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This article describes the significance of mutual aid and self‐help groups for employee assistance programmes (EAPs). In an era of dwindling resources, groups can be valuable adjunctive resources. Examples given are a recovery network of AA members at the workplace willing to act in a 12‐step fashion with EAP clients, a co‐dependency assessment and support group, a supervisor′s mutual aid support group and a peer support group diversity network. The benefit to EAP professionals of developing these groups is an expanded range of referral resources, increased visibility for the EAP and an opportunity to engage in community building within the workplace.

As communities grappled with a slew of concurrent disasters in 2020, grassroots mutual aid regained prominence, providing lessons for a more equitable approach to emergency management. Within emergency management, “mutual aid” has come to mean the specific legal mechanisms by which governments, non-governmental organizations, and private sector entities share resources. However, the term “mutual aid” has a much longer history of functioning outside of government and emergency management circles. With a recorded history in Black and Creole communities dating back to the mid-1700s, it has been widely used within communities of color for centuries. To see grassroots mutual aid in practice, the authors present a case study of Imagine Water Works’ Mutual Aid Response Network (MARN) in New Orleans, which was developed in 2019 and responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and a record-breaking Gulf Coast hurricane season in 2020. Utilizing Facebook as a platform, the MARN’s “Imagine Mutual Aid (New Orleans)” group saw its membership grow by 5,000 members from March 2020 to March 2021. Within the first week of Hurricane Laura’s landfall, the group welcomed evacuated individuals from Southwest Louisiana and quickly facilitated thousands of requests for support, providing food, housing, clothing, medical devices, emotional support, emergency cash, laundry services, and personalized care for those in non-congregate shelters, as well as locally informed flood and hurricane preparedness information for subsequent storms. Grassroots mutual aid sheds light on root causes and existing gaps within emergency management and provides a model for autonomous community care.

This article relates one aspect of an action research project on work related stress and mental health problems to its wider context. It is argued that self‐help/mutual aid, including self‐management, could make an important contribution to tackling the current epidemic of work‐related stress in the UK and elsewhere. Initiatives such as the government's Work‐Life Balance campaign indicate that the policy context is appropriate. An overview of the causes, costs of, and policy responses to work‐related stress is followed by a discussion on the nature of self‐help/mutual aid and the benefits that the sharing of experiential knowledge can bring to participants. This includes a specific, structured form of self‐help: self‐management programmes as led and used by mental health user groups. We conclude that self‐help initiatives can make a valuable contribution to addressing work‐related stress if employers support them. Beyond simply ameliorating staff retention problems, the experiential learning communities that could be created could be an asset, particularly in seeking to change workplace cultures to minimise work‐related mental stresses.

Support groups are a common feature of the mental health support engaged by carers and consumers. The purpose of this paper is to update and consolidate the knowledge and the evidence for the effectiveness of mental health support groups.

This paper is based on a systematic literature review of relevant databases around support groups for mental health. Support groups are defined as meetings of people with similar experiences, such as those defined as carers of a person living with a mental illness or a person living with a mental illness. These meetings aim to provide support and companionship to one another.

The results show that there is a consistent pattern of evidence, over a long period of time, which confirms the effectiveness of mental health support groups for carers and people living with mental illness. There is strong, scientifically rigorous evidence which shows the effectiveness of professionally facilitated, family-led support groups, psychoeducation carers support groups, and professionally facilitated, program-based support groups for people living with mental illness.

This research implies the use of support groups is an important adjunct to the support of carers and people with mental illness, including severe mental illness.

This research brings together a range of studies indicating the usefulness of support groups as an adjunct to mental health therapy.

Relationship marketing has been playing an important role in the development of marketing theory and practice. Though the concept has been extensively applied in international marketing in understanding the dynamics of exporter-importer relationships, few studies have looked at dyadic data to investigate the impact of mutuality of relational variables on the exporter-importer relationships. The objective of this study is to understand the impact of mutuality of key relational variables on exporter-importer relationship performance. A dyadic model of mutuality is proposed. The model highlights the impact of balance, level and quality of perceptual bi-directionality of relational variables.

The model was tested using dyadic data collected from exporter-importer relationships involving Australian exporters and their Southeast Asian import partners through a cross-sectional, quantitative survey. Mutuality of relationship constructs was measured using the perceptual bi-directionality (PBD) method.

The results support the central hypothesis that mutuality of relational constructs has an impact on relationship performance.

The study is the first to apply the perceptual bi-directionality method to measure mutuality of relational constructs in an exporter-importer setting. The study contributes to the general understanding of international business and exporter-importer relationship performance in particular.

In the hyper-dynamic business world of today, innovation has become the lifeblood of organizations. Knowledge management (KM) is widely considered an essential antecedent of innovation. However, very little empirical research has specifically addressed how KM is nurtured as support for innovation from a behavioral point of view. This paper aims to operationalize the characteristics of a fitting context – in terms of top management support, organizational rewards and mutual trust – and to clarify the role of organizational context on knowledge management strategies (KMS) and ultimately on firm innovativeness.

By studying 98 surveys from 23 companies from Technology Fast 50 list, based on using the partial least squares method, the authors find that this organizational context has a significant impact on the formulation and implementation of KMS.

Organizational/behavioral context has significant effects on the formulation and implementation of KMS as well as firm innovativeness. The results also demonstrate that the tacit KMS has a crucial impact on firm innovativeness.

From a behavioral perspective, this study empirically examines the role of organizational context (top management support, organizational rewards and mutual trust), KMS and firm innovativeness in a holistic manner in Turkey, a developing country. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no researcher has undergone those relationships in literature.

The purpose of this paper is to find Batak Toba society’s local wisdom of mutual cooperation in Toba Lake area: a linguistic anthropology study.

This research employed qualitative paradigm. As a qualitative research, it employed four methods of data collection, namely in-depth open-ended interview, direct participatory observation, focus group discussion which is often abbreviated as FGD, and written documents. In-depth and open-ended interviews were applied to obtain data from the informants who understand the local wisdom of mutual cooperation, the traditional expressions as the collective memory of mutual cooperation, and the terms of mutual cooperation in Batak Toba society.

Based on the research findings, Batak Toba society has terms for gotong royong (mutual cooperation). They are marsirimpa or marsirumpa (cohesive, in unison, and together). It means that the basic rule of gotong royong (mutual cooperation) in Batak Toba society is the cohesion, synchrony, and togetherness. In other words, gotong royong (mutual cooperation) in Batak Toba society is working cohesively, in unison, and together, which is practiced in the life cycles, livelihood cycles, and public works.

This paper presents a new and significant contribution to the social and economic activity, especially socio-anthropology. People do not consider the implementation of mutual cooperation anymore. They forget that marsirimpa (the local term for mutual cooperation) can be used as a non-material capital to improve the socio-economic development. Marsirimpa can improve the social activity because its main principles are based on the “solidarity” and “harmony.” This research gives contribution economically to the people in the research area (Tippang village) compared to the neighboring area (Bakkara village). People in Tippang village get better income because they believe that many works, for instances, irrigating, paddy planting, until paddy cutting should be done together; they do not need to spend money for workers. Each clan has its own representative to manage irrigation. The activities of land digging and paddy cutting are collectively done. In relation to social anthropology, the tradition around the research area is still maintained because it makes people value the social interaction.

New Ways of Working practices like activity-based working and home-based work lead to different behaviors of employees. Due to these NWW practices, employees choose their own preferred times and places to work – albeit to a certain extent and within certain boundaries. This might have an impact on the possibilities for teamwork. Therefore, we suppose that teamwork and teamwork behaviors might moderate the relationship between NWW and outcomes. Does teamwork behavior have an influence on the relation of NWW and productivity or organizational commitment? And how, is it a positive or a negative influence on these relations? This chapter reports the results of an explorative study on the relationship between NWW practices, teamwork behavior, productivity, and organizational commitment. Quantitative data from the questionnaire will illustrate the main issues: the complex linkages between the four components of NWW, the outcome variables, and the effect of different components of teamwork behavior. This chapter describes the issue of teamwork and provides new data on the actual use and effectiveness of the different components of teamwork behaviors.

The purpose of this paper is to study project management performance measures by analyzing how training utility affects the relationships between mutual trust, social interaction and creativity as well as mutual trust, social interaction and flexibility in projects.

Using training utility and organizational support theory, eight hypotheses were developed. Responses from 279 project management professionals in the USA were collected. The hypotheses were then tested using partial least squares (PLS) and regression with the PROCESS macro approach.

The results suggests that the communication environment indeed has an important role in fostering creative and flexible project managers. Additionally, the study shows that organizations can actively improve the influence of the communication environment on project management creativity through training efforts. Interestingly, these findings may not hold for project manager flexibility.

In today's project management world, organizations need project managers who quickly adapt to changing project management scenarios. To do this, project managers need to be creative, generating new and novel ideas, as well as flexible when converting ideas into action. Organizations often possess large amounts of knowledge, and project managers rely on good communication practices to access this knowledge in response to the required changes in the project domain.

The study includes contributions to theory and empirical research in project management by analyzing the critical role training utility has on the firm communication environments and its outcomes. The study shows that organizations can take an active role by investing in resources to promote flexibility and creativity in projects.

Despite consumers being essential stakeholders in the exponential growth of the sharing economy, consumers’ attitudes towards their rights and responsibilities are relatively unknown. This study aims to test a novel hypothesised model mapping consumers’ attitudes towards their consumer rights and responsibilities with that of their political ideology (liberalism, conservatism and libertarianism) and moral foundations (avoiding harm/fairness, in-group/loyalty, authority/respect and purity/sanctity).

Two survey studies were conducted with consumers of the Uber ride share service; the first being to test measures of political ideology and consumer rights/responsibilities. These measures were then taken into the second study along with the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. The hypothesised model was tested using structural equation modelling.

The findings suggest that political ideology associates with similarities and differences in how consumers perceive their rights and responsibilities in the sharing economy, including mutual self-regulation. Support for these findings is established by identifying links with specific moral foundations.

This study considers a single participant in the sharing economy.