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Adopting a person-environment (P-E) fit approach, the purpose of this paper is to examine the role of emotional labour, segmentation/integration and social support in the development of work-home conflict.

Mental health professionals (n=118) completed the work-home conflict and home-work conflict scales (Netemeyer et al., 1996), the segmentation preferences and supplies scales (Kreiner, 2006) and the Mann Emotion Requirements Inventory (Mann, 1999). A social support checklist was also developed to assess the perceived value of work and non-work sources of support.

Contrary to expectation, emotional labour was associated with lower levels of work-home conflict. There was no evidence found for the relevance of a P-E fit approach, rather the results indicated that the perception that the organisation supports the separation of work and home is sufficient in ameliorating work-home conflict. In addition, work-based support was found to reduce work-home conflict.

The importance of support within the work environment as a way of reducing work-home conflict has been highlighted. That is, providing a safe environment to discuss anxieties and concerns is a fundamental factor when developing organisational support structure. The importance of providing professionals with choice regarding their preference to segment or integrate work and home has also been highlighted. Based on the contradictory findings with regards to emotional labour and work-home conflict, future research should aim to further examine this relationship within a forensic psychiatric setting.

This is the first research paper to explore the role of emotional labour, segmentation/integration and social support in the development of work-home conflict.

Examines the effects of demographic characteristics (gender and marital status), work‐related attitudes (organizational commitment and job security), support factors, and perceived advantages and disadvantages of teleworking to individuals and organizations on individuals’ attitudes towards teleworking. Respondents consist of information technology (IT) professionals. Results suggest that married individuals and those who perceived more advantages accruing from teleworking either to themselves or to their organizations, reported a more favourable attitude towards teleworking. Individuals with high levels of job insecurity and those who perceived more disadvantages accruing from teleworking to themselves or to their organizations reported a less favourable attitude towards teleworking. Contrary to initial prediction, organizational commitment was found to be negatively associated with attitude towards teleworking as a work option. Findings of this study also revealed that men and women did not differ in their attitude towards teleworking. In addition, support from supervisor and work colleagues did not emerge as a significant predictor of attitude towards teleworking. Implications of the findings are discussed.

This paper seeks to examine the relationship of a network of social support for midlife women with their attitudes toward work‐family balance and work outcomes, including job satisfaction, organisational commitment, and career accomplishment.

A total of 1,089 women between the ages of 35 and 50 across three organizations were surveyed and then 72 of them interviewed.

Results indicate that the women generally received more personal social support than work‐based social support and more instrumental than expressive support from all sources. Work‐based social support was positively associated with job satisfaction, organisational commitment, and career accomplishment; personal social support was also associated with job satisfaction and organisational commitment. Work‐family balance may partially mediate the relationship between social support and work outcomes.

Much of what is known about work‐life issues centers on the work‐family conflicts of younger women with children. Perceptions are explored of work‐life balance among women at midlife, an understudied population with significant work and personal responsibilities. This study contributes to research by examining the relationships among the full network of social support, work‐family balance, and work‐related outcomes, as well as the nature of this support for working women. The combination of quantitative and qualitative methods provides substantive insights into the complexity of these relationships for women at midlife.

The performance of the World Wide Web is evaluated as an information resource in a specific information domain. The theoretical framework underpinning this approach recognises the contribution of information‐seeking behaviour from the discipline of information science and models of information systems success from the discipline of information systems in explaining World Wide Web usage as an information resource. A model integrating the construct of uncertainty and the task‐technology fit model is presented. A questionnaire‐based empirical study is used to test this integrated approach. Our results confirm that richer models representing the broad context of World Wide Web usage are required to evaluate usage of the World Wide Web as an information resource. Usage for travel tasks, uncertainty reduction, the Web as an information resource, and mediation all have a significant impact on users' perception of performance, explaining 46 per cent of the variance.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the constituents of personal discretionary non-work activities and their influence on the work values ethic (WVE).

The constituents of personal discretionary non-work activities and their relationship to the WVE for 1,349 employees drawn from three manufacturing companies were surveyed. The data was used to test a measure of WVE, to develop a valid measure of personal discretionary non-work activities and to test a model of the relationship between personal discretionary non-work activities and a WVE.

Data obtained from the survey enabled the identification of a valid measure of personal discretionary non-work activities and the components that made up this measure. A measure of WVE was shown to be both valid and reliable, and a model of the relationship between personal discretionary non-work activities and WVE was tested.

A positive relationship between personal discretionary non-work activities and WVE was identified. However, the study was not designed to investigate motivations and such relationships should be the subject of future research.

Personal discretionary non-work activities were shown to be of importance for a major proportion of the study’s respondents and to contribute to the employees’ work ethic.

The study has extended the non-work and work literature and has identified a formative non-work measure that was able to be tested in an overall model.

This paper examined the role of career‐enhancing strategies (CESs) as mediators of the relationship between situation‐centred characteristics (e.g. career prospects) and subjective career success. CESs included self‐nomination, networking behaviour and consultation with mentors. Subjective career success was measured using two criteria, intrinsic job success and perceived career success. Questionnaire data was collected from 283 full‐time support personnel in the UK. Results provided partial support for the mediating role of CESs between situational characteristics and subjective career success. Specific CESs played a mediating role in the relationship between specific situation‐centred variables and intrinsic job success. Self‐nomination and networking played a mediating role between career prospects and intrinsic job success. Networking also played a mediating role between security and intrinsic job success. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed, together with avenues for further research.

Although employee helping behaviors have been widely examined by organizational and human resource management scholars, relatively little is known about the antecedents and consequences of help-seeking in the workplace. Seeking to fill this gap, I draw from the social and counseling psychology literatures, as well as from research in epidemiology and health sociology to first conceptualize the notion of employee help-seeking and then to identify the variables and mechanisms potentially driving such behavior in work organizations. My critical review of this literature suggests that the application of existing models of help-seeking may offer limited predictive utility when applied to the workplace unless help-seeking is conceived as the outcome of a multi-level process. That in mind, I propose a model of employee help-seeking that takes into account the potential direct and cross-level moderating effects of a variety of situational factors (e.g., the nature of the particular problem, organizational norms, support climate) that might have differential influences on help-seeking behavior depending on the particular phase of the help-seeking process examined. Following this, I focus on two sets of help-seeking outcomes, namely, the implications of employee help-seeking on individual and group performance, and the impact of help-seeking on employee well-being. The chapter concludes with a brief examination of some of the more critical issues in employee help-seeking that remain to be explored (e.g., the timing of help solicitation) as well as the methodological challenges likely to be faced by those seeking to engage in such exploration.

To examine the attitudes of small‐to‐medium enterprises (SMEs) in the UK, in order to identify obstacles to employment of marketing‐qualified graduates and devise strategies for improving the rate of graduate recruitment in the sector.

Focus groups, semi‐structured interviews and a postal questionnaire survey, yielding responses from 260 SMEs and 130 graduates, was built upon focus group discussions and semi‐structured interviews, and selectively followed up by in‐depth interviews.

There is a significant supply‐demand imbalance and a mismatch between the skills demanded by SME owner‐managers versus those taught in typical marketing syllabuses. Graduates' frame of reference is the world of big FMCG business; they do not understand the modus operandi of SMEs. Proposals are made for dealing with the resulting problems.

The sample is limited geographically and the response rate among SMEs characteristically low. A broader‐based extension of the study is indicated.

The findings provide a recipe for the redesign of syllabuses and curricula to narrow the skills identified, to educate SME owner‐managers in the benefits of employing graduates, and to stimulate graduates to take more responsibility for their own development.

Empirical research of interest to policy makers, marketing educators and small‐business leaders.

The purpose of this paper is to draw on the outcomes of an Higher Education Academy funded project, Literacies for Employability (L4E) to contribute to discussion of the interface between university learning and workplace settings and the focus on employability that dominates the English context. The paper will be of interest to colleagues from any discipline who have an interest in critical (re)readings of employability and practical ways of engaging student in ethnographic approaches to understanding workplace practices, particularly those with an interest in professional, work-based, or placement learning.

L4E is grounded in social theories of communication from Sociology and Education that understands literacy as a complex social activity embedded in domains of practice. These ideas recognise workplaces as domains that are highly distinctive and diverse contexts for literacy (rather than generic or standard) and that to be successful in particular workplace settings students must be attuned to, and adaptive and fluent in, the nuanced literacy practices of that workplace. However, evidence suggests (Lea and Stierer, 2000) that HE students (and teachers) rarely experience overt teaching about literacy in general or workplace literacies in particular.

This project developed a framework to scaffold and support this process across the disciplines so that students can develop the attitudes and behaviours they will need to be successful in the workplace.

The approach chimes with recommendations from Pegg et al. (2012) that employability is most effectively developed through a focus on more expansive, reflexive approaches to learning and through “raising confidence […] self-esteem and aspirations” (Pegg et al., 2012, p. 9).

The study explores the role of satisfaction with job security in predicting organizational commitment and job performance in a multicultural non‐Western environment. It also examines factors contributing to the variations in satisfaction with job security among employees. Results indicate that satisfaction with job security is positively correlated with both organizational commitment and job performance. Furthermore, employees’ age, educational level, job level, monthly income, marital status, tenure in present job, tenure in present organization and an organization’s activity contribute significantly to the variations in satisfaction with job security among employees. Finally, the relationship between satisfaction with job security, and both organizational commitment and job performance vary across national cultures.