Search results

This paper sought to understand the communication activities of employees who were required to work from home because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors examined the relationship between these individuals' efficient and interrupting communication with their peers in other locations and with individuals who were colocated with them at home. The authors also investigated these workers' job engagement and willingness to speak out about organizational issues.

This paper drew upon a survey of 579 employees via an online panel.

Efficient communication positively predicted employees' job engagement, whereas interruptions negatively predicted job engagement. Additional analyses showed that efficient communication was positively associated with job engagement, which in predicted a higher level of employee voice. Managers showed significantly higher levels of job engagement and voice than nonmanagers.

Recommendations are made for communication managers to cultivate job engagement and to manage interruptions with home-based employees.

Scholars with an interest in job demands and resources have not fully examined how interpersonal communication shapes job engagement and voice scholars have often overlooked teleworkers' communication needs. This study adds depth to the communication management literature in both areas.

By utilizing boundary theory and distraction–conflict theory, this study attempted to examine the influential process of supportive teleworking practices granting work scheduling autonomy on work-to-family conflict (WFC) via the mediating mechanism of work interruption initiated from home.

The study conducted two-wave online questionnaire survey to obtain a final sample of 277 remote knowledge workers in Taiwan during the peak period of COVID-19 pandemic. Hypotheses were tested with partial least squares-structural equation modelling using SmartPLS 3.0 software.

The results revealed that supportive teleworking practices did not directly decrease the level of WFC while home-sourced work interruptions fully mediated the negative relationship between supportive teleworking practices and WFC.

This provides a more nuanced explanation for how and why supportive teleworking practices are beneficial for employees to cope with the challenge of work–home interferences under the new ways of working. The findings simultaneously address evidence-based practices to better deal with mandatory teleworking during potential societal crisis beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.

Work interruptions (WIs) due to social media are becoming more and more common in the daily lives of organizations. However, the relationship between WI and work performance of employees is still unclear. This study aims to investigate the effects of WIs due to social media on employees' work performance in terms of different mechanisms; it also considers the moderating role of social media usage.

Using the jobs demands-resource (JD-R) model, this paper proposes a research model to investigate the effects of WIs on employee work performance from the perspective of the enabling mechanism and burden mechanism. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to analyze the data of 444 employees.

The results show that (1) with regard to the enabling mechanism path, WI has a positive effect on employees' sense of belonging, which further has a positive effect on employees' work performance; (2) with regard to the burden mechanism path, WI has a positive effect on employees' interruption overload; however, the effect of employee interruption overload on employees' work performance is not significant, and (3) social media used for either work or social purposes can strengthen the relationship between WI and interruption overload, while social media used for work-related purposes can reduce the relationship between WI and a sense of belonging.

First, this paper contributes to the WI literature by clarifying how WI affects employees' work performance through different mechanisms, namely the enabling mechanism and the burden mechanism. Second, this paper contributes to the WI literature by revealing a boundary condition, namely social media use, between WI and a sense of belonging and between WI and employees' interruption overload.

When employees complete their work tasks, they often experience intrusions stemming from the work (professional intrusions) or the home domain (personal intrusions). Yet, little is known about the respective implications of these two types of intrusions for employees’ productivity. This paper aims to investigate how professional and personal intrusions at work relate to the bright (perceived performance) and dark (procrastination) sides of employees' productivity. Based on recent advances in Self-Determination Theory, the authors also examined the mediating role of psychological need unfulfillment in these relations.

The authors relied on a cross-sectional survey design. A total of 229 French employees took part in the study.

Results from structural equation modelling indicated that need unfulfillment mediated the negative association between personal intrusions and employees’ performance and the positive relation between personal intrusions and procrastination. Professional intrusions were positively related to the soldiering dimension of procrastination only.

This study sheds light on the differentiated effects of personal and professional intrusions, while uncovering the psychological mechanisms at play. Personal intrusions, by triggering employees’ need unfulfillment, were found to have more extended detrimental consequences than professional intrusions. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is also the first to demonstrate the mediating role of need unfulfillment in the relations between socio-contextual characteristics and individual functioning, and thus contributes to Self-Determination Theory.

This paper revolves around the central question: is it possible to do “proper ethnography” without complete participant observation? The authors draw upon a student's experiences of negotiating National Health Service (NHS) ethical approval requirements and access into the student's research field, a British NHS hospital and having to adapt data collection methods for the student's doctoral research. The authors examine some of the positional (insider/outsider, native gone academic), methodological (long-term/interrupted, overt/covert) and contextual challenges that threatened the student's ethnographic study.

The paper draws on reflexive vignettes written during the student's doctorate, capturing significant moments and issues within the student's research.

The authors highlight the temporal, practical, ethical and emotional challenges faced in attempting an ethnography of nursing culture within a highly regulated research environment. Having revealed the student's experience of researching this specific culture and finding ways to overcome these challenges, the authors conclude that the contemporary ethnographer needs to be increasingly flexible, opportunistic and somewhat covert.

The authors argue that it is possible to do “proper” and “good” ethnography without complete participant observation – it is not the method, the observation, that is the essence of ethnography, but whether the researcher achieves real understanding through thick descriptions of the culture that explain “what is really going on here”.

The authors hope to assist doctoral students engage in “good” ethnographic research within (potentially) risk-averse host organisations, such as the NHS, whilst being located in neo-liberal performative academic organisations (Foster, 2017; McCann et al., 2020). The authors wish to contribute to the journal to ensure good ethnography is accessible and achievable to (particularly) doctoral researchers who have to navigate complex challenges exacerbated by pressures in both the host and home cultures. The authors wish to see doctoral researchers survive and thrive in producing good organisational ethnographies to ensure such research is published (Watson 2012), cognisant of the pressures and targets to publish in top-ranked journals (Jones et al. 2020).

Having identified key challenges, the authors demonstrate how these can be addressed to ensure ethnography remains accessible to and achievable for, doctoral researchers, particularly in healthcare organisations. The authors conclude that understanding can be attained in what they propose as a hybrid form of “propportune” ethnography that blends the aim of the essence of “proper” anthropological approaches with the “opportunism” of contemporary data collection solutions.

Employees' personal Internet usage (PIU) has become increasingly common at work. It is important for both researchers and managers to understand how PIU affects employee creative performance. This study aims to examine what kind of PIU is likely to increase or decrease employee creative performance and why. The authors also examine a potential boundary condition for the effect of PIU on employee creative performance.

Based on conservation of resource (COR) theory and broaden and build theory, the authors investigated the impact of two types of PIU, namely within-task PIU and between-task PIU, on the creative performance of knowledge workers. The authors conducted a daily diary study and surveyed 107 knowledge workers in China over 10 consecutive working days (n = 1,070) to test the model.

The authors find that within-task PIU reduces knowledge workers' creative performance by decreasing the workers' positive emotion, whereas between-task PIU promotes the performance by increasing positive emotion. The above relationships become stronger when knowledge workers perceive a higher level of organisational support.

The authors' study makes theoretical contributions by advancing researchers' understanding of the situations in which PIU may decrease or increase employee creative performance. The findings are also useful for developing organisational policies to take advantage of the positive side of PIU whilst avoiding PIU's negative side.

The authors investigate the relationship between instant messenger (IM) use and work performance, mediated by interruptions and two key indicators of the stress associated with technology use: overload and complexity.

The authors validate this research model using partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) with data collected through a survey of 416 working professionals.

The data reveal that while IM use contributes minimally to work interruptions and to a greater extent to technological complexity, these two constructs fully mediate the direct influence of IM use at work on technology overload, and meanwhile significantly and directly contribute to work performance.

This research provides theoretical insights into the deployment of IM and its actual impacts in the workplace. To improve the generalisation of the findings, the authors call for more IM-related research in other countries, with more native theories and various methodologies in this domain.

The level of stress generated through IM use is moderate, considering IM is not a significant contributor to work interruptions. Thus, despite the potential negative effects of IM communication, the positive effects of using IM at work prevail. As a result, the technology can be promoted as long as employees, their managers and the organisation as a whole are well prepared. Employees can transfer skills and behaviour from the personal setting to their work environment and thus may find an intrinsic motivation to make better use of the IM technology at work.

The authors argue that this research model is novel for its perspective on evaluating the actual impacts of IM use at work instead of the reasons of using it. The authors conceptualise the process to explain how IM contributes to interruptions and other technostress indicators in the working context, and the impact on performance. Contrary to some prior research, the authors find that overall IM applications do not have a negative impact on work performance, and instead may enhance it.

Message stream advertising (MSA) has become an increasingly popular option for advertising on mobile social media. However, MSA is often avoided by consumers, and this avoidance deserves more research attention. The purpose of this study is therefore to identify the underlying mechanism and key variables that affect consumer avoidance of MSA in the context of mobile social media.

A face-to-face survey was administered to current mobile users of WeChat (N = 438). Structural equation modeling was conducted to test the relationships in the research model.

Results revealed that mobile consumers employ mechanical avoidance methods (i.e. zipping, muting and zapping) against MSA. The findings also demonstrated that advertising intrusiveness (stimulus) is directly linked to negative emotions, perceived entertainment and sense of control (organism), which, in turn, relate to MSA avoidance (response).

The study contributes to the MSA avoidance literature by using the stimulus-organism-response model to deepen the understanding of consumers' MSA avoidance on mobile social media, and it suggests important managerial implications for advertising practitioners and platform operators.

Project-based organizations (PBOs) face challenges to enhance employee work engagement because of dynamic and constant role configuration. Accordingly, this study aims to explore how ethical leadership enhances employee work engagement from a sensemaking perspective.

This study used a questionnaire-based quantitative research design to collect data from 194 full-time employees in PBOs. The data were analyzed via partial least squares-structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) technique to test hypotheses.

The findings show a positive relationship between ethical leadership and work engagement. Additionally, the relationship between ethical leadership and work engagement is mediated by two sensemaking mechanisms, i.e. goal commitment and prosocial.

This study deepens the understanding of how ethical leadership enhances work engagement in PBOs by providing two sensemaking mechanisms. By exploring the sensemaking process through which ethical leaders help employees construct identity, the findings contribute to the current literature on how ethical leadership enhances work engagement in PBOs.

Post-COVID-19, public K–12 schools are still facing the consequences of the years of interrupted learning. Schools serving minoritized students are particularly at risk for facing challenges with academics, behavior and student social emotional health. The university counseling programs are in positions to build capacity in urban schools while also supporting counselors-in-training through service-learning opportunities.

The following conceptual manuscript demonstrates how counselor education counseling programs and public schools can harness the capacity-building benefits of university–school partnerships. While prevalent in fields like special education, counselor educators have yet to heed the hall to participate in mutually beneficial partnership programs.

Using the multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) and the components of the university–school partnerships, counselor educators and school stakeholders can work together to support student mental health, school staff well-being and counselor-in-training competence.

The benefits and opportunities within the university–school partnerships are well documented. However, few researchers have described a model to support partnerships between the university counseling programs and urban elementary schools. We provide a best practice model using the principles of university–school partnerships and a school’s existing MTSS framework.