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Customer orientation of service employees relates to customer satisfaction and loyalty, sales growth and business performance. Drawing from conservation of resources (COR) theory, the aim of this study was to test the interactive effects of service employees' role clarity and learning goal orientation on customer orientation. Specifically, it was hypothesized that even under conditions of low role clarity, service employees with high learning goal orientation would maintain a high level of customer orientation.

Participants were 323 employees of 4- and 5-star hotels in Singapore. Using questionnaires, they reported their role clarity, learning goal orientation and customer orientation. For hypothesis testing, moderated regression analysis was performed.

Role clarity and learning goal orientation were significantly related to customer orientation, and in support of the hypothesis, the interaction effect of role clarity and learning goal orientation was also significant. With high role clarity, all employees showed high customer orientation. But with low role clarity, only employees with high learning goal orientation demonstrated high customer orientation.

The recommendations from this study are to include learning goal orientation as a selection criterion for service employees and to clearly define the roles of existing service employees, especially for those with low learning goal orientation.

The originality and value of this study lies in highlighting the importance of learning goal orientation especially under conditions of low role clarity.

The purpose of this study is to explore the role of employees’ underlying implicit person theories in the relationship with innovative work climate and proactive behaviour at work. First, the authors study how an employee’s implicit person theory (IPT), or the domain-general implicit belief about the development potential of people’s attributes, relates to learning goal orientation and proactive learning and entrepreneurial behaviour at work. Second, the authors investigate how employees’ perception of their work climate is associated with this IPT.

The authors set up an exploratory study relying on survey data from a sample of 498 professionally active Flemish adults and analysed a correlational path through SEM.

The authors found that holding an incremental IPT (i.e. believing in the development potential of people’s attributes) positively relates to proactive learning and entrepreneurial behaviour. Moreover, the authors found that employees working in an innovative work climate are more likely to hold an incremental IPT.

This study offers indications that IPT is a relevant explanatory variable in the relationship between innovative work climate on the one hand and learning goal orientation, learning work behaviour and entrepreneurial work behaviour on the other hand. As such, this study suggests that IPT is a promising concept that can be actively endorsed as a relevant underlying psychological process variable for fostering learning and entrepreneurial behaviour in organizations.

Students entering Zayed University are expected to become active participants in their learning. However, the majority of these students have come from a public education system that is recognized to focus on teacher-centered passive learning. Students may be unprepared for this transition. This paper reports on a case study of changes in performance and motivation for students transitioning from passive learning to active learning.

Three students from the public education system were followed through two consecutive courses employing increasing active learning. Methods included observations, surveys, and interviews. Results indicate that the initial transition from passive learning to active learning has a negative impact, mainly due to inadequate preparation. However, subsequent development of skills through exposure results in improvement to the extent that motivation and performance exceed high school levels. It is concluded that the transition from active learning has the capacity to greatly improve student achievement if properly managed.

This study aims to explore how individual personal growth initiative (PGI) mediates the relationship between a positive error orientation and job crafting. Furthermore, it explores the moderating role of the feedback from the leader in this relationship.

Data was collected through a survey conducted on 209 international employees from multiple occupations.

A positive error orientation is indirectly related to job crafting through its relationship with PGI. Also, feedback from leadership has a negative effect on the relationship between a positive error orientation and PGI. Indeed, the mediation effect of PGI on the relationship between a positive error orientation and job crafting loses significance when the leadership feedback is high.

As far as job crafting is concerned, it is essential to develop an error management culture to promote proactive behaviors among individuals.

Although the literature tends to highlight the positive effects of receiving feedback from the leader on employee’s professional development, this paper highlights the potential detrimental effects of leader feedback on PGI, therefore opening a new interesting area that demands attention.

The purpose of this study is to develop the self-initiated work adjustment for learning (SIWAL) scale that measures the adjustments that employees make in their work to enhance learning, based on theories and research on workplace learning, work adjustment and work design.

The SIWAL scale was validated in two independent studies. Study 1 (n = 208) focused on the internal consistency and factor structure of the SIWAL scale. Study 2 (n = 178) re-examined the factorial structure using confirmatory factor analysis and investigated scale validity.

In both studies, the SIWAL scale showed good psychometric characteristics, i.e. a clear two-factorial structure and internal reliable sub-scales. The findings also indicated convergent, divergent and concurrent validity.

Using the SIWAL scale, future research could focus on the individual, social and organizational predictors and outcomes of SIWAL, collect supervisor and peer ratings to further validate this self-report scale and investigate lower-educated workers.

Organizations might try to enhance their employees' SIWAL through organizational policies, such as supportive leadership, and a learning climate.

This study provides a first step toward a better understanding of what workers do to enhance their workplace learning. The study findings indicate that employees address two adaptive behaviors: adjusting job responsibilities and adjusting social interactions.

This study aims to address a paucity of research into career success by exploring the impact of organizational context (“in-group” culture and the competitiveness strategy) and individual variables (self-efficacy and goal orientation), on objective career success (academic position) and subjective career success (career satisfaction).

Survey data were obtained from 447 faculty members employed by Babeș-Bolyai University (BBU), the best-ranked Romanian higher education institution. For analysis, hierarchical multiple regressions analyzes were used.

The novel results of this quantitative analysis are that organizational context variables influence both subjective career success and objective career success. Academics who do not attain promotion have lower subjective career success and objective career success, as a result of the publish or perish university strategy. Self-efficacy has a positive impact on both success types, while goal orientation is for subjective career success a weak predictor.

Organizational efforts should be focused on improving academics career development especially for those teachers who are in the current position already for many years. The development of performance-driven career paths should be also considered for diminishing the impact of organizational variables.

This paper extends the knowledge concerning objective and subjective career success by revealing the important impact of contextual determinants, as it confirms the impact of individual self-efficacy in a university context and partially the one of goal orientation.

Despite the interest in leaders' identity work as a framework for leadership development, coaching psychology has yet to expose its active ingredients and outcomes.

To do so, the authors reconcile published systematic literature reviews (SLRs) in the field to arrive at a more thorough understanding of the role of identity work in coaching. A total of 60 eligible SLRs on identity work and coaching were identified between 2010 and 2022. Four were included in the data extraction after selecting and screening, and the full texts of 196 primary studies reported therein were analysed.

Amongst the coachee-related factors of effective coaching, the coachee’s motivation, general self-efficacy beliefs, personality traits and goal orientation were the most frequently reported active ingredients, and performance improvement, self-awareness and goal specificity were the most frequently supported outcomes. The analysis indicates that leaders' identity work, as an active ingredient, can be a moderator variable for transformative coaching interventions, while strengthening leadership role identity could be one of the lasting outcomes because coaching interventions facilitate, deconstruct and enhance leaders' identity work. Further research is needed to explore the characteristics of these individual, relational and collective processes.

This study adds value by synthesising SLRs that report coachee-related active ingredients and outcomes of executive coaching research. It demonstrates that the role of leaders' identity work is a neglected factor affecting coaching results and encourages coaching psychologists to apply identity framework in their executive coaching practice.

In this chapter, we discuss talent development in the context of higher education. After discussing the advantages and disadvantages of inclusive and exclusive approaches to talent development, we present empirical data that detail how the participants of a focus group study perceive talent development in higher education. Our data show the importance of a contextualized reading of talent development as the competitive context in academia hinders an inclusive focus on talent development. This context results in a performance-centred, instead of a development-centred approach to talent management, where outperforming others in narrowly defined areas (e.g. publication record) is the main goal. We show that in such a context the development of competitive talent is rewarded, and the development of communal talent is not. The focus on performance instead of (inclusive) development becomes more pronounced when employees move through their career and is believed to have several negative consequences. Mostly women perceived that such a non-inclusive approach to talent development hinders the development and deployment of their talents and obstructs their career progression.

This research aims to explore digital feedback needs/preferences in online education during lockdown and the implications for post-pandemic education.

An empirical study approach was used to explore feedback needs and experiences from educational institutions in the Netherlands and Germany (N = 247) using a survey method.

The results showed that instruments supporting features for effortless interactivity are among the highly preferred options for giving/receiving feedback in online/hybrid classrooms, which are in addition also opted for post-pandemic education. The analysis also showed that, when communicating feedback digitally, more inclusive formats are preferred, e.g. informing learners about how they perform compared to peers. The increased need for comparative performance-oriented feedback, however, may affect students' goal orientations. In general, the results of this study suggest that while interactivity features of online instruments are key to ensuring social presence when using digital forms of feedback, balancing online with offline approaches should be recommended.

This research contributes to the gap in the scientific literature on feedback digitalization. Most of the existing research are in the domain of automated feedback generated by various learning environments, while literature on digital feedback in online classrooms, e.g. empirical studies on preferences for typology, formats and communication channels for digital feedback, to the best of the authors’ knowledge is largely lacking. The findings and recommendations of this study extend their relevance to post-pandemic education for which hybrid classroom is opted among the highly preferred formats by survey respondents.

We present a framework for understanding the relationship between individual differences in leaders’ motivations and their engagement in leader development, and we empirically test that framework across three different operationalizations of engagement, demonstrating that the motivation to develop as a leader (MTDL) is distinct from other motivational constructs (specifically, motivation to lead and motivation to learn) and that MTDL differentially predicts engagement in leader development. Finally, we provide evidence that motivation and engagement mutually reinforce each other in a virtuous spiral during leader development.