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The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether insights into high reliability organizations (HROs) are useful for innovation management teams. HRO teams can keep failure to a minimum level due to high alertness and resilience. Project teams working on innovation management could benefit from HRO principles and thus reduce their chances of failure.

A survey among in total 260 team members and team leaders of project teams in innovation management was conducted to study the relation between, on the one hand, organizational features of HROs (“mindful infrastructure”) and HRO principles (adjusted as “innovation resilience behaviour”, IRB), and on the other hand, between mindful infrastructure and IRB and project outcomes.

From the results it could be concluded that mindful infrastructure associates with IRB, and that IRB has a mediating role in the relation between mindful infrastructure and project outcomes. Innovation management project teams can thus learn from the practice of HRO teams.

To the authors’ knowledge, HRO-thinking has not been applied to team behaviour in innovation management. A fruitful transfer of insights from the domain of safety and crisis management seems applicable to the domain of innovation.

This paper aims to investigate the principles of high reliability organisations (HROs), present in safety and crisis teams, as applied to innovation teams. Safety and crisis teams cannot fail, as failure leads to disaster and casualties. Innovation teams cannot fail either, as this harms the organisations’ competitiveness and effectiveness. Do HRO principles, rooted in mindful infrastructure, enable innovation resilience behaviour (IRB)?

A study of 18 innovation projects performed by project teams was carried out. A survey by team members/leaders of these teams was completed; team members/leaders of other projects were added to achieve a larger sample. Mindful infrastructure consists of team psychological safety, team learning, complexity leadership and team voice. The analyses assessed the teams’ mindful infrastructures as a causal condition enabling IRB.

Applying qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), the findings indicate that mindful infrastructure enables team IRB, which is a set of team behaviours indicating their resilience when encountering critical incidents. Teams apply different “paths” to IRB.

The exploratory study’s generalizability is limited. The findings nonetheless indicate the usefulness of non-linear techniques for understanding different roads to successful innovation processes.

HRO principles are applicable by non-HROs. These require investments in organisational learning.

HRO studies fail to account for the antecedents of HRO principles. This study groups these antecedents of team behaviour into a mindful infrastructure. QCA has not been applied within the domain of HROs before and only scarcely within the domain of innovation teams.

For various reasons many organisations are currently introducing the new ways of working (NWW). By now, this occurs on such a large scale, that it becomes relevant to investigate whether the new way of working leads to the best way of working: are the measurements taken by NWW really resulting in pursued outcomes? NWW claims to make working more effective, efficient but also more enjoyable for the organisation as well as the employee (Bijl, 2007). In practice, it seems that more pragmatically reasons lead to changes in the way of working. In many cases this concerns the elimination of fixed workplaces, combined with the possibility to work from home or elsewhere, facilitation of working with new ICT, and establishing an organisational culture which aims at employee autonomy and goal attainment.

To answer the question whether the NWW approach offers sufficient tools to provide effective solutions for occurring objectives, we compare NWW with a scientifically established construct regarding work design: Sociotechnical systems (STS) (Kuipers et al., 2010). We chose STS not only because it is a comprehensive approach to work design (all aspects of managing and organising are addressed), but also because the ambition is similar to NWW. STS considers, next to the ‘quality of the organisation’ (which is central to most work design approaches), also the ‘quality of work’ and ‘quality of employment relationships’ as outcome criteria. With incorporating the latter two, STS distinguishes itself from many other work design approaches and fits to the philosophy of NWW as mentioned above. Important foundations for the NWW approach are the quality of work as well as the willingness to organise teamwork.

The comparison of NWW and STS reveals as most important finding that the NWW approach misses a coherent theoretical foundation for the design of organisations. NWW focuses on loose aspects of organisations, like workspace, work design, management, organisational culture and competences. This is also evident in the scientific research focused on NWW: many studies examine the impact of a specific measure (e.g. introduction of flexible workspaces) on specific aspects of the organisation (e.g. social cohesion). Due to the lack of a work design approach no framework exists to test whether the introduction of NWW fits to the organisation and how work is organised and divided. It is our statement that NWW can only be effective once a good theoretical foundation is provided for NWW and once a clear work design approach is deducted.

Simultaneously, the NWW practices provide so many relevant practical experiences on skills and information underlining the potential of STS. Currently, STS mostly is focused on work in industrial organisations. STS and NWW have the potential to mutually extend each other, while tools may be developed with which new ways of working lead to the best way of working for organisations.

The Dutch version of sociotechnical systems design called “modern sociotechnology” stresses that the quality of working life is dependent on the choice for a certain “production structure”, i.e. the physical layout of operations. Two propositions about this relationship are derived from modern sociotechnology, and tested on a sample of Dutch textile companies. No empirical support is found for the propositions. The implications of these findings are discussed.

This paper aims to focus on participation in the workplace and examines the relative importance of different dimensions of job control in relation to subjective well-being and organizational commitment. These dimensions are job autonomy (within a given job), functional support (from supervisor and colleagues) and organizational level decision latitude (shop-floor consultancy on process improvements, division of labor, workmates, targets, etc.). Interaction with work intensity is looked at as well.

Measurements and data were taken from the European Working Conditions Survey, 2010. The paper focusses on salaried employees only. The sample was further limited to employees in workplaces consisting of at least 50 workers. There are 2,048 employees in the final sample, from Denmark, Ireland, The Netherlands, Finland, Sweden and the UK. In this paper, the focus is not on differences between countries, and adding more countries would have introduced too many country characteristics as intermediate variables.

In the regression analyses, functional support and organizational level decision latitude showed stronger relations with the outcome variables than job autonomy. There was no relation between work intensity and the outcome variables. Two-way interactions were found for job autonomy and organizational level decision latitude on subjective well-being and for functional support and organizational level decision latitude on organizational commitment. A three-way interaction, of all job control variables combined, was found on organizational commitment, with the presence of all types of job control showing the highest organizational commitment level. No such three-way interaction was found for subjective well-being. There was an indication for a two-way interaction of work intensity and functional support, as well as an indication for a two-way interaction of work intensity and organizational level decision latitude on subjective well-being: high work intensity and low functional support or low organizational level decision latitude seemed to associate with low well-being. No interaction was found for any dimension of job control being high and high work intensity.

Although this study has all the limitations of a cross-sectional survey, the results are more or less in accordance with existing theories. This indicates that organizational level decision latitude matters. Differentiation of job control dimensions in research models is recommended, and so is workplace innovation for healthy and productive jobs.

Most theoretical models for empirical research are limited to control at task level (e.g. the Job Demand-Control-Support model of Karasek and Theorell. The paper aims at nuancing and extending current job control models by distinguishing three dimensions/levels of job control, referring to sociotechnical systems design theory (De Sitter) and action regulation theory (Hacker) and reciprocity (Akerlof). The policy relevance regards the consequences for work and organization design.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of internal marketing orientation, external marketing orientation, and subjective well-being on the affective organizational commitment of frontline employees.

Previous research was used to develop hypotheses and develop a questionnaire for this project. An online survey was completed by 108 frontline employees.

The hypothesized model of all three variables having positive effects on organization commitment was supported. Internal marketing orientation, external marketing orientation, and subjective well-being were significant predictors of affective organizational commitment.

A key limitation of this study is the cross-sectional, data collection design. A longitudinal study would allow for increased confidence when evaluating causal inferences with this type of data.

This paper identifies how managers may be able to use internal marketing orientation, external marketing orientation, and subjective well-being as potential tools to increase the affective organizational commitment of frontline employees.

This paper demonstrates the importance of subjective well-being as an important component of life for an employee and success of the organization.

This paper extends current research on affective organizational commitment by testing a new model that includes internal marketing orientation, external marketing orientation, and subjective well-being as predictor variables.

Gives a bibliographical review of the finite element methods (FEMs) applied for the linear and nonlinear, static and dynamic analyses of basic structural elements from the theoretical as well as practical points of view. The range of applications of FEMs in this area is wide and cannot be presented in a single paper; therefore aims to give the reader an encyclopaedic view on the subject. The bibliography at the end of the paper contains 2,025 references to papers, conference proceedings and theses/dissertations dealing with the analysis of beams, columns, rods, bars, cables, discs, blades, shafts, membranes, plates and shells that were published in 1992‐1995.