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Legalists and social scientists have not been able to explain the expansion of gay rights in a conservative age because they refuse to respect the special qualities of judicial decision making. These qualities require the Supreme Court to look simultaneously at the past, present, and future, and, most importantly, to determine questions of individual rights through a consideration of how citizens are to live under a continuing rights regime. Unless scholars understand how and why Supreme Court decision making differs from that of more directly politically accountable institutions we can expect no greater success in explaining or predicting individual rights in the future.

I aim to understand how informal relationships at work provide a supportive context for individuals and contribute to their engagement in an environment of disruptive change when they are likely to be stressed.

The research was conducted in three UK public service organizations during pre-Brexit disruption. An app was used to capture 400+ transient emotions, reactions, and diary entries of employees about their interactions with co-workers, colleagues, and close colleagues. This was followed by 25 interviews to reflect more deeply on those relationships documented in the app.

Interactions with co-workers, colleagues, and close colleagues are shown to contribute in different ways to emotions felt and different aspects of engagement. Closer relationships, less transactional and more emotional in nature, contribute to feelings of trust, significance, and mutual reliance. A typology of four close colleague relationship types also emerged variously driven by the depth of the relationship and sense of shared mutuality.

This research documents employees' lived experience during disruption to show that relationships provide support for the meaningfulness, psychological safety, and availability aspects of personal engagement. It maps the process of developing supportive workplace relationships that form the relational context with four sub-contexts, distinguishing work, and personal engagement by their different foci. Practical and social implications are discussed.

Environments coined as “VUCA” (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) are hotbeds for new modi operandi in organisations that involve a shift from face-to-face towards distant leadership, as well as from “classical” towards agile organisation principles.

At the same time, digital collaboration tools have found their way into daily business operations. As the above changes arguably leave deep imprints on performance indicators, our work accordingly illuminates potential impacts on employee engagement. Based on a German sample, we conduct a qualitative investigation featuring in-depth interviews.

Our findings indicate a curvilinear inverted (approximate) U-shaped relation between what we dub “leadership richness continuum” (including specific characteristics of leadership, agility, as well as the application of a digital collaboration tool) and engagement.

Although our work may inspire practicing managers, we also contribute to theory development providing a new theoretical model for employee engagement.

In this introductory chapter, we establish the basis for the theme of this volume, “Emotions and Disruption.” We discuss how the initial idea for the theme arose during the height of COVID-19. At this time, and as widely reported in the press (e.g., see Grensing-Pophal, 2020), a myriad of workplace disruptions occurred impacting employees' moods and emotions and their subsequent well-being and performance. We open by discussing some key work on emotions research during change and disturbance, followed by a synopsis of each of the chapters in this volume, including discussion of their key contributions. This includes an overview of how some of these chapters were first presented as conference papers at the Twelfth International Conference on Emotions and Worklife (EMONET XII), an event that took place for the first time online in response to the turbulence and travel disruptions created by the pandemic.

In this chapter we give an outline of the organization of this book and discuss its four major parts. We then relate each chapter to the relevant part and consider its key contributions in terms of what we have learnt about emotions when applying the lens of disruption.

We conclude that the chapters provide a range of insights and practical solutions for dealing with emotions during different types of disruption that should be helpful to practitioners and academics.

The chapters investigate underresearched topics and thus make new and important contributions. While many topics addressed in the chapters are still in their initial stages, they clearly have the potential to make a significant impact on people's work lives.

Identifies two empirically derived measures of internal customer support used to assess team effectiveness from the perspective of the team’s internal customers. The measures, personal service and technical competence, are based on analysis of the responses of 465 individuals representing 150 internal customer teams. When compared, the expected (self) ratings of the members of internal intact work teams were more positive than those ratings actually attributed to them by their internal customers. The findings reveal members of work teams tend to over estimate the effectiveness of their team’s performance when compared with the ratings the same teams receive from their internal customers. The measurement of internal customer satisfaction is a tool that can be a useful aid for managers of service quality and their work teams to help them more accurately measure the effectiveness of their units.

This study examined the relationships among ethnocentrism, group cohesion, and constituent pressure in either competitive or collaborative directions within the context of a complex simulation of intergroup conflict. The simulation elicited both a value and an economic conflict over scarce resources and their development in which pairs of groups negotiated through representatives to reach a settlement. The results from 32 four‐person groups of college males were based on self‐report questionnaires and behavioral codings from videotapes of the simulation sessions. With the questionnaire data, ethnocentrism, group cohesion, and constituent pressure were significantly related at three different measurement points and when averaged over the entire simulation. Behavioral ratings of ethnocentrism were positively correlated with behavioral measures of constituent pressure to compete and negatively with pressure to collaborate. These results provide empirical support for the effects of cohesion and ethnocentrism on conflict management behavior in line with realistic group conflict theory.

A core concept of work–home interface research is boundary permeability – the frequency with which elements from one domain cross, or permeate, the boundary of another domain. Yet, there remains ambiguity as to what these elements are and how these permeations impact important outcomes such as role satisfaction and role performance. The authors introduce a multidimensional perspective of work–home boundary permeability, identifying five forms of boundary permeation: task, psychological, role referencing, object, and people. Furthermore, based on the notion that employee control over boundary permeability behavior is the key to achieving role satisfaction and role performance, the authors examine how organizations’ HR practices, leadership, and norms impact employee control over boundary permeability in the work and home domains. The authors conclude with an agenda for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the moderating roles of two distinct styles of coping and decision latitude on the relationship between three facets of role stress and psychological strain in six national contexts.

The objective of the research is to examine the relative predictive efficacies of three theory specific moderators in six countries which differ on the cultural dimension of individualism‐collectivism. The data are analyzed using moderated regression analysis.

The results show that problem‐focused coping is a better moderator in the individualistic countries and that emotion‐focused coping is a better moderator in the collectivistic contexts. None of the three moderators moderate the relationships in Germany and South Africa – the two countries which had scores in the mid‐range of the individualism‐collectivism continuum. Findings are discussed for their significance into the interplay of cultural variations and coping with work stress in predicting psychological strain or distress on the job.

Practical implications for managing human resources in various subsidiaries of multinational and global organizations are discussed.

This paper confirms existing theories and expands the authors’ understanding of role stress and psychological strain in different cultural contexts.