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1 – 10 of 201William E. Donald, Melanie J. Ashleigh and Yehuda Baruch
The purpose of this paper is to understand how students perceive their future careers and how university has prepared them to enter the global labor market; student perceptions…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to understand how students perceive their future careers and how university has prepared them to enter the global labor market; student perceptions regarding benefits vs associated costs of pursuing higher education (HE) on employability and earnings; and the anticipated barriers and how to overcome these in pursuit of career sustainability within a career ecosystem.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors adopted a qualitative method using semi-structured interviews on a small sample of 38 final year students from a UK university who were also participants in an earlier two-wave quantitative survey, which was conducted with 387 penultimate and final year undergraduates from the same UK-based University.
Findings
Findings revealed that undergraduates perceive their investment in HE to offer a net financial gain; however, this is narrowing due to increased tuition fees, associated student debt and interest payments eroding earning premiums. As undergraduates progress, they feel more employable from a personal perspective, but less employable from a market perspective due to competition for graduate jobs and the cost/benefit conflict of resources.
Practical implications
The authors provide nine opportunities for enhancing the employability of graduates collaborating with graduate employers, providing a timely contribution to the social, political and economic debate on the funding of HE.
Originality/value
The authors advance career theory via the new perspective of Career Ecosystem Theory by: explaining student career perceptions in terms of how university has prepared them for the global labor market; exploring the perceived costs vs benefits of pursuing HE in relation to employability; suggesting a two-dimensional model of personal and market factors of employability; providing a model of careers advice from employers and universities for supporting students’ careers; and offering policy implications in relation to the future funding of HE and employability of future graduates.
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William E. Donald, Melanie J. Ashleigh and Yehuda Baruch
The purpose of this study is to understand how universities and organizations have responded to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of preparing university students and…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to understand how universities and organizations have responded to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of preparing university students and recent graduates to enter the global labor market, using the accounting, banking and finance sector as a case study. The two research questions are (1) How can university career services and organizations work individually and collaboratively to best develop early career talent following the COVID-19 pandemic? (2) What are the challenges that university career services and organizations face when working individually or collaboratively to develop early career talent following the COVID-19 pandemic?
Design/methodology/approach
The data for thematic analysis comes from 36 semi-structured interviews with career advisors (CAs) (n = 19) and graduate recruiters (GRs) (n = 17).
Findings
This study offers some of the first findings on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, helping to ensure that organizational behavior and career theory literature reflect the dramatically changing landscape in the university-to-work transition.
Originality/value
Theoretically, our contribution comes from applying a framework of the career construction theory (CTT) within the context of a career ecosystem to understand the views of the intermediary, meso-level actors, which, to date, have lacked representation within career literature. Practically, we provide an insightful bridge between universities and organizations, offering opportunities for greater collaboration, and enhanced outcomes for all stakeholders.
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William E. Donald, Yehuda Baruch and Melanie J. Ashleigh
The purpose of this paper is to conceptually articulate the differing needs of graduates and graduate employers, which can be competing or complementary in nature. Drawing from…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to conceptually articulate the differing needs of graduates and graduate employers, which can be competing or complementary in nature. Drawing from theoretical frameworks of career ecosystems and the new psychological contract, a set of propositions are presented using three themes: career management, development of talent and technological change.
Design/methodology/approach
A conceptual design offering a conceptual model through adopting the career ecosystem and new psychological contract as a framework.
Findings
These propositions offer a new conceptual model, which provides a practical contribution by articulating sustainability of graduates’ careers through employability at the graduate level and competitive advantage at the employer level.
Originality/value
The paper offers important contributions to theory by connecting career management and vocational career literature through acknowledging shared constructs of life-long learning and sustainable employability for graduates. These two streams are often developed in parallel, thus this paper helps to bridge the gaps in respective research agendas. This paper therefore has the originality of helping to advance the fields of career theory and sustainable human resource management.
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N.A. Stanton, M.J. Ashleigh, A.D. Roberts and F. Xu
This paper aims to report a study into the levels of abstraction hierarchy (LOAH) in two energy distribution teams. The original proposition for the LOAH was that it depicted five…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to report a study into the levels of abstraction hierarchy (LOAH) in two energy distribution teams. The original proposition for the LOAH was that it depicted five levels of system representation, working from functional purpose through to physical form to determine causes of a malfunction, or from physical form to functional purpose to determine the purpose of system function. The LOAH has been widely used throughout human supervisory control research to explain individual behaviour. The research seeks to focus on the application the LOAH to human supervisory control teams in semi‐automated “intelligent” systems.
Design/methodology/approach
A series of interviews were conducted in two energy distribution companies.
Findings
The results of the study suggest that people in the teams are predominantly operating at different levels of system representation, depending on their role. Managerial personnel work at functional purpose and abstract function levels, whereas operational personnel work at physical function and physical form levels. It is argued that both types of personnel are part of the wider distributed problem‐solving system, which includes both people and technology.
Originality/value
The research provides useful information on the application of the LOAH to human supervisory control teams in semi‐automated “intelligent” systems.
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John E. Ettlie, Christopher Tucci and Peter T. Gianiodis
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the combined roles via trust relationships of the two technology cores of the firm: information technology (IT) and R&D and their…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the combined roles via trust relationships of the two technology cores of the firm: information technology (IT) and R&D and their impact on new product success.
Design/methodology/approach
A model was tested whereby trust and the integrated IT strategy account for a significant amount of the variance in a broad range of new product development (NPD) outcomes for a survey sample of 223 manufacturing firms. Respondents said design practices and quality methods like Six Sigma accounted for a total of over 25 percent of the reports of the most helpful approaches in promoting effective NPD. At the same time their biggest challenges were having a clear strategic direction within which to operate and resolving cost and resource issues which accounted for over a third (34 percent) of barriers to success.
Findings
Respondents reported that a total of over 25 percent of the reports of the most helpful approaches in promoting effective included these quality methods. At the same time their biggest challenges were having a clear strategic direction within which to operate and resolving cost and resource issues which accounted for over a third (34 percent) of barriers to success. High-tech firms were less likely to report integrated IT strategies, but this tended to be counterbalanced by high levels of trust in the IT function and adoption of organizational innovations for execution of strategic intent. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.
Research limitations/implications
Survey methods produce broad results with low response rates in most studies involving R&D and NPD, and this study is no exception.
Practical implications
With the challenge of strategy alignment reported by many of these firms, it seems clear that the top management team cannot afford to leave NPD challenges to engineering teams and NPD programs without guidance and general vision.
Social implications
NPD has become the staple of most manufacturing firms as a way of meeting and beating the competition worldwide. However, trust between functional areas often starts before people are even employed and should begin in training and educational programs.
Originality/value
Designing NPD programs is at the heart of many firms’ competitive strategies and the fast learning companies are the winners. Very little is known about the trust relationship between IT and R&D and their combined effects on new product success which we have found to be significant and unexpected in their impacts.
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Joshua Thomas Hanna, Alexandria K. Elms, Harjinder Gill, David J. Stanley and Deborah M. Powell
The purpose of this paper is to examine how leaders’ behaviour and subordinates’ personality can impact subordinates’ feelings of being trusted. Feeling trusted by one’s leader is…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine how leaders’ behaviour and subordinates’ personality can impact subordinates’ feelings of being trusted. Feeling trusted by one’s leader is associated with increased performance, organisational citizenship behaviours and job satisfaction (Baer et al., 2015; Lester and Brower, 2003).
Design/methodology/approach
Participants read a vignette in which a leader’s behaviour was manipulated and then rated the extent to which they felt trusted. Participants in Sample 1 consisted of 726 undergraduate students with work experience, and Sample 2 consisted of 1,196 people with work experience recruited over CrowdFlower, a crowd-sourcing website.
Findings
Results from both samples indicate that a leader delegating a task increases subordinate felt trust, for Sample 1 p<0.001, d=0.75 and for Sample 2 p<0.001, d=0.90. Further, subordinate felt trust increases when the task delegated is of high importance, for Sample 1 p<0.001, d=0.42 and for Sample 2 p<0.001, d=0.58. The likelihood of the delegated task resulting in negative outcomes and subordinate propensity to trust have negligible effects on felt trust.
Originality/value
Despite the organisational benefits of felt trust, it is still unclear how to elicit subordinates’ felt trust. This study is one of the first to empirically examine leader behaviour that may lead subordinates to feel trusted in the workplace. These findings support theoretical underpinnings of the relational leadership model and the risk-based model of trust.
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The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of trust propensity on both objective (salary) and subjective (career satisfaction) indicators of career success and investigate…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of trust propensity on both objective (salary) and subjective (career satisfaction) indicators of career success and investigate the mediating role of organizational identification in these relationships.
Design/methodology/approach
The sample for this study consisted of 187 Pakistani employees who were selected from three units of a large footwear company. The research hypotheses were tested through structural equation modelling.
Findings
Results showed that as theorized, organizational identification fully mediated the effects of trust propensity on salary and career satisfaction.
Originality/value
To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study which has explored the effects of trust propensity on objective and subjective measures of career success. Furthermore, this paper highlights one possible pathway in the form of organizational identification through which trust propensity relates to different career outcomes.
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The purpose of this study is to synthesize the previous empirical studies on transactive memory systems (TMS) through a meta-analytical approach and test the proposed model for…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to synthesize the previous empirical studies on transactive memory systems (TMS) through a meta-analytical approach and test the proposed model for the relationships between TMS and different types of team outcomes.
Design/methodology/approach
TMS refers to shared memory systems developed among a group of people for encoding, storage and retrieval of their different knowledge domains. They have been widely used in group or organization settings to describe the cumulative knowledge in a group of multi-disciplinary experts. Previous literature suggests TMS as a critical concept for explaining group performance, but few studies were conducted to integrate the literature findings to identify the relationships between TMS and team outcomes.
Findings
The findings suggest that TMS is more strongly linked to affective outcomes than behavioral or performance outcomes. In addition, the authors find that the specific operationalization of TMS does not affect the relationship between TMS and team outcomes. There was not enough support for significant effects of group size and research setting on the relationships between TMS and team outcomes, which indicates that both laboratory and field studies have similar potential to generate valuable results for the research of TMS.
Originality/value
This study contributes to the body of knowledge on team effectiveness by investigating the links between TMS and team effectiveness through a broad definition of outcomes that include tangible constructs, such as performance, as well as behavioral and affective outcomes. By exploring the relationships through this broad conceptualization of team effectiveness, the authors can better understand the particular effects of TMS on different key aspects used to determine success in teams.
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William E. Donald, Beatrice I.J.M. Van der Heijden and Graham Manville
By adopting a Social Exchange Theory (SET) lens, this paper aims to integrate the often-fragmented literature streams of Vocational Behavior (VB), Career Development (CD), and…
Abstract
Purpose
By adopting a Social Exchange Theory (SET) lens, this paper aims to integrate the often-fragmented literature streams of Vocational Behavior (VB), Career Development (CD), and Human Resource Management (HRM) to offer a conceptual model for framing sustainable careers.
Design/methodology/approach
A conceptual approach is taken whereby eight propositions are developed to integrate the fragmented literature streams of VB, CD, and HRM.
Findings
We posit that external factors and career counseling moderate the positive relationship between employability capital and self-perceived employability. We also argue that self-perceived employability is positively associated with career success and that career crafting moderates this relationship. Finally, we propose that career success is positively associated with a sustainable career, which, in turn, is positively associated with a sustainable organization.
Practical implications
The practical contribution comes from informing VB, CD, and HRM policies and practices to maximize sustainable outcomes for individuals and organizations. The paper concludes with recommendations for future research.
Originality/value
The theoretical contribution comes from integrating the three literature streams to offer a conceptual model as the basis for further interdisciplinary collaborations.
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Sarra Berraies, Rym Lajili and Rached Chtioui
The objective of this research is to examine the mediating role of employees' well-being in the workplace in the relationship between the dimensions of social capital, namely…
Abstract
Purpose
The objective of this research is to examine the mediating role of employees' well-being in the workplace in the relationship between the dimensions of social capital, namely structural, relational and cognitive social capital and knowledge sharing, as well as the moderating role of enterprise social networks between knowledge sharing and employees' well-being.
Design/methodology/approach
A quantitative approach was performed within a sample of 168 middle managers working in knowledge-intensive firms in Tunisia. The Partial Least Squares method was used to analyze the data collected.
Findings
Results highlight the importance of the dimensions of social capital as a lever for boosting knowledge sharing. It also reveals that employees' well-being plays a mediating role in the link between structural and relational social capital and knowledge sharing. Moreover, findings show that while enterprise social networks use does not moderate the relationship between employees' well-being and knowledge sharing, it has a positive and significant effect on knowledge sharing.
Originality/value
On the basis of a socio-technical perspective of knowledge management, this research pioneers the examination of the mediating effect of employees' well-being in the link between dimensions of social capital and knowledge sharing and the moderating role of enterprise social networks use within knowledge-intensive firms. Findings of this study may help managers of knowledge-intensive firms in boosting knowledge sharing within organizations, in improving knowledge workers' well-being and thus in motivating and retaining these talented employees.
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