Search results

The study investigated emotional competence at work and elaborated emotional competence in relation to sociocultural aspects of emotions at work.

Emotional competence at work was explored via interviews, surveys and observations. The study was conducted over one year, during which an emotion-training intervention was conducted within a medium-sized company, operating in the healthcare sector.

The study shed light on emotional competence at work, identifying three domains: individual emotional competence, emotional competence within interactions and emotional competence embedded in workplace practices.

This study was conducted in one organization.

Organizational developers are recommended to implement activities such as training interventions in order to build emotional competence; this applies not only at the individual level but also to achieve interaction among members of the organization within collective workplace practices.

Previous studies on emotional competence have been limited to the individual level. The sociocultural approach to emotional competence adopted in this study recognizes – in addition to the individual and interactional level of emotional competence – emotional competence at work as related to practices at work.

Although there has been an increase in workplace studies on professional agency, few of these have examined the role of emotions in the enactment of agency at work. To date, professional agency has been mainly conceptualised as a goal-oriented, rational activity aimed at influencing a current state of affairs. Challenged by this, this study aims to elaborate the nature and quality of emotions and how they might be connected to the enactment of professional agency.

Data are collected in the context of a leadership coaching programme that aimed to promote the leaders’ professional agency over the course of a year. The participants (11 middle-management leaders working in university and hospital contexts) were interviewed before and after the programme, and the data were analysed using qualitative content analysis.

Findings showed that emotions played an important role in the leaders’ enactment of professional agency, as it pertained to their work and to their professional identity. The study suggests that enacting professional agency is by no means a matter of purely rational actions.

The study suggests that emotional agency can be learned and enhanced through group-based interventions reflecting on and processing one’s own professional roles and work.

As a theoretical conclusion, the study argues that professional agency should be reconceptualised in such a way as to acknowledge the importance of emotions (one’s own and those of one’s fellow workers) in practising agency within organisational contexts.

This paper aims to examine employees' conceptions of the meaning of experience in job‐competence and its development in workplace context. The aim is to bring out the variety of conceptions related to experience, competence and workplace learning.

The paper is based on interview data from six Finnish small and medium sized enterprises. The data were collected as a part of a larger European Union research project, Working Life Changes and Training of Older Workers (WORKTOW) during spring 1999. The approach chosen for the analysis presented in this paper was phenomenography.

The findings in the paper show the importance accorded to experience in competence and in workplace learning. The employees valued work experience as the main source of their competence. They also developed their competence mainly through learning at work. The role of social participation in work communities and learning through experiences was emphasized.

The paper shows that differentiating employees' conceptions paves a way to more specific perspectives on the development and utilisation of experience‐based competence in work communities and organisations.

In this paper the findings are discussed in the light of construction and development of older workers' job‐competence in working life. It is argued that experience serves several kinds of purposes in workplace learning also among experienced workers.

The purpose of this paper is to explore interprofessional collaboration during ward rounds on a Finnish emergency and infection ward from the viewpoint of three central professional groups: physicians, nurses and secretaries.

The authors utilise an ethnographically informed approach, with observations and interviews as the data collection devices. The data comprise ten interviews with staff members and ten hours of observations. The data were analysed using qualitative thematic analysis.

The ward rounds were found to be rather physician- and medicine-centred, and mostly not interprofessional. Nurses and secretaries in particular expressed dissatisfaction with many of the current ward rounds work practices. Ward rounds are an essential part of collaboration in implementing the emergency-natured operational aim of the ward, yet we found that the ward rounds are complicated by diverging professional views and expectations, variable work practices and interactional inequality.

This study makes a contribution to the research of collaboration in emergency care and ward rounds, both of which are little-studied fields. Further, context-specific studies of collaboration have been called for in order to eventually create a model of shared expertise. The findings of this study can be utilised in studying and developing emergency care contexts.

The purpose of this study is to gain more understanding of how competence might matter from the perspective of well-being at work. The authors explore how perceived competence is connected to perceived work-related well-being among Baby Boomer, Generation X and Generation Y employees.

The authors explore how perceived competence is connected to perceived work-related well-being among Baby Boomer, Generation X and Generation Y employees. The frames of reference of the study are based on literature on employee well-being (measured with work engagement and overcommitment) and competence, as well as on generational discussions. The quantitative, questionnaire-based study was conducted in 88 companies in Finland, with the total number of respondents being 4,418.

The main finding was that perceived competence related to current duties is statistically significantly connected to employee well-being. The results indicate that high competence results in high employee well-being in all generational groups. Further, Generation Y estimated their work well-being, both in terms of work engagement and overcommitment, lower than Baby Boomers or Generation X. The results suggest that developing competence of employees in organizations seems to be an important means to also support work well-being. It is especially important to pay attention to that among Generation Y, who take their first steps in working life. Competence is a meaningful factor for coping in working life in continually changing work environments. Incompetence is not just a factor for poor performance but also a potential threat to employee well-being.

Most of the competence/workplace learning results research concentrates on cognitive competence and skills, often from the employers’ benefit viewpoint (useful skills, productivity increase). This study starts from the finding that new generations of workers rather look for a meaningful work life, and thus, a feeling of having the necessary competences directly improves their well-being and, thus, life quality. Furthermore, the study is based on an original questionnaire-based study conducted in 88 companies in Finland, with the total number of respondents being 4,418.