Search results

The purpose of the paper is to contribute to an understanding of the relational work carried out in mentoring programmes and the implications for learning capabilities in future practices.

This study is based on field research of a mentoring programme bringing together senior and newly graduated workers in a large Swedish health care organisation. In total, 54 qualitative interviews with mentors, mentees, HR, managers and union representatives are included.

The findings point to the role of trust and a psychological sense of community in the socialisation work that goes on in relationships between the mentor and the mentee. This in turn leads to increased social capital in the form of learning and retaining workers. The conditions for being vulnerable and asking questions, as well as daring to be independent, are an essential and decisive part of constructing bonding within the professional group and bridging out to other professions and parts of the organisation.

The practical contribution from this study is the workplace conditions that are central to organising mentoring programmes, with implications for learning capabilities in future practices.

With its theoretical focus on social capital, the study shows the importance of relationships for learning and retaining both newly graduated and experienced employees in a context of high employee turnover. It is central to achieving strong and mutually beneficial relationships through continual and trustful interaction between actors. By using the concepts of social capital, socialisation agents and psychological sense of community, this study contributes to an understanding of mentoring and workplace learning.

In Italy, worker cooperatives (WCs), whose workers hold major control rights over collectively-owned assets, are the leading vehicle for the promotion and development of employee ownership. Worker cooperatives are present in all regions and in most economic sectors, employing about 506,000 workers and generating a turnover of about €22 bn. Despite their history and diffusion, the high prevalence of WCs in Italy is under-researched and -thematised and requires new research.

The paper leverages unpublished primary and secondary data from Centro Studi Legacoop databank, the Aida-Bureau Van Dijk databank and the Cooperative Registry of the Ministry of Economic Development (CRMED) to explain the spread of WCs in Italy.

This paper reveals descriptive statistics of WCs and investigates their distribution across economic sectors and regions, their economic and financial performance and gives an overview of the relevant legislation. The paper indicates that older small- and medium-sized cooperatives located in central and north-eastern Italy perform best economically. However, in recent years, an increasing number of young cooperatives has emerged in South Italy thanks to favourable legislation, cooperative finance and the diffusion of cooperative know-how. Limitations to such results are reported in the conclusions.

The paper sheds light on past and recent development trends of WCs in Italy, highlights their growth in South Italy and revitalises the debate on the drivers, structures and rationales of employee-owned enterprises in Italy. Findings generate implications for research and practice. Given the tendency of WCs to better protect jobs than investor-owned enterprises, the spread of these enterprises may help workers find better and more stable jobs, counter-cyclically mitigating the dangerous effects of macro- and meso-economic fluctuations and instability.

This study operationalizes risks in stakeholder dialog (SD). It conceptualizes SD as co-produced organizational discourse and examines the capacities of organizers' and stakeholders' practices to create a shared understanding of an organization’s risks to their mutual benefit. The meetings and online forum of a German public service media (PSM) organization were used as a case study.

The authors applied corpus-driven linguistic discourse analysis (topic modeling) to analyze citizens' (n = 2,452) forum posts (n = 14,744). Conversation analysis was used to examine video-recorded online meetings.

Organizers suspended actors' reciprocity in meetings. In the forums, topics emerged autonomously. Citizens' articulation of their identities was more diverse than the categories the organizer provided, and organizers did not respond to the autonomous emergence of contextualizations of citizens' perceptions of PSM performance in relation to their identities. The results suggest that risks arise from interactionally achieved occasions that prevent reasoned agreement and from actors' practices, which constituted autonomous discursive formations of topics and identities in the forums.

This study disentangles actors' practices, mutuality orientation and risk enactment during SD. It advances the methodological knowledge of strategic communication research on SD, utilizing social constructivist research methods to examine the contingencies of organization-stakeholder interaction in SD.

This paper provides a systematization of the existing body of literature on both employee participation goals and the intervention formats in the context of organizational change. Furthermore, degrees of employee involvement that the intervention formats address are identified and related to the goals of employee participation. On this basis, determinants of employee involvement and participation in the context of digital transformation are unveiled.

Based on a systematic literature review the authors structure and relate employee participation goals and formats. Through a workshop with expert practitioners, the authors transfer and enhance these theoretical findings in the context of digital transformation. Experts rated the three most important goals and identified accompanying success factors, barriers and effects.

The results show that it is not necessarily the degree of involvement but a context-specific selection of measures, the quality of their implementation as well as the actual uptake of suggestions and activities developed by employees that contribute to employees accepting and participating in goal-directed transformations. Moreover, employees must have sufficient information and time for their participation in transformation processes.

This paper is based on a transformative approach, combining literature analysis to identify formats and goals of employee participation with experiential knowledge of digital transformation practitioners. In addition to relating intervention formats to goals pursued in organizational change processes, empirical and experiential perspectives are used to identify three very relevant goals and respective determinants in digital transformation processes.

Given the general consensus that creativity is a crucial driving force for innovation and progress, understanding how to promote it would benefit individuals, companies, society and academia. Therefore, this paper aims to analyze the independent and contingent impact of individuals’ personality traits, team-member exchange (TMX) and gender on stimulating creativity.

The study uses a survey-sample of 639 university students (51.96% women) between the ages of 17 and 50. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) demonstrated reliability and validity of its measures. To test hypotheses, using structural equation modeling, hierarchical regression analyses were performed.

Results show that four of the five personality traits (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness to experience) and TMX positively influence creativity. There are no significant differences between men’s and women’s creativity. High TMX reinforces the influence of extraversion on creativity, while low TMX harms this relationship. High extravert women are more creative than high extravert men, while low extravert men are more creative than low extravert women. Low emotionally stable women are more creative than low emotionally stable men, while high emotionally stable men are more creative than high emotionally stable women. There are differences in how women and men take advantage of their openness to experience when TMX is considered. That is, while women take advantage of openness to experience for any value of TMX, men only increase their creativity as openness to experience increases for low values of TMX.

Like all studies, ours has some limitations that provide opportunities for future research. First, care should be taken when generalizing these findings to other contexts. We use data from Spanish individuals, specifically university students. While they are suitable for testing our hypotheses, future studies should establish whether the general tendencies that we observe hold true for other kinds of people from Spain and other countries. Even more, this paper’s perspective might be biased by the authors’ country of origin (south Europe) in terms of gender. According to Hofstede (2001) south European and South American countries are more masculine than other cultures (Mensa and Grow, 2022). Therefore, analyzing these questions in different cultures (countries and settings) would facilitate the generalization of the results. Second, the data we use is mainly cross-sectional so strict causality cannot be inferred. The theory we use assumes specific causal directions, but alternative causal relationships cannot be ruled out. Finally, ideally, we should have controlled for additional variables that might influence the relationships in our model.

This paper has practical implications, as it demonstrates that neither gender is more creative than the other. It goes a step further, explaining how men and women can leverage their personality traits to be more creative. Moreover, since TMX could reinforce the impact of personality traits on creativity, this paper could help managers better organize teams and companies that want to be more innovative by taking into account the personality traits of their employees and how to get the best out of women and men.

Traditionally, women have considered creativity to be a man’s thing. The results of this work favor society, demonstrating that women are just as creative as men and that through personality traits and TMX, both men and women can be more creative. These results help to reduce the gender gap and may favor women’s place in today’s society.

This work offers academic and practical implications. The main contributions to the creativity and gender literatures are the following: (1) Women are as creative as men. (2) High extravert and low emotionally stable women are more creative than men. (3) High open to experience women with high TMX are more creative than men at any level of TMX. For practitioners, the understanding of what personality traits have higher impact on creativity depending on the levels of TMX for women and men could help companies and politicians in hiring the most suitable people, especially for those positions where creativity is needed. This would increase the quality of their human capital, allowing them to get the most out of their human resources, from the very beginning of the employment relationship.

Drawing on indigenous theory of Ibn Khaldun, the rise and fall of States, this paper explores the agency of women entrepreneurs in family business in Bahrain and the underlying enablers in supporting and facilitating the exercise of this agency. This study attempts to move beyond the Western-centric studies to reflect and bring to light the unique institutional settings of the Gulf States.

The research builds on a rich qualitative single case of a family business based in Bahrain. The single case study methodology was motivated by the potential for generating rich contextual insights. Such an approach is particularly valuable to gain a more holistic and deeper understanding of the contextualized phenomenon and its complexity.

In this study the authors show how women entrepreneurs take two different paths to enter and become involved in the family business, the barriers they are subjected to and the active role they play in dismantling the challenges to the extent that they become the main mediators between the family business and central institutions in society.

By incorporating indigenous theory with Western family business concepts, the study extends existing understanding of women entrepreneurs in family business by underscoring the agency that women entrepreneurs have in “doing context” and the role that women play in strengthening common cause and destiny within the family and the business by building and drawing on different forms of loyalty.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute theoretical ideas of how peer support workers (PSWs) bring added value to interprofessional learning (IPL) in mental health care teamwork. The question is: How can we theoretically understand the value of PSWs’ expertise for IPL in mental health care teamwork?

Initially, the authors formulate a hypothesis. Then, the authors describe the focus and context in IPL and PSWs, respectively, and the PSWs’ and mental health professions’ different roles, expertise and perspectives. The authors also refer to some peer provided programs related to IPL. Finally, the authors construct an outline and apply ideas from Wenger’s Communities of Practice (CoP).

Using CoP, the PSWs as newcomers can by their perspectives change mental health professions’ perspectives and stimulate IPL in teamwork.

The paper gives theoretical insights of how PSWs can facilitate IPL in mental health care teamwork.

Institutional, economic, social and technological advancements enable openness to cope with wicked public management issues. Although open innovation (OI) is becoming a new normality for public sector entities, scholarly knowledge on this topic is not fully systematized. The article fills this gap, providing a thick and integrative account of OI to inspire public management decisions.

Following the SPAR-4-SLR protocol, a domain-based literature review has been accomplished. Consistently with the study purpose, a hybrid methodology has been designed. Bibliographic coupling permitted us to discover the research streams populating the scientific debate. The core arguments addressed within and across the streams were reported through an interpretive approach.

Starting from an intellectual core of 94 contributions, 5 research streams were spotted. OI in the public sector unfolds through an evolutionary path. Public sector entities conventionally acted as “senior partners” of privately-owned companies, providing funding (yellow cluster) and data (purple cluster) to nurture OI. An advanced perspective envisages OI as a public management model purposefully enacted by public sector entities to co-create value with relevant stakeholders (red cluster). Fitting architectures (green cluster) and mechanisms (blue cluster) should be arranged to release the potential of OI in the public sector.

The role of public sector entities in enacting OI should be revised embracing a value co-creation perspective. Tailored organizational interventions and management decisions are required to make OI a reliable and dependable public value generation model.

The article originally systematizes the scholarly knowledge about OI, presenting it as a new normality for public value generation.

The Case Valdesi (Waldensian Houses) are non-profit structures, managed by the Diaconia Valdese, that propose a value-based and value-driven model of hospitality. There are nine hospitality facilities (six guest houses, two hotels and one hostel) located in different Italian venues, open to individual travellers, families or groups who look for unconventional tourism experiences such as slow-paced visits to artistic and natural attractions, retreats, informal symposia, as well as creative projects. The guest houses welcome international students and volunteers who provide hospitality services. They host refugees and asylum seekers when needed and encourage connections and mutual exchanges among people with diverse life experiences. Moreover, they use the hospitality revenues to support educational and social welfare projects. This chapter will present the Waldensian model of hospitality through a case study based on observations and qualitative data collected during fieldwork, proposing it as one of the possible sources of inspiration for the creation of human destinations.

The paper provides a detailed historical account of Douglass C. North's early intellectual contributions and analytical developments in pursuing a Grand Theory for why some countries are rich and others poor.

The author approaches the discussion using a theoretical and historical reconstruction based on published and unpublished materials.

The systematic, continuous and profound attempt to answer the Smithian social coordination problem shaped North's journey from being a young serious Marxist to becoming one of the founders of New Institutional Economics. In the process, he was converted in the early 1950s into a rigid neoclassical economist, being one of the leaders in promoting New Economic History. The success of the cliometric revolution exposed the frailties of the movement itself, namely, the limitations of neoclassical economic theory to explain economic growth and social change. Incorporating transaction costs, the institutional framework in which property rights and contracts are measured, defined and enforced assumes a prominent role in explaining economic performance.

In the early 1970s, North adopted a naive theory of institutions and property rights still grounded in neoclassical assumptions. Institutional and organizational analysis is modeled as a social maximizing efficient equilibrium outcome. However, the increasing tension between the neoclassical theoretical apparatus and its failure to account for contrasting political and institutional structures, diverging economic paths and social change propelled the modification of its assumptions and progressive conceptual innovation. In the later 1970s and early 1980s, North abandoned the efficiency view and gradually became more critical of the objective rationality postulate. In this intellectual movement, North's avant-garde research program contributed significantly to the creation of New Institutional Economics.