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The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether perceived organizational support for strength use (POSSU) predicts employee thriving at work and the underlying mechanisms that explain this relationship.

The analysis is based on data from an online, time-lagged survey of 209 employees. Latent moderated structural equations (LMS) method was used to test the mediating role of job crafting and meaningfulness and the moderating role of core self-evaluation (CSE) in the organizational support-employee thriving relationship.

POSSU has a direct, positive relationship with employee thriving at work. Moreover, this relationship is fully mediated by employees' job crafting (as an agentic work behavior) and meaningfulness (as a resource produced at work). In addition, contextual factor of POSSU synergistically interacts with individual characteristic of CSE to foster thriving at work.

Based on a time-lagged survey, causal relationships cannot be drawn from this study. Results point to future research that can incorporate specific types of work climate and organizational practices in a multilevel design to investigate how context at team, unit and organizational levels impact employee thriving.

The study results highlight the importance of fostering employee thriving at work by implementing organizational practices that create supportive, innovative and meaningful workplaces. Management needs to pay close attention to develop a supportive organizational climate geared to identifying, developing and utilizing employees' strengths.

This study provides theoretical explanations and empirical tests on the mechanisms linking organization support and employee thriving based on the socially embedded model of thriving.

The branding of universities is increasingly recognized to present a different set of challenges than in corporate, for-profit sectors. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how faculty make sense of branding in the context of higher education, specifically considering branding initiatives in business schools.

The paper is based on qualitative interviews with faculty regarding their responses to organizational branding at four business schools. Discourse analysis was used to analyze the interview data.

The study reveals varied, fluid and reflexive faculty interpretations of organizational branding. Faculty interviewed in the study adopted a number of stances towards their schools’ branding efforts. In particular, the study identifies three main faculty responses to branding: endorsement, ambivalence and cynicism.

The study contributes by highlighting the ambiguities and ambivalence generated by brand management initiatives in the higher education context, offering original insights into the multiple ways that faculty exploit, frame and resist attempts to brand their organizations. The authors conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for branding in university contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of firm training on the job performance of mainly semi-skilled manufacturing employees in the context of changes required to ensure the competitiveness of contemporary Chinese manufacturing.

Data were collected using a survey with time-lagged method and from multiple sources. The sample included 348 supervisor-subordinate dyads from two Chinese manufacturing firms. PROCESS macro tool (Hayes) was used to test the mediating role of work engagement and the moderating role of HRM strength in the training-performance relationship.

Work engagement mediates the relationship between training and in-role task performance, while the relationships between work engagement and both task performance and organizational citizenship behavior are moderated by HRM strength.

Based on a time-lagged survey, causal relationships cannot be drawn from this study. Results point to future research on the training-performance relationship that more closely considers antecedents and the organizations’ internal and external contexts.

Managers should pay close attention to the context and process of training and learning from the employees’ perspective. In addition, a strong HRM system will improve the benefits of training on employee performance.

This study provides theoretical explanations on the mechanisms linking training and employee performance based on the ability-motivation-opportunity framework.

Scholars have adopted different theoretical perspectives to explain the influence of HR practice on employee outcomes. However, few studies have investigated the role of human resource (HR) practice in fostering higher in-role and extra-role employee performance by encouraging employee participation in job design, a process referred to as job crafting. Drawing on human resource management (HRM) process theory and the job crafting literature, this study aims to examine how work engagement and job crafting mediate the relationship between employee perceptions of HR practice and employee performance.

The authors use survey on a sample of 455 employees working in five Chinese manufacturing firms to test their theoretical model.

This study finds that where management maintains a strong HR system, employees are more likely to be engaged in their work and participate in job crafting. In addition, job crafting on its own, and work engagement and job crafting together, are shown to mediate the HRM–performance relationship.

In a Chinese context, line managers (including supervisors) are both important implementers of HR policy and vary in their adoption of particular roles. Yet our research did not consider the role of these persons in facilitating work engagement or job crafting. Future studies could usefully explore how these managers vary in their attitudes towards job crafting and the roles they play in encouraging this important activity.

One important implication is that strong HR system with distinctive, consistent and consensus HR practices should be used by managers to motivate employees to encourage work engagement and job crafting behaviours.

This study enriches the theoretical framework to explain the underlying mechanism between HRM and employee performance from job crafting perspective.

This paper aims to analyse two ways in which Chinese workers attempt to resist unjust treatment: exit through quitting and voice via collective action. This is in the context of rapid economic growth, rising economic inequality (Lu and Gao, 2011; Qin et al., 2009; Reed, 2012) and escalating industrial conflict (Pringle, 2011).

A model is developed and hypotheses formulated in the light of qualitative data analysis that included archival data, workplace observation and interviews with employees and managers at a large factory. A mediated chain model was tested based on a survey of 234 semi-skilled and skilled manual workers and 353 service employees employed in the same city in Western China.

Organisational identification and organisational cynicism were found to mediate the relationship between interactional justice and the two outcomes, intention to quit and collective opposition.

The authors’ interpretation of these relationships challenge previous research by showing that social identification is a more powerful explanation than social exchange in accounting for variations in these two outcomes. Implications are drawn for human resource theory and practice.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how part-time waiters perceive and respond to abusive supervision by the owner-manager of a small restaurant.

An ethnographic approach was used to collect data. One of the authors worked as a participant observer for three months. In addition, 13 interviews and three focus group discussions were conducted.

Data analysis showed how neutral identification based on a primary identity—liu xu sheng (overseas student)—overshadows employees’ occupational identity (waiter), which helps waiters to cope with abusive supervision.

Development and application of the concept of neutral organizational identification orientation encourages emotional suppression and reframing, leading to waiters’ indifference and acquiescence in abusive supervision. Implications are drawn for theory and the practice of managing part-time and temporary workers.

Presents 31 abstracts, edited by Johanthan Morris and Mike Reed, from the 2003 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference, held at Cardiff Business School in September 2003. The conference theme was “The end of management? managerial pasts, presents and futures”. Contributions covered, for example, the changing HR role, managing Kaizen, contradiction in organizational life, organizational archetypes, changing managerial work and gendering first‐time management roles. Case examples come from areas such as Mexico, South Africa, Australia, the USA, Canada and Turkey.

The authors wanted to find out if perceptions of training were positively related to work engagement and also assess the mediating influence on human resource management.

The authors sent out 415 questionnaires to employees in two Chinese garment factories supplying an Australian retailer. Overall, 360 questionnaires were returned and 348 were valid. The survey covered perceptions of the organization’s training practices. A month later, a second survey included employee evaluations of the HRM strength and their work engagement. Meanwhile, supervisors filled out a survey rating employee work performance.

The study found that their perceptions of training were positively related to work engagement. The study also revealed that when there was a strong human resource management (HRM) climate, employees had more training opportunities and were more strongly motivated to perform well.

The authors claimed their study of 348 supervisor-subordinate dyads offered important lessons for managers. It provided guidance on how to increase work engagement and job performance. The research took place in China because it was especially relevant to the cultural and economic context there. China has rapidly grown, but shortages of labour and rising protests about working conditions have made change inevitable.

To identify and critically assess the most recurrent themes in the ongoing debate on knowledge work.

A representative selection of studies published since 1962 is reviewed. The review focuses on the theoretical strengths and limitations of the concept of knowledge work.

The review indicates that definitions of knowledge work abound. Although knowledge work has attracted scholarly minds for several decades and the number of publications in this area has rapidly increased in recent years, it has proved hard to come by a clear and concise definition of this term. However, certain themes, such as a high level of education and skills and the use of information technology as an integral part of the informational labour process, have become increasingly common to both the empirical and the theoretical literature.

The paper helps pave the way for more detailed research by providing an ideal‐typical profile of informational labour.