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Higher education research is replete with discussion of boundaries imagined as structural constraints in need of removal or circumvention. But, while foregrounding national–transnational frameworks, leadership strategising and institutional structures, the scholarship is subdued about how boundaries are actually dealt with at ground level. How do practitioners come together, day by day, across higher education boundaries; and what is required for desirable practices to be nurtured? It is on this issue, and in particular the theorisation of this issue, that this chapter will focus.

This chapter presents and develops a relational working framework, based on the work of Anne Edwards. We highlight three core concepts (common knowledge, relational expertise and relational agency), disaggregating each into constituent features. We then apply the framework to reinterpret previously published empirical studies, to demonstrate its broad applicability. We argue that the framework usefully conceptualises how practitioners work with others across boundaries; that it helps us to notice how many boundaries are, in fact, routinely permeated; and that it usefully highlights important aspects of local practices that are easily obscured.

This chapter advances understanding of how professional expertise is enacted and created to accomplish routines in the context of technology-mediated work. Information and communication technologies broaden the participation of professionals with various specialist skills and expertise to accomplish work together, which is particularly salient in health care. Broadening participation, however, creates jurisdictional conflict among professionals. Thus, a key challenge of interprofessional work is the need to mutually adapt established professional routines and overcome jurisdictional conflict to perform interdependent routine tasks. The authors examine how professionals adapt established routines by analyzing the new interactions and interdependent actions required to accomplish technology-mediated geriatric consultation routines. The findings of this study show that professionals create new patterns of actions that are shaped by relational forms of professional expertise, namely selective and blending expertise. The findings and theoretical insights contribute to the literature on routine dynamics by highlighting the importance of relational expertise, and showing how it can transform and destabilize otherwise established professional routines.

The purpose of this chapter is to develop the idea of enhancing collaboration within a public context. It does so by exploring the challenge of working with others across organisational boundaries, when addressing complex issues. It discusses research findings from a Scotland based public service study concerned with collaborative practice and presents an empirical analysis of what it means to work in a relational way. The existing literature is reviewed alongside the study findings, connecting with contemporary theories and debates in the fields of collaboration, leadership and public administration.

The empirical work detailed in this chapter drew from collective and relational leadership theories which influenced the study design and methodological approach. The data collection method took the form of semi-structured interviews and data were analysed using thematic analysis supported by data mapping exercises. Data were obtained through interviews of 20 participants from multiple public service roles and organisations who were involved in similar activities linked to collaboration.

This chapter promotes an approach where disrupting traditional collaborative practice offers new insights in terms of (1) understanding the group process and (2) recognising what processual and behavioural adjustments can be made to enrich collaborative work. This approach was found to offer a number of benefits linked to building trust, promoting meaningful dialogue and altered the conversations that people chose to have.

The reconceptualisation of collaboration specifically illustrates what it means to ‘work in a more relational way’ and how it is understood by those attempting to build collaborative capacity, sustain public services and improve outcomes for citizens and communities. As such, it is this focus on relationships that is considered innovative and important to creating the open collaborative culture required for addressing complex issues and working across organisational boundaries.

This paper analyses how neighbourhood governance of social care affects the scope for frontline workers to address health inequities of older ethnic minorities. We critically discuss how an area-based, generic approach to service provision limits and enables frontline workers' efforts to reach out to ethnic minority elders, using a relational approach to place. This approach emphasises social and cultural distances to social care and understands efforts to bridge these distances as “relational work”.

The authors conducted a two-year multiple case study of the cities of Nijmegen and The Hague, the Netherlands, following the development of policies and practices relevant to ethnic minority elders. They conducted 44 semi-structured interviews with managers, policy officers and frontline workers as well as 295 h of participant observation at network events and meeting activities.

Relational work was open-ended and consisted of a continuous reorientation of goals and means. In some cases, frontline workers spanned neighbourhood boundaries to connect with professional networks, key figures and places meaningful to ethnic minority elders. While neighbourhood governance is attuned to equality, relational work practice fosters possibilities for achieving equity.

Further research on achieving equity in relational work practice and more explicit policy support of relational work is needed.

The paper contributes empirical knowledge about how neighbourhood governance of social care affects ethnic minority elders. It translates a relational view of place into a “situational” social justice approach.

Attempts by mainstream economics to account for cooperative behavior expand the utility‐maximizing framework without questioning the individualistic set‐up on which it is grounded. This paper aims to develop a theory of cooperation that departs from the individualistic framework. “Communal principles” must be introduced in the analysis to account for cooperation and the relational, as opposed to atomistic, nature of individuals must be acknowledged.

The empirical study, based on data from the European Working Conditions and European Social Surveys, aims at illustrating the social benefits of cooperation. A categorical components analysis was carried out to build indicators for the notions of relational and moral goods and civic participation. Regression models were subsequently estimated to study the association between relational/moral goods at work and civic participation.

The empirical results show that high levels of relational and moral goods at work are associated with high levels of civic participation. However, substantial differences are observed between countries. Nordic countries exhibit high levels of both indicators while some Eastern and Southern European countries perform much more poorly. The study illustrates interaction between certain features of working life and civic behavior.

The theoretical contribution of the paper lies in the proposal of a new account of the sources of cooperative behavior at work. It argues that cooperation within work organizations is supported by three common goods – a common goal, relational goods and moral goods. The “goodness” of these goods does not derive simply from their generating utility but from their being commonly shared.

This article focuses on the conditions that are conducive to effective work on reducing children's vulnerability to social exclusion. It draws on three studies of practitioners who are collaborating to prevent the social exclusion of children and young people. Two ideas are discussed: distributed expertise and relational agency. Distributed expertise recognises that expertise is distributed across local systems and that practitioners need to become adept at recognising, drawing on and contributing to it. Relational agency offers a finer‐grained analysis of what is involved in working in systems of distributed expertise. Findings include the need for professionals to develop relational agency as an extra layer of expertise alongside their core professional expertise and a concern that interprofessional work may result in seeing clients as tasks to be worked on rather than people to be worked with relationally. Implications for training and professional development are outlined.

Drawing on Kahn’s model of meaningful connections, this study aims to examine relational attachment as a mediating mechanism linking social support in terms of instrumental support and personal support to employees’ subjective career success.

Data were collected in 2 waves from 247 employees working in Poland. Hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling in AMOS.

The findings indicated that employees are more attached to and satisfied with their careers when they have a stronger relational attachment to others at work. Furthermore, relational attachment was found to be driven by tangible or intangible instrumental support received at work rather than the personal support received at work.

Managers should recognize the importance of workplace relationships and social support, which can lead to higher career commitment and career satisfaction. However, managers should keep in mind that too much interference in individuals’ privacy and providing too much personal support may lead to adverse outcomes.

The present study expands the scant literature on the mediating role of relational attachment at work between social support received at work and subjective career success.

Drawing upon theories of conservation of resources (COR), broaden-and-build (BnB), self-determination, and the job demands- resources (JD-R) model, this study uniquely tries to understand the mechanisms that contribute to happiness at work by proposing a model of the effects of emotional culture of joy on happiness at work, where psychological safety and relational attachments serve as intervening mechanisms among the aforesaid relationship.

A three-wave time-lagged study with 340 employees from Pakistani organizations was conducted. Data were analyzed using covariance-based structural equation modelling.

The results indicate that emotional culture of joy significantly predicts happiness at work. Furthermore, emotional culture of joy significantly and positively influences both psychological safety and relational attachment. Finally, the relationship between emotional culture of joy and happiness at work is found to be mediated by both relational attachment and psychological safety.

The results are of utmost importance as they provide insights to policy makers and organizations administrators on the value of emotional culture of joy and its contribution to employees’ wellbeing, and indeed its role in fostering important psychological and emotional resources such as psychological safety and relational attachment.

This study is unique for the following reasons. First, it addresses and bridges a gap pertaining to the drivers of happiness at work. Second, this is the first study that considers emotional culture of joy as an antecedent to happiness at work. Third, the employment of both psychological safety and relational attachment as intervening mechanisms in the relationship between emotional culture of joy and happiness at work has not been previously addressed in the management and wellbeing literature. Finally, the study shifts direction from studying organizational drivers (i.e. HR, organization support, etc.) of happiness at work to the examination of psychological and emotional resources that may influence happiness at work.

The shift to remote work brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically limited spontaneous workplace interpersonal interactions. For one interpersonal relationship in particular, the work spouse, the sudden physical distance may impact the energy work spouses draw from one another. Drawing on interactional ritual theory, this study aims to investigate the relationship between interaction frequency and organizational outcomes mediated by relational energy amid the pandemic.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, working adults who indicated they had a work spouse were recruited via Qualtrics to participate in a two-part online study.

Complete data from 120 participants across both time periods revealed that more frequent interaction between work spouses is associated with increased job satisfaction and affective commitment mediated by relational energy.

This study represents the first empirical examination of individual and organizational outcomes of a unique interpersonal workplace relationship. Additionally, this study enhances our understanding of the impact of relational energy in socially distanced situations between employees in a close, intimate (non-sexual) pair bond.

Healthcare professionals are key in healthcare organisations but are subject to long working hours and may have to make complex life-and-death decisions. As frontline agents dealing with human lives, giving them a voice is paramount. This study explores the impact of employee voice (assessed based on employee perceptions on how much they are consulted and how much influence they have on task-related decisions) on health professionals' work engagement and burnout when mediated by relational outcomes (perceived organisational support, workplace trust, workplace recognition and meaningful work).

A sample of 3,266 health professionals retrieved from the European Working Condition Survey was used. The quantitative analysis was performed using the partial least square structural equation modelling and multiple regression analyses.

The results indicate that employee voice has a direct positive impact on work engagement, but employee voice's direct effects on burnout still need to be confirmed. Relational outcomes are found to mediate the relationship between employee voice and burnout (decreasing it) and between employee voice and work engagement (increasing it).

Practices of employee voice in the workplace are fundamental to promoting health professionals' well-being. Trust, recognition, support and the feeling of doing meaningful work increase the influence of employee voice, especially in reducing the levels of burnout.

This is the first study that assesses, at a European level, the importance that ‘giving health professionals a voice' has on crucial employee outcomes: work engagement, burnout and relational outcomes.