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Although studies have improved understanding of the relation between external career mentoring and mentor work outcomes, an important question remains regarding whether this mentoring function influences mentor turnover intentions. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of career mentoring outside the workplace on mentor turnover intentions.

Data were collected from 101 working business professionals in the southeastern USA at two points in time who provided career mentoring to business student protégés in an eight-month university sponsored mentoring program.

As hypothesized, moderated mediation analysis indicated that amount of external career mentoring negatively related to mentor turnover intentions and that the indirect effect of external career mentoring on mentor turnover intentions via mentor work engagement was stronger when both mentor protégé satisfaction and meeting frequency were high vs low. A two-way interaction revealed that mentors reporting higher protégé satisfaction had lower turnover intentions when meeting frequency was high vs low.

The findings help clarify the external career mentoring and mentor turnover intentions relation and have valuable theoretical implications for research on the benefits external mentoring can provide mentors. They also have practical implications for using external mentoring to enhance mentor work engagement and reduce mentor turnover intentions.

This paper aims to understand water and wastewater industry leaders’ perceptions of the current and future role of workplace spirituality, including the challenges and benefits of incorporating workplace spirituality in government utilities.

The Delphi technique was used to gather input and gain consensus from an expert panel of executive level managers.

The panel achieved consensus that workplace spirituality is evident in a higher sense of purpose for those working in the water and wastewater industry which is likely to be the greatest future benefit of workplace spirituality in the industry. Other central themes included making a positive environmental impact, going beyond compliance, collaborating with the community, creating a connection to peers and encouraging organizational belonging. Consensus was also achieved regarding obstacles to workplace spirituality’s future role in the industry, including concerns about terminology and the need for supportive leadership.

The water and wastewater industry face challenges including climate change, rising costs, aging infrastructure, increased regulatory requirements and a rapidly changing workforce. Workplace spirituality seems likely to support the industry in facing these challenges and can be promoted through encouraging a sense of purpose and meaning, collaborating with the community and recruiting individuals with resonant values and sense of calling.

Workplace spirituality has received growing attention in the private sector. However, workplace spirituality research in the public sector is minimal. This expert panel of top leaders from US water and wastewater agencies provide insight into the role of workplace spirituality in the public sector.

Literature on European and national identities displays a tension between occasional observations of an emerging ‘banal Europeanism’ (Cram, 2009) and a dominant strand (e.g. Guibernau, 2007; Toplak & Šumi, 2012) that questions the viability of European identifications vis-à-vis historically entrenched nationalisms, particularly in the context of the debt crisis and the resulting (re)nationalization of European politics. This chapter builds on recent work on Austrian European Union (EU) scepticism and its contestation (Karner, 2013) to examine instances – in diverse media coverage, readers’ letters to the editor of Austria’s most widely read newspaper, internet platforms, political essays and party political positions – of national identity negotiations in relation to the EU and as articulated in the context of successive European crises and the most recent elections to the European Parliament. The qualitative, thematic analysis of these wide-ranging materials developed here draws on two key concepts in critical discourse analysis, the notions of deixis (Billig, 1995) or ‘rhetorical pointing’ and of the topos or ‘structure of argument’ (e.g. Reisigl & Wodak, 2001), which are complemented by a third theoretical tool, namely the anthropological concept of ‘grammars of identity’ (Baumann & Gingrich, 2004). The resulting discussion reveals the uneasy coexistence of (critical) Europeanisms and various national reassertions in Austria’s public sphere and their respective discursive features. Further, the theoretical approaches synthesized cast light on internal diversities within political positions that are often too monolithicly classified as being ‘simply’ pro- or anti-European respectively. Instead, the analysis presented here reveals a spectrum of (at least five) competing positions.

Like other public and nonprofit leaders, academic librarians face multiple challenges (McGregor, 2000) such as tight and declining budgets, technology-savvy users, higher performance expectations from clients and overseers, complex production networks, rapid technological change, and increased competition (Stoffle, Allen, Morden, & Maloney, 2003). These challenges require new leadership roles, skill sets, and techniques for academic librarians, as well as restructuring the library organization. A discussion of their changed roles and organizations contextualizes the discussion of how academic librarians should meet the challenges of a changed service environment (Stoffle et al., 2003). However, a void in the discussion is the failure to suggest a leadership role best suited to governing complex academic libraries, as well as the lack of a coherent strategic framework to guide academic librarians in formulating, implementing, and assessing strategy to create additional value (Gilreath, 2003).

The purpose of this paper is to explore the congruencies and incongruences between the moral and entrepreneurial accountabilities of Lillian McMurry to provide insights for entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship. Ms McMurry was the entrepreneurial force behind the founding of Trumpet Records, a unique, Mississippi Delta Blues record label in the 1950s.

The examination of this historical case study is grounded in the theoretical examination of the tensions between Lillian McMurry’s felt moral and entrepreneurial accountabilities. Using an analytical archival historical method, a narrative explanation of how these tensions influenced the success and, ultimately, the failure of Trumpet Records are developed.

The accounting records highlighted a number of issues hampering the commercial profitability of Trumpet Records. Moreover, the archival and documentary sources examined also proved revealing as to conflicts between Ms McMurry’s personal character and mercantile determination as an entrepreneur.

The approach of using analytically structured historical narrative as a research strategy is but one method of explaining the tensions between the moral and entrepreneurial accountabilities of Lillian McMurry.

The proponents of virtue ethics suggest that this Aristotelian personal character perspective is more fundamental than traditional, act-oriented consequentialist teleological and deontological ethical decision-making approaches. A perspective of moral accountability exceeding the norm of the obstructionist stance is required to maintain a sound balance between entrepreneurial accountability and moral accountability.

This paper adopts a mercantile perspective, using the accounting and related business records of Trumpet Records, to examine the leadership characteristics of Lillian McMurry. Practical lessons learned for entrepreneurs facing the moral dilemma of competing accountabilities and advance questions to spur future research in this area are drawn.