Search results

With HR now at the center of efforts to address the talent crisis, how can HR strategists best deploy their resources to help their organizations to rise to the challenge?

Data-driven digital solutions can be a good starting point for discovering what’s working with existing employees. A new breed of high-tech tools are giving HR departments the means to more thoroughly and actionably understand the factors that attract, retain and drive away quality employees.

Based on data from these tools, HR teams can design inviting, engaging and productive work environments.

The struggle to attract and retain quality talent in the workplace is real, it is escalating and it has landed right at the doorstep of HR departments. It is perhaps the most pressing priority they – and their entire organizations – must confront to keep pace in the ongoing US economic expansion.

International relocation is undoubtedly a source of stress for families, and in particular for married couples. Yet, despite familial challenges and the fact that “family concerns” remain a top reason for assignment refusal and assignment failure, including a growing body of anecdotal evidence suggesting that many expatriate marriages fail often at huge cost to organizations, there is not one academic study yet published on expatriate divorce. The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the causes and consequences of expatriate divorce.

In this exploratory case-based study, the author uses respondent data from 13 face-to-face interviews and 25 online survey participants.

Findings demonstrate that expatriate marriages end in divorce for two main reasons: first, a core issue in the marriage that exists before going abroad (e.g. alcoholism, mental health problems) and which continues while abroad; and second, when one or both spouses is negatively influenced by an expatriate culture to such an extent that a form of “group think” results in polarizing behavior that is counter to how they might behave “back home” (e.g. infidelity, sexual misconduct). The consequences of divorce for expatriates are immense and include bankruptcy, destitution, homelessness, depression, psychophysiological illness, alienation from children, and suicide.

Data are cross-sectional and findings are limited by single-response bias. Future studies would do well to research matched samples of couples engaging in global work experiences over different points in time in order to track longitudinal changes in marital quality, including why some go on to divorce while others recover from marital breakdown and stay married.

One of the strongest pieces of advice offered by most of the respondents is for spouses, and trailing spouses in particular, to know their legal rights and entitlements in each country where they are living in the event of divorce.

This is the first study to empirically explore the lived experience of expatriate divorce.

Robert Franklin Hoxie was of the first generation of University of Chicago economists, a figure of significance in his own time. He is often heralded as the first of the Institutional economists and the impetus behind the field of labor economics. Yet today, his contributions appear as mere footnotes in the history of economic thought, when mentioned at all, despite the fact that in his professional and popular writings he tackled some of the most pressing problems of the day. The topics upon which he focused included bimetallism, price theory, methodology, the economics profession, socialism, syndicalism, scientific management, and trade unionism, the last being the field with which he is most closely associated. His work attracted the notice of some of the most famous economists of his time, including Frank Fetter, J. Laurence Laughlin, Thorstein Veblen, and John R. Commons. For all the promise, his suicide at the age of 48 ended what could have been a storied career. This paper is an attempt to resurrect Hoxie through a review of his life and work, placing him within the social and intellectual milieux of his time.

The study investigated the impact of theory of constraints (TOC), a change methodology previously employed in the private sector and now adapted to the health sector, on three NHS Trust departments, Neurosurgery, Eyes and ENT, especially in relation to reducing waiting lists in the system and improving throughput of patients.Design/methodology/approach – Data were collected over a period of 40 months, on a number of NHS performance indicators, before and after the TOC intervention. An interrupted time series design with switching replications was used to investigate the impact of the intervention.Findings – An overall ARIMA analysis indicated that TOC had an impact in both Eyes and ENT. Out of 18 measures, 16 went in the direction of the hypotheses, the probability of these changes in the predicted direction by chance alone was 0.0006. However, there was a lack of significant improvements in neurosurgery that was associated with the size of the system, complexity of treating neurological disorder, heavy reliance on support services, impact of emergencies on elective work and the motivation and receptiveness of staff to the proposed changes.Practical implications – In order for organisations to maximise the benefits of TOC organisations should take into account the social environment in which they exist.Originality/value – The importance of customising the intervention to the local needs of each department, and the requirements for leadership and robust project management are highlighted in this study. Failure to do so can potentially derail the change process.

Technical solutions can be important when key communicators take on the task of making sense of social media flows during crises. However, to provide situation awareness during high-stress assignments, usability problems must be identified and corrected. In usability studies, where researchers investigate the user-friendliness of a product, several types of data gathering methods can be combined. Methods may include subjective (surveys and observations) and psychophysiological (e.g. skin conductance and eye tracking) data collection. This chapter mainly focuses on how the latter type can provide detailed clues about user-friendliness. Results from two studies are summarised. The tool tested is intended to help communicators and journalists with monitoring and handling social media content during times of crises.

Enterprise sustainability is the capacity to create and maintain social, economic, and environmental benefits. While sustainability connotes survival, excellence is the capacity to thrive across critical performance domains. Enter resilience and robustness. Resilience is enterprise ability to self-renew through innovation, changing and reinventing itself by adapting its responses to political, social, economic and other competitive shocks or challenges. Robustness is enterprise resistance or immunity gained through strategies, policies, partnerships, and practices that maintain or advance competitive position when shocks or challenges arise. Resistance as herein constructed is a composition or blend of revival, striving, surviving and thriving. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A sustainable enterprise excellence, resilience and robustness (SEER2) model and assessment regime is proposed. SEER2 integrates excellence and sustainability principles, methodologies, and standards to optimize enterprise performance across the triple bottom line people, planet, and profit domains.

A Springboard to SEER2 model blending simplicity, applicability, and usability by a range of enterprises is introduced. Its enablers include data analytics and intelligence, human ecology, and social-ecological innovation. Springboard technology includes an assessment regime that yields actionable feedback and foresight. These inform next generation strategy, activities and performance that support identification and implementation of best and next best practices and sources of competitive advantage.

The Springboard to SEER2 enterprise self-assessment approach restricts itself to sustainability, excellence, resilience and robustness considerations.

A model integrating SEER2 in relation to strategic resistance is introduced.

This chapter explores the origins of the theme of competitive advantage in 19th and early 20th century economics. This theme, which forms the core of modern Strategic Management, was a battleground for debates about the value of abstract theory versus observations about real-life events. Intellectual genealogies, citations, and other sources show the central roles played by the University of Vienna and Harvard University. These two institutions strongly influenced the theory of monopolistic competition as well as all three modern views of competitive advantage – the industrial as expressed by Porter, the resource-based as expressed by Penrose, and the evolutionary as expressed by Schumpeter.

The teaching and learning of anatomy has experienced a significant paradigm shift. The present study assessed the level of knowledge in anatomy in medical postgraduate students and explored the impact of interventions in the form of anatomical videos on knowledge obtained. An awareness of the importance of human anatomy for clinical skills was created to ensure a certain level of competence be achieved by the end of the anatomy course.

Postgraduate medical students were recruited from various specialties on voluntary basis. The first step was to conduct a preliminary screening exam to determine the level of anatomical knowledge. The students were then divided into two groups at random, one of which received no intervention (the control group), and the other of which watched the videos with content that was pertinent to the practical demonstrations (intervention). To assess the effects of the video intervention, a post-test was administered to all students.

Both spot tests (SPOTs) and short answer question (SAQ) components for scores of all the regions from the intervention groups were comparable to the scores obtained by the post-test control group, although the findings were not significant (p > 0.05). However, the intervention group from the abdomen (ABD) region did perform significantly better (p < 0.05) than the screening test score.

The results of the research study imply that interventions like anatomical videos can bridge the postgraduate trainee’s anatomy knowledge gap in a practical method which will immensely help in increasing their knowledge.

Knowing what employees expect in the never normal environment post-COVID-19 can help organizations understand talent needs and preferences – including how and where they want to work, as well as what they need to feel productive – and then initiate action on those expectations. So, this paper aims to delineate the factors that makes an employee experience (EX) that align, empower and accelerate business impact.

This viewpoint paper draws on extant literature review – academic journals and mainstream business magazines – and establish a case for EX as an emerging concept in employer–employee relationship.

EX is the function of work, workplace culture, empowering technologies, flexible human resource policies/practices and importantly inclusive leadership. Positive EX determines employee engagement, which is likely to create a “positivity spiral” of culture, engagement and importantly organisational bottom-line.

EX is the new value proposition. This paper delineates five critical elements of EX and establish the case for continuing the research on EX as a critical line of inquiry in the human resource management (HRM) research tradition.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the interplay between identity and global mobility in the careers of senior, female talent, uniquely taking into account the perceptions of both female and male participants. In addition, the role organisations can play in enabling women to overcome these identity constraints is identified.

This interpretivist study draws on data from 38 in-depth interviews with senior managers in a large, multinational organisation to elicit a rich picture of how such careers are enacted.

Findings reveal how identity conflicts function as a glass border for globally mobile, senior female talent. Ways in which talent can access positive identity narratives to inform global mobility choices are identified.

The limitations of this study include the relatively small sample size and the single case design of this research. The findings, however, offer insights into the identity work of globally mobile, female talent across different contexts.

Organisations can facilitate access to identity narratives through mentoring, face-to-face forums and via the internet to enable globally mobile, female talent to make more informed global mobility choices.

Drawing on identity theory, this paper examines how identity work for globally mobile, female talent has more fluid interpersonal boundaries than for men, creating on-going identity struggles. In highlighting how identity narratives can act as a means of breaching the glass border and facilitating global mobility for female talent, a contribution is made to existing debates in the fields of identity, gender studies and global talent management.