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Public sector regimes in Australasia are reforming their operations to enhance effectiveness and efficiency. Competition and contracts are presented as mechanisms facilitating such reform in areas such as costs, productivity and quality. This paper argues that short‐term contractual arrangements such as compulsory tendering do not live up to such reformist expectations. Unresolved questions thus preclude any final judgement about the benefits claimed for contracts and tendering in public management. In pursuing “best value” procurement policies, the public sector should consider delivery of services as a facilities management issue. Furthermore, business practice suggests that success is linked to an ability to be flexible in environments noted for change more than constancy. However, the preference given to competitive tendering and contracting (CTC) and more specifically to compulsory competitive tendering (CCT) by state and federal governments in Australia limits the growth of networks at community levels. The policy arena from which CCT derives is more transitory and limited in scope. The notion of compulsory tendering through market competition is discussed and challenged. The authors conclude that good procurement of facilities is a result of strategic linkages.

Recently there has been an impressive growth in the scholarly literature on public procurement. The study of the administrative roles assumed by public procurement specialists is, however, one area that remains largely underexplored. Somewhat curiously, the professionals making a career in the field are often an afterthought when it comes to empirical research. Outside of anecdotal accounts, there is little that is known in terms of the roles that procurement specialists assume on daily basis. In this respect, there is an important knowledge gap within the field's body of literature. This article attempts to address this knowledge gap through an exploratory empirical evaluation of the administrative behaviors of public procurement specialists.

This paper aims to examine key determinants that influence the decision to outsource facilities management (FM) services. FM is said to be acquiring increasing popularity all over the globe, with several sourcing strategies springing up for FM services provision.

Based on questionnaire survey approach, this paper uses purposive sampling to administer 84 questionnaires to selected bank executives operating in the 21 licensed commercial banks in Nigeria, soliciting their responses about what constitute key determinants of outsourcing decision in the context of FM services provision. In all, 41 responses were received, giving a response rate of 49 per cent.

Supported by empirical evidence, this study established 14 factors as key determinants of outsourcing decision for FM services provision. The top three rated factors were “to improve company’s focus”, “to make cost transparent” and “to improve stakeholders’ satisfaction”, while “to restrict own investment in staff”, “to retire personnel” and “to play along with trend in privatisation” were the least rated. There was no significant difference in the rankings of the factors by respondents, while most of the highly rated factors exhibited strong correlation with other factors.

Due to limited dimension of sample size, more robust techniques such as factor analysis and structural equation modelling could not be used.

This paper provides an enhanced understanding of outsourcing decision and basis for further research into decision support models for outsourcing in the context of FM services provision.

This study sets out to introduce an innovative performance measurement system (PMS) for business process outsourcing in facility management (FM) industry and analyse, comprehend and explain the main criticalities in the relationship among the actors involved in an outsourcing non core services contract, which is typical of the FM business sector. The aim of the tool is to improve performances and enhance their integration towards a partnership.

A case study research has been carried out on a medical service authority and on its FM service provider in order to investigate, understand and explain the main criticalities in their relationships. Starting from a literature analysis on empirical applications of PMS, an adaptation of a balanced scorecard (BSC) has been realized to exceed the criticalities of the case study and to propose a PMS for facility management.

As highlighted in the case study, the need for an improved actors' partnership has been fulfilled through an innovative approach, i.e. a performance measurement system which shares some indicators among FM service provider and customer.

The limitation of this research lies in the fact that PMS has been designed from a single case study. Despite this fact, the PMS can be easily adapted for wide applications inside the FM business sector.

The PMS allows a better integration and coordination of the actors involved in an outsourcing services contract. It could be implemented in FM software tools.

The proposed performance measurement system is an innovative integration between the balanced scorecard and service balanced scorecard (SBC) for the facility management service industry. Furthermore, it shares some indicators which solve the main criticalities in the relationships among the actors involved in an outsourcing services contract and enhance partnership.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the compatibility between the religious investing criteria of some Christian mutual funds and the “ Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility” (ICCR) shareholder resolutions about corporate unethical/illegal practices.

Among all ICCR 2007‐2008 shareholder resolutions, the paper analyze unethical practices that could lead to corporate illegalities for business corporations that are included in the portfolios of Christian mutual funds. It will determines to what extent such companies have codes of ethics that clearly explained the expected behaviour from their employees, managers, or directors about given ethical issues: sexual orientation discrimination, conflicts of interest on the board and slave labour in the supply chain.

About the issue of slave labour in the supply chain, managers of Christian mutual funds could not invoke ignorance since in the code of ethics of one company, there is no provision dealing with slave labour. Concerning conflicts of interest on the board, managers of Christian mutual funds could not identify potential risks related to those companies, since the problem is the applicability of their codes of ethics. Finally, companies have very different ways to address or not the issue of sexual orientation discrimination in their codes of ethics.

The originality of the paper is twofold: first to compare companies Christian mutual funds are investing in (on the basis of Christian selection criteria) and companies for which there are ICCR resolutions (the aim of such resolutions is to change some questionable or unethical aspect of a given business corporation), and second to see to what extent corporate codes of ethics are written in a way to reduce or increase the potentiality of ethical conflicts.

In Australia, the public sector represents a significant component of the Australian economy and is a major employer across all states and territories. A constant stream of public sector management reforms has occurred over the last decade. These reforms include accrual accounting and budgeting, whole of government reporting, privatisation and contracting out to name a few. This would suggest that accounting graduates applying for positions at government agencies would benefit from some knowledge of these significant reforms. This paper aims to examine the perceptions of accounting academics as to barriers to public sector accounting (PSA) education in Australia and identify strategies for making the accounting curriculum more public sector inclusive.

Two data collection methods were employed in order to attain a comprehensive picture of the state of PSA education in Australia. Telephone interviews were undertaken with accounting academics across a carefully selected range of universities. This selection ensured representation across the core accounting units to gain an indication of the extent of public sector coverage in the core accounting subjects. In‐depth face‐to‐face interviews were then conducted at five universities across five states of Australia to probe further issues that emanated from the telephone interviews.

The findings suggest that in general, there is very limited teaching of PSA in Australian universities' accounting degree programs. Of the universities studied where issues regarding the public sector are emphasised, this is mainly due to a few academics who have a research interest in the public sector and so extend this interest into their teaching and the curriculum.

There are a number of strategies identified to achieve greater coverage of PSA in the curriculum. However, the findings suggest that unless the professional accounting bodies require PSA to be included in courses as part of the accreditation process, then it will be difficult to achieve significant improvement in the nature and extent of public sector exposure. Most interviewees argued that a key factor in increasing public sector coverage would be ensuring that the textbook writers for the core accounting units included more PSA examples.

The public sector in general, and PSA education is a neglected area of research. This study is significant as it highlights that although major public sector reforms have occurred in Australia and worldwide, this has had little impact on the accounting curriculum taught to students.

This paper aims to integrate the extant literature on the impact of positive leadership on organisational outcomes within the Australian not-for-profit (NFP) organisations, identifies existing gaps in the literature and proposes a framework capturing feasible pathways for future research on positive leadership in NFP organisations.

This is a systematic review of the existing literature on positive leadership and external/environmental factors and organisational values as applied to Australian NFP organisations mainly based on journal articles.

This paper proposes a plausible conceptual framework postulating how Australian NFP organisations could attain superior performance outcomes when there is a perfect alignment between positive forms of leadership, external/environmental factors and organisational values. We explain the conceptual framework through testable research propositions explaining interrelationships between positive leadership, external/environmental factors, organisational values and organisational performance.

The review focused on two positive forms of leadership (i.e. transformational and servant) and could benefit by including other closely related leadership styles and behaviours (like authentic and ethical leadership). In addition to the positivist paradigm and quantitative approach adopted by this paper, interpretative and critical paradigms and related qualitative approaches may also lend themselves well to exposing pertinent issues and relationships that have not been imagined before in the under-researched NFP sector.

Leaders within NFP organisations need to understand when and how to align positive forms of leadership, external/environmental factors and organisational values to maximise limited resources available to Australian NFP organisations.

This systematic review adds to the limited literature exploring the impact of positive forms of leadership within Australian NFP organisations. The proposed framework offers unique insights into the relationships between positive forms of leadership, external/environmental factors, organisational values and organisational performance.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of job demand, job control, and supervisory support on stress among nurses in China, Japan, Argentina, and the Caribbean using the Job demand‐control (JDC) and the Job demand‐control‐support (JDCS) models.

The authors have employed a comparative research design, cross‐sectional survey methodology with convenient random sampling, and a commonly used statistical analytic strategy.

The results highlight that job demand, job control, and supervisory support are important variables in understanding stress among nurses. This has been corroborated in China, Japan, Argentina, and the Caribbean. Based on their findings and what is available in the literature, the authors report that the JDCS model has universal significance albeit it works somewhat differently in different contexts.

This study's contribution comes from its comparative nature, theoretical anchor, its use of one of the most popular models of stress, its focus on a profession that is demonstrably stressed, its use of common measures and an established analytic strategy. The study's findings underscore the cross‐cultural usefulness and application of the JDCS model along with its threshold and substitution effects and limiting conditions.

The purpose of this paper is to examine organizational identification as an underlying mechanism for how perceptions of interpersonal leadership are related to employee engagement, and its relationship with commitment and job tension.

A sample of 451 full-time employees at an international firm completed a web-based survey.

Organizational identification mediated the relationship between perceived interpersonal leadership and engagement, which mediated the relationship between perceived interpersonal leadership and commitment. Engagement mediated the relationship between identification and job tension.

Limitations include cross-sectional data. Strengths include a large field sample. Implication is that leaders who encourage employees’ identification with the organization may also encourage their engagement.

Interpersonal leadership characteristics can be developed, and are positively related to employees’ identification, commitment, and engagement, which are negatively related to job tension.

Interpersonal leaders are positively associated with employees’ engagement; high engagement has been related to positive employee health and well-being. A healthy workforce translates into a healthy society.

This study is one of the few to examine the underlying mechanisms through which leadership relates to engagement.

This study aims to test the relationship between ageing, professional status and well-being and the moderating role that job resources might have in this relationship.

The authors relied upon the literature on well-being and the job demands–resources (JD-R) model and employed the Copenhagen psychological questionnaire administered to patient care workers in three paediatric hospitals belonging to the same healthcare organization.

The findings, on the one hand, confirm a not-significant relationship between ageing, professional status and well-being; on the other hand, they indicate that job resources have a positive, significant and direct impact on well-being and a significant role in moderating the relationship between ageing, professional status and well-being.

The present paper has manifold academic and practical interesting implications as it contributes to the literature on the well-being of healthcare workers and provides implications to identify interventions for better human resource (HR) management in the healthcare context.