being.

The study’s sample size is limited to twenty-one university teachers at a single institution, which may affect the generalizability of the findings. Future research should consider a larger, more diverse sample to explore the universality of the findings across different academic contexts.

The implications for university teachers, researchers, leaders and policymakers include a better understanding of the sources that contribute to academic well-being and the need for adopting systems thinking in addressing these sources.

This study employs a unique application of Q methodology within a systems theory framework to explore the sources of academic well-being among university teachers. Unlike previous research that has primarily focused on anxiety, stress and burnout, this study provides a holistic perspective by capturing the complex interplay between organizational structures and individual identities.

Our study explores the effects of immigration on the employment of native middle-skilled workers, focusing on how this effect varies with the specificity of their occupational skill bundles.

Exploiting the 2002 opening of the Swiss labor market to EU workers and using register data on the location and occupation of these workers, our findings provide novel results on the labor market effects of immigration.

We show that the inflow of EU workers led to an increase in the employment of native middle-skilled workers with highly specific occupational skills. This finding could be attributed to immigrant workers reducing existing skill gaps, enhancing the quality of job-worker matches, and alleviating firms' capacity restrictions. This allowed firms to create new jobs, thereby providing increased employment options for middle-skilled workers with highly specialized skills.

Previous literature has predominantly highlighted the disadvantages of specific occupational skills compared to general skills in the context of labor market shocks. However, our findings reveal that workers with specific occupational skills can benefit from an immigration-driven labour market shock. These results suggest that policy conclusions regarding the role of specific occupational skills should be more nuanced.

Early research on overqualification suggested that overqualification is primarily associated with negative attitudes and behavior. As a consequence, hiring practitioners were advised against hiring overqualified job applicants. However, recent studies have revealed that there are several potential positive consequences of overqualification. Given this change in perspective on overqualification, we examine how hiring practitioners nowadays look at overqualified job applicants, and what their considerations are for hiring an overqualified job applicant or not.

We have interviewed 33 hiring practitioners to examine their attitudes and considerations toward hiring overqualified job applicants.

Results show that hiring practitioners are aware of potential positive as well as negative consequences of overqualification and consider a variety of factors to assess how beneficial hiring an overqualified candidate will be. These factors fall under three categories: Individual considerations, interpersonal considerations and contextual considerations.

We show that overqualification is not a stigma anymore and that the decision to hire an overqualified job applicant or not depends on a mixture of factors that are carefully considered. Two of these three considerations transcend the individual level (i.e. the overqualified person), whereas most research and theories on the consequences of overqualification do not go beyond the individual level. As such, our findings call for more theory and research on interpersonal and contextual factors shaping the consequences of overqualification.

We investigate whether women are more likely than men to choose to pursue a competency-based labour market integration programme, rather than the time-based labour market integration programme. We further investigate whether women with existing but uncertified skills are even more likely to pursue a competency-based labour market integration programme.

We test our hypotheses using ordinary least squares applied to linear probability models. We discuss the relative advantages of this methodology. We show the robustness of our results through multiple specifications and estimation methods. Finally, we discuss the reasons preventing us from granting our results a causal interpretation and discuss how they are surmountable in future research.

Women are significantly more likely to enrol into competency-based programmes, relative to time-based. Women with existing but uncertified skills are significantly more likely to enrol into competency-based programmes, whereas women without skills or with college degrees are not significantly different from the baseline. Our findings are robust to various specifications, and we include a comprehensive set of fixed-effect vectors, addressing industrial, occupational and time-varying state specificities.

First, our empirical test of hypothesis H2 is hindered by the construction of the “some college or associate’s degree” variable in RAPIDS data. “Some college” is very different from an associate’s degree. Second we had to choose between omitted variable bias and selection bias. Because of the demonstrated importance of the occupation and industry variables in existing literature, we included those variables at the risk of selection bias. Occupation and industry fixed effects reduce, but do not eliminate, omitted variable bias. Finally, the third limitation of this paper is external validity. Registered Apprenticeship programmes are quite idiosyncratic to the United States.

The rollout and expansion of CBRA may thus be an avenue through policymakers may reduce the gender training gap. This may in turn give more women access to the labour market and allow more women to benefit from the “wage premia” of Registered Apprenticeship completion on the labour market (Lou and Hawley, 2019).

This article is the first that applies econometric methods to investigate women’s choices of labour market integration programmes, using Registered Apprenticeship as a case study. We discuss the implications of our findings, highlighting how competency-based programmes may be an approach to better serving more diverse populations in Registered Apprenticeship.