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Stereotypes are simplified and widely shared visions held by a social group regarding a place, object, event or recognizable set of people united by certain characteristics or qualities. They are “dangerous” mental models because they are widely disseminated, devious and capable of acting even unconsciously in individuals, social groups and organizations altering the rationality of assessments and choices and producing discrimination and prejudice. Stereotypes acritically extend from a characteristic of a significant percentage of a category to the totality of individuals. The process of generalization triggered by a stereotype produces the error of discrimination and prejudice. There are numerous forms of stereotypes, but this study takes into account gender stereotypes because they act pervasively, often subtly, to reduce “productivity”. People who are aware of being discriminated perceive an unsatisfactory fulfillment of their motivations, which reduces their incentive to improve their performance. Since productivity measures the efficient use of energy from working in production processes, the author believes that wherever gender stereotypes are at play, there is a productive “waste of energy”, an inefficiency in work activity with harmful effects for organizations of all kinds, including families.

The work aims to demonstrate that wherever gender stereotypes are at play, a “waste of energy” manifests itself in terms of productivity, representing an inefficiency in work activity with harmful effects for organizations of all kinds, including families. To describe the negative effects stereotypes produce in organizations, some models are presented based on the methods and language of systems thinking. These models, although typically qualitative, are capable of exploring the most accepted theories in the literature: tournament theory, the Pygmalion effect, the Galatea effect, self-fulfilling prophecies, the Queen bee syndrome, the role congruency theory, the glass ceiling theory (“think manager, think male” and “family responsibilities wall”). The paper follows a predominantly organizational and corporate approach, although the copious literature on stereotypes belongs largely to the area of social psychology and organization studies.

The paper does not consider the psychological origin of stereotypes but highlights their use as routines-shortcuts for evaluations and decisions demonstrating that, when adopted in social systems and within organisations, stereotypes produce different forms of discrimination: in social rights, in work, in careers and in access to levels of education and public services, reducing performance and limit potential. The paper also examines some ways gender and culture stereotypes can be opposed, presenting a change management strategy and some concrete solutions proposed by the process–structure–culture model for social change (PSC model).

The main limitation of the work is that it focuses on gender stereotypes, choosing not to consider the “intersection effect” of these with other stereotypes: racial stereotypes, religious stereotypes, color stereotypes, age stereotypes, sex and sexual orientation stereotypes, and many others, whose joint action can cause serious inefficiencies in organizational work.

As stereotypes are a component of social culture and are handed down, by use and example, from generation to generation, the maintenance over time of stereotypes used by individuals to evaluate, judge and act can be seen as an effect of the typical action of a combinatory system of diffusion, which can operate for a long time if not effectively opposed. Il PSC model indicates the strategy for carrying out this opposition.

With regard to gender stereotypes, it should be emphasized that in organizations and social systems, “gender diversity” should be considered an opportunity and not as a discriminating factor and thus encouraged by avoiding harmful discrimination. In fact, this diversity, precisely because of the distinctive characteristics individuals possess regardless of gender, can benefit the organization and lead to an increase in organizational and social performance. The United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (2020) Goal 5: Achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls is examined in this context.

This study views the action of gender stereotypes as especially harmful “mental models”, highlighting the distortions they cause in the allocation of productive energy in society, groups and organizations. The paper follows a predominantly organizational and corporate approach, although the copious literature on stereotypes belongs largely to the area of social psychology. Using the “logic” and “language” of systems thinking, theories and models that describe and interpret the distorting effects of organizational choices based on stereotypes rather than rational analysis are highlighted. The action of stereotypes and their persistence over time can also be described using combinatory systems theory. With this paper, the author hopes that by acting on the three wheels of change highlighted by the PSC model, through legal provisions, control tools and actions on the culture operated by educational and social aggregative institutions, it should not be impossible to change the prevailing culture so that it becomes aware of the harmful influence of gender stereotypes and other discriminatory mental models and come to reject them. The author hopes this paper will help to understand the need to make this change.

Conducted with a staff of 562 persons working in the health sector in Quebec, mainly nurses, the purpose of this paper is to test the indirect effects of psychosocial safety climate (PSC) on workarounds through physical fatigue, cognitive weariness and emotional exhaustion as mediators.

The structural equation method, namely CFA, was used to test the structure of constructs, the reliability and validity of the measurement scales as well as model fit. To test the mediation effects, Hayes’s PROCESS (2013) macro and 95 percent confidence intervals were used and 5,000 bootstrapping re-samples were run. The statistical treatments were carried out with the AMOS software V.24 and SPSS v.22.

The results based on bootstrap analysis and Sobel’s test demonstrate that physical fatigue, cognitive weariness and emotional exhaustion mediate the relationship between PSC and safety workarounds.

The study has important practical implications in detecting blocks and obstacles in the work processes and decreasing the use of workaround behaviors, or in converting their negative consequences into positive contributions.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to examine the relationship between PSC, burnout and workaround behaviors. These results could contribute to a better understanding of this construct of workarounds and how to deal with it. Moreover, the test of the concepts of PSC in this study provides support for the theory of “conservation of resources” by proposing an extension of this theory.

This chapter examines one of the most contested issues in Public Administration, namely political–administrative relationships. The first part of the chapter begins with a brief overview of the features of an ideal-type bureaucracy. Next is a literature review of political–administrative relationships. This is followed by an analysis of typologies of political–administrative relationships, with particular reference to developing countries. The second part of the chapter analyses the evolution of political–administrative relationships since the dawn of South African democracy in 1994. It examines the growing politicisation of the public service, the weakening of the powers of public officials vis-a-vis Ministers and the emasculation of the PSC. Data indicate that the government is unable to fill posts at the Senior Management Service (SMS) level and that there are a high number of acting HoDs, an indicator of instability. Finally, it uses Dasandi and Esteve’s typology of political–administrative relationships in developing countries to interpret the South African case.

This paper aims to evaluate the implementation of innovative programmes within the downstream domain of the pharmaceutical supply chain (PSC), with the aim of informing improved service provision.

A mixed-method approach was used to assess to what extent innovation could be adopted by hospital and community pharmacies to improve the delivery process of pharmaceutical products. Unstructured interviews and 130 questionnaires were collected and analysed to identify factors that facilitate or prevent innovation within PSC processes.

The analysis led to the creation of the innovative pharmaceutical supply chain framework (IPSCF) that provides guidance to health-care organisations about how supply chain management problems could be addressed by implementing innovative approaches. The results also indicated that the implementation of Lean and Reverse Logistics (RL) practices, supported by integrated information technology systems, can help health-care organisations to enhance their delivery in terms of quality (products and service quality), visibility (knowledge and information sharing), speed (response to customers and suppliers needs) and cost (minimisation of cost and waste).

The study’s recommendations have potential implications for supply chain theory and practice, particularly for pharmacies in terms of innovation adoption. The IPSCF provides guidance to pharmacies and health-care organisations to develop more efficient and effective supply chain strategies.

This research contributes to the academic literature as it adds novel theoretical insights to highly complex delivery process innovation.

Adopting new technologies to improve supply chain activities and processes is essential due to increasingly complex and dynamic business environments. Particularly in the pharmaceutical industry, high-quality standards must be met, requiring transparency and visibility in the supply chain. This research aims at investigating the implementation of blockchain technology in the supply chain of an Egyptian pharmaceutical company.

The research applies a single case-study approach building on the theoretical underpinnings of transaction cost economics. Twenty-five semistructured interviews were conducted with pharmacies and employees of the case company to identify the blockchain technologies' potential for pharmaceutical supply in Egypt. Further analyzing the frequencies of the codes, the authors elaborate on specific relationships between the observed practices.

The research revealed the potential benefits of adopting blockchain technology. Transaction costs are indeed positively impacted by reduced contracting costs, processing costs and lead times, also ensuring the safe delivery of medications. However, the findings also highlight obstacles related to running costs, awareness and company culture. Regarding supply chain governance, blockchain technology can enhance collaboration within the supply chain as well as with important stakeholders.

Insufficient management of pharmaceutical supply chains (PSC) may affect a company's reputation but also disrupt the patient's healing process due to temperature damage and counterfeit medicines. Blockchain governance, in this vein, can ensure a safer and more reliable supply of pharmaceutical products. For intraorganizational purposes, however, cloud solutions, barcoding and generally digital platforms are rated more frequently than blockchain solutions.

The present study contributes to an advanced understanding how blockchain technology supports PSC, particularly in an emerging country context like Egypt. It thereby confirms and extends previous research as well as adds to the theoretical underpinnings of digitalized supply chains.

Pharmaceutical donations are a practical approach to increase medicine availability during disasters such as disease outbreaks. However, often donated pharmaceuticals are inappropriate and unsuitable. This convergence of inappropriate pharmaceuticals is a severe operational challenge and results in environmental hazards. This study explores the pharmaceutical supply chains (PSCs) during a disease outbreak to relieve the negative impact of the material convergence problem (MCP).

This study adopts a situation-actors-process learning-action-performance (SAP-LAP) linkage framework to understand the PSC dynamics. The problem-solving component of the SAP-LAP analysis provides the strategies catering to MCP. The findings from the SAP-LAP helped to develop the causal loop diagram (CLD). This study conducts several experiments on the proposed strategies by integrating CLD into a stock and flow diagram. Later, a disease outbreak case study accessed the pharmaceutical donations effect on PSC performance.

The study synthesises and evaluates propositions and strategies to incorporate circular economy (CE) principles in PSC. This study proposed two strategies; one to sort and supply and the other to sort, supply and resell. The reuse policy improves humanitarian organisations' finances in the simulation study. This study verified the operational improvement of PSC by reducing the transport and storage burden due to MCP.

This study comprehensively approaches the issue of drug donation and uniquely produced several propositions for incorporating a CE perspective in PSC. The study also proposed a unique simulation approach to model the donation arrivals in response to a disease outbreak using susceptible, exposed, infectious and recovered modelling.

The purpose of this paper is to uncover the effect of psychosocial safety climate (PSC – a climate for psychological health) on managerial quality and the mediating processes explaining that association. It is posited that the alignment between what is said (espoused PSC) and what is done (enacted PSC via managerial quality) is important for successful organizational interventions. Managers’ own psychosocial work factors act as resources to facilitate the enactment of managerial quality.

Two waves of survey were administered over a three-month period (n at Time 1=144, n at Time 2=166, overall n=115) in a study of four organizations involved in implementing the Quebec Healthy Enterprise Standard (QHES). A cross-lagged panel analysis was used to determine the temporal direction of the PSC–managerial quality relationship. A longitudinal mediation model of PSC as a determinant of managerial quality was tested using job demands, job control, social support and quality of relationships with subordinates as mediators.

The cross-lagged panel analysis showed that PSC is temporally prior to managerial quality in that the relationship between PSC at T1 and managerial quality at T2 was stronger than the relationship between managerial quality at T1 and PSC at T2. A two-wave mediation analysis showed that PSC was positively associated with managerial quality, and that job control partially mediated this relationship. Contrary to expectations, managers’ workload, their social support and the quality of their relationships with subordinates did not mediate the PSC–managerial quality relationship.

Despite the small sample size and short timeframe of this study, it contributes to knowledge on the resources facilitating managerial quality, which is important for employees’ psychological health. Little is known regarding the mediating processes that explain how managers’ own context and psychosocial work factors affect their management practices during organizational health interventions.

From a practical view point, this study contributes to the literature showing that managers need to be supported during the implementation of health interventions, and need the leeway to pursue the organization’s prevention objectives.

Whereas previous studies have focused on describing the impact of leadership behaviors on employee health outcomes, the study offers insights into the resources that help managers translate PSC into action in the implementation of a national standard, the QHES.

The purpose of this paper is to articulate a synergic-mediated model of positive service behaviors enabled by what could be called a “psychosocial resource caravan” for improved customer behavioral intentions to help service organizations especially during coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) crisis.

This paper adopts a multi-level approach and is based on positive organizational behavior and occupational health and safety literature. An empirical study of synergic-mediated model of positive service behaviors has been developed and tested using a quantitative approach.

This paper offers a theoretical framework proposing that a psychosocially safe work environment (psychosocial safety climate (PSC)) interacts with employees' positive psychological capital (PsyCap) to facilitate positive service behaviors that influence customers' behavioral intentions. As PsyCap and PSC have origin, respectively, in different organizational levels, those both can combine and create a context for positive service encounters. The proposed model has been operationalized and then the reliability and validity of the constructs have been examined. A series of CFAs has been conducted and the fitness of the prosed model was compared to other possible models. The model showed a better fitness compared to the other plausible models. All hypotheses of the model were also significant.

The proposed model integrates positive organizational behavior and occupational health and safety literature to consider the conditions for positive service behaviors. High levels of PsyCap among team members and a psychosocially safe working environment, i.e. PSC can impact customers through positive service behaviors. The articulation of the proposed model presented in this paper invites future empirical research on the synergic nature of psychosocial resources. The paper also suggests some key points to operationalize “psychosocial resource caravan.”

The paper seeks to establish a critical role for leaders in guiding projects to higher levels of effectiveness. This role centers on using the thinking capacities associated with systems thinking, knowledge processing, action learning, and pragmatism. It is also to design systems to imbue these capacities into the operation of project teams.

This paper presents a case study, action‐research observations, and conceptual models. Actual case studies including a medium‐sized US manufacturer and a large shipyard.

This paper includes a section that presents research findings that suggest efforts by managers to improve profits actually reduced profit in the longer term due to erroneous learning and low‐quality knowledge.

The research presented does not focus specifically on project teams, but rather on the interplay between project teams and the larger organizations of which they are part.

In certain industries, the performance track record of project teams for operating according to schedule and within budget is dismal. Such failures have been wrongly attributed to bad staffing, poor decision making, internal politics, or external forces. This paper proposes that the more common reasons for such failures are erroneous learning caused by misperceptions of dynamic feedback, low‐quality knowledge, imbalances among system elements, and failure to account for dynamics and time delays. An approach called project management system pragmatics is proposed for use by leaders as a way to improve the effectiveness of project teams.

This is the first approach to project management/leadership that offers practical ways for leaders to conceive of how to deal with the ambiguities posed by the dynamics of the complex systems many project teams operate within.

Employee engagement (EE), supervisor support (SS) and interprofessional collaboration (IPC) are important contributors to patient safety climate (PSC). The purpose of this paper is to propose and empirically test a model that suggests the presence of a three-way interaction effect between EE, IPC and SS in creating a stronger PSC.

Using validated tools to measure EE, SS, IPC and PSC data were collected from a questionnaire of 250 clinical and support staff in an Australian health service. Using a statistical package (SPSS) an exploratory factor analysis was conducted. Bivariate correlations between the derived variables were calculated and a hierarchical ordinary least squares analysis was used to examine the interaction between the variables.

This research finds that PSC emerges from synergies between EE, IPC and SS. Modelling demonstrates that the effect of IPC with PSC is the strongest when staff are highly engaged. While the authors expected SS to be an important predictor of PSC; EE has a stronger relationship to PSC.

These findings have important implications for the development of patient safety programmes that focus on developing excellent supervisors and enabling IPC.

The authors provide quantitative evidence relating to three of the often mentioned constructs in the typology of patient safety and how they work together to improve PSC. The authors believe this to be the first empirically based study that confirms the importance of IPC as a lead marker for improved patient safety.