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The authors examine the interactive effects of work engagement and work autonomy in enhancing job crafting behaviour and performance.

Dyadic data from a sample of 320 white-collar employees in an Indian manufacturer are analysed through structural equation modelling.

The level of job crafting is highest when both work engagement and work autonomy are high. Job crafting fully mediates the interactive effect of work engagement and autonomy on task performance and partially on contextual performance.

There is value in reviewing organisational constraints on employee autonomy to foster the ways in which highly motivated workers can craft their jobs and, thus, maximise their performance.

This study demonstrates the interactive effects of work engagement and autonomy in enhancing job crafting and, through this mechanism, employee performance.

This study aims to explore barriers and pathways to a whole-institution governance of sustainability within the working structures of universities.

This paper draws on multi-year interviews and hierarchical structure analysis of ten universities in Canada, the USA, Australia, Hong Kong, South Africa, Brazil, the UK and The Netherlands. The paper addresses existing literature that championed further integration between the two organizational sides of universities (academic and operations) and suggests approaches for better embedding sustainability into four primary domains of activity (education, research, campus operations and community engagement).

This research found that effective sustainability governance needs to recognise and reconcile distinct cultures, diverging accountability structures and contrasting manifestations of central-coordination and distributed-agency approaches characteristic of the university’s operational and academic activities. The positionality of actors appointed to lead institution-wide embedding influenced which domain received most attention. The paper concludes that a whole-institution approach would require significant tailoring and adjustments on both the operational and academic sides to be successful.

Based on a review of sustainability activities at ten universities around the world, this paper provides a detailed analysis of the governance implications of integrating sustainability into the four domains of university activity. It discusses how best to work across the operational/academic divide and suggests principles for adopting a whole institution approach to sustainability.

Scholars have pointed out the need for improvement and refinement in public management research, also depending on the role of public administration for sustainable development. Because government organizations employ a substantial portion of the workforce, management practices in the public sector are critical areas for designing, implementing and delivering policies that can achieve the goals set forth in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. For these purposes, and in implementation of the Next Generation EU (NGEU) programme, Italy recently launched an ambitious National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) which includes, among other things, upskilling goals for staff employed, following the modernization process that has involved the Italian public sector in the last decades, with the Decree n. 150/2009. Aiming both to understand the extent of the application of the reform and to answer some basic questions (why, what and how) concerning Individual Performance Appraisal Systems (IPAS), we conducted a content analysis on the 220 documents already produced by the Italian Ministries. The study has been conducted in two different steps of the reform process and provides solid evidence of the reforms' effects on designing and implementing individual performance systems. The analyzed documents reveal no longer-term vision in implementing the IPAS that involves some critical performance management utilities such as training, development, fair pay and deployment of employees, raising new questions about a sustainable approach to the individual performance management process even in public organizations.

In this case study, we offer an analysis of feedback from a student experience survey completed by Black undergraduate students who received proactive, targeted coaching and mentoring support during 2021–2022. All the students were studying at a large higher education institution in the United Kingdom which offers a broad range of degree courses by distance learning.

This paper reports on the intervention delivered and analyses the student experience of being offered, and receiving, proactive coaching and mentoring. It is based on the responses of 102 students who engaged with the experience survey after having self-selected to receive the intervention. What follows is an analysis of their experiences using a qualitative in vivo approach based on word frequency in students’ free-text comments.

The findings presented are that, in this intervention, students who self-select to receive coaching and mentoring support experience tangible (self-reported) behaviour changes with potentially longer term benefits for their studies. These include improved self-confidence and self-efficacy, increased proactive help-seeking behaviour, greater recognition of strengths and achievement and personal growth and self-awareness.

In presenting this case study, we aim to contribute to the growing corpus of practitioner case studies and research papers that show the benefits of coaching and mentoring in higher education and – more specifically – why coaching and mentoring can be a worthwhile targeted intervention for students from underrepresented backgrounds. This lends support to the growing consensus that students with positive, proactive help-seeking behaviours perform better than students not able to access support (Byrne et al., 2014). We conclude the case study with some practical implications for providers looking to provide targeted support to students.

This chapter is devoted to sustainable human resource management that leads to sustainable competitiveness. It features the ways human resources can be managed to carry out sustainable goals and the impact of sustainability on employees' attitudes and behaviours. The aim of this study is to explore the complex objectives of sustainability and human resource management and empirically investigate the dynamic relationship between human resources in science and technology and sustainable competitiveness in the case of 35 European countries. Our contribution emphasizes this interrelationship and its causality. For this research, we applied a vector auto-regression (VAR) model, and the Granger causality method to examine the relationship between human resources in science and technology and sustainable competitiveness. A panel data included 314 observations between 2012 and 2021. The panel VAR for analysing the impulse response function was enriched with the 5% and 95%, using Monte Carlo simulations. The research results revealed bidirectional causality in the European countries between human resources in science and technology and sustainable competitiveness. Human resources in science and technology trigger sustainable competitiveness and vice versa. As an element of originality, our study demonstrates that human resources in science and technology contribute to sustainable performance, and, on the other hand, a more competitive and sustainable environment contributes to the development of human resources in science and technology. Thus, the chapter outlines the role of human resources in science and technology with regard to sustainable human resource management (HRM), and how to navigate these objectives so that they can positively influence sustainable competitiveness.

The construction workforce plays a crucial role in the successful delivery of any construction project and, eventually, the performance of any construction organisation. Effectively managing these workforces becomes crucial. However, past studies have shown that workforce management within the construction industry has been on the back foot, with workers being seen as resources required to deliver construction projects. This situation begs the need for a construction workforce management model that can be tailored to an organisation’s situation and adopted to manage workers and improve organisational performance effectively. To this end, this chapter reviewed existing workforce management theories, models, and practices to develop a suitable approach towards managing the construction workforce. Ultimately, a strategic workforce management with a classical view using a soft workforce management approach that embraces employees’ empowerment and development through trust was proposed. Five major practices that best suit the soft workforce management approach were identified as key constructs in the proposed construction workforce management model.

Children of recent refugees and immigrants are the fastest growing student population in the US public education system. Thus, it is imperative to create research-based pedagogies that value linguistic diversity, provide academic and social–emotional support and embrace life experiences that are often vastly different from those of the teachers and typical students. The goal of this study was to examine the effects of an instructional model designed to address specific academic and social–emotional competencies of linguistically and culturally diverse students on the writing of eight and nine-year-old students (n = 10) enrolled in an afterschool programme serving students from refugee families. The model of explicit writing instruction implemented in the study included culturally responsive literature, mindfulness practices, and differentiation in teaching genre-specific text structure and academic vocabulary. Pre- and post-test personal essays were scored for holistic quality of writing and use of academic vocabulary. The findings indicate that explicit and differentiated instruction in both writing organisation and vocabulary use was effective in increasing the holistic quality of students' personal writing and their ability to integrate academic vocabulary appropriately and meaningfully in independent writing. Implications for culturally responsive instruction for refugee students are discussed.

This paper analyzes the influence of HR function on organizational performance through the effective deployment of high-performance work practices. Although researchers have examined the relationship between these constructs, extant literature demonstrates contradictory findings. Thus, building on contemporary strategic HRM literature this study expands previous frameworks adopting a system thinking perspective, namely the concept of maturity of HRM system.

It is a cross-sectional study, having collected primary data from 424 managers and employees working in 135 organizations. The research model and hypotheses were tested at unit level using structured equation modelling.

The results support a positive impact of the HR function on perceived organizational performance. Furthermore, demonstrating that the mediation through high-performance work practices is partial, supporting that the HR function has an incremental value over HR practices on organizational performance. Inspired by system thinking, this study tested an integrated model that combines the HRM system, HR function and organizational performance. Overall, it contributes to the literature by providing additional evidence to the influence of HR Function for organizational performance.

The data were collected using a questionnaire at a single point in time, and thus, not allowing cause-effect inferences.

The results provide guidance to organizational leaders interested in designing and implementing effective HRM systems and building successful HR departments.

This study advances the understanding of the mechanisms by which HR function, HR practices and HRM system interact to explain organizational performance. Furthermore, it suggests that organizational decision-makers to benefit the most from high-performance work practices should embedded them on mature HRM systems.

Information literacy (IL) is clearly important for academic performance, as evidenced by literature. It could be defined as a set of abilities, attitudes and experiences that enable people to recognize when they need information to solve an issue. The importance of investigating students’ IL competencies cannot be overstated. This study therefore aims to look into the IL development and competencies of high school students in Accra, as there appears to be a dearth of systematic study on this in Ghana.

To investigate this phenomenon, the study used a survey research design with a mixed-methods approach and a post-positivist research paradigm. A total of 454 high school students, 3 librarians and 3 heads of ICT departments from three senior high schools in Accra participated in this study. This study used two methods: an audit of the IL programmes and practices available at the selected schools as well as IL literacy assessment through the use of a standardized test instrument. The data collection tools used were a semi-structured interview schedule and a questionnaire.

This study found that high school students in Accra had low IL competencies. Again, the findings of this study revealed that inadequate infrastructure and lack of formalized IL instructions in schools hindered the IL development of students.

The author considers the study original both in conceptualization and design. The main question being interrogated stems from identified gaps in the literature and this study intends to fill these knowledge gaps. This study’s originality also stems from the fact that there is a paucity of information on the subject of study in the context of Ghana. This study recommends the need to integrate IL in the school curriculum to ensure effective and efficient IL instructions in high schools.