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Science Education Outdoors provides students with direct contact with natural phenomena and enables active learning, a key factor in Inquiry Based Science Education (IBSE), a student-centred methodology for the acquisition, construction and understanding of knowledge.

This chapter will describe three case studies which used the IBSE methodology as both a teaching and learning methodology, promoting a deeper understanding of how IBSE can contribute to the success of learning and teaching in outdoor settings.

The three case studies were based on three training courses conducted at the Botanical Garden of the University of Coimbra (BGUC, Portugal). The first case study was the annual regular course for garden educators, and the other two were the two editions of the COInquire professional and accreditation training course for teachers and educators. Involving a total of 70 participants, data was collected through the application of questionnaires.

The study revealed that all participants considered IBSE a successful teaching–learning process and they remarked the opportunities created for the active construction of new knowledge. Strengthened by numerous live educational resources, the use of IBSE in the garden facilitated the questioning and interpretation of nature, supporting the open-minded and well-founded training of teachers, educators and students.

Additionally, the participants considered IBSE to be an effective methodology to boost their professional improvement, contributing to the development of innovative approaches to the curricular programmes on biodiversity and sustainability.

This chapter provides an introduction to how the inquiry-based learning (IBL) approach is being used by colleges and universities around the world to strengthen the interconnections between teaching, learning, and research within STEM programs. This chapter provides a synthesis and analysis of the chapters in the volume, which present a range of case studies and empirical research on how IBL is being used across a range of courses across a range of institutions within STEM programs. Based on these findings, this chapter argues that the IBL approach has great potential to enhance and transform teaching and learning. Given the growing demands placed on education to meet a diverse range of complex political, economic, and social problems and personal needs, this chapter argues that education should be a place where students learn “how-to-learn” – where increasingly higher levels of self-directed learning is fostered – and where students grow in the three key areas of learning: affectively, behaviorally, and cognitively. To that end, this chapter argues that IBL, if designed and implemented properly, can be an important approach to enhancing and transforming teaching and learning in higher education.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the knowledge of how organization service orientation (OSO) influences job satisfaction and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) of customer‐contact employees.

Questionnaires were carried out in 149 hotel firms. One customer‐contact employee and the manager provide the data in each hotel. The constructs were measured using existing scales. Structural equation models were used to examine the effects.

The empirical results enable one to identify the dimensions of OSO on which the managers of hotel firms should place greater emphasis in order to stimulate employee job satisfaction and OCB.

The results are limited by the specificity of the geographic context. It would be of interest to complete the model by incorporating other variables, such as employees' trust of management, role conflict and role ambiguity, and measures of performance such as service quality.

The results indicate that managers must use service communicative leadership and service encounter practices to influence directly employee OCB and human resource management to improve employee job satisfaction and OCB.

The paper provides empirical evidence about the positive effect of the OSO on employee job satisfaction and citizenship behavior in the hospitality industry.

Non-profit organizations (NPO) contribute significantly to the welfare of citizens and communities. Engagement in volunteering is crucial for sustaining volunteer motivation and for the effective and efficient functioning of NPO, with significant implications for society at large. Yet, literature on volunteer engagement (VE) is limited to date. Grounded on service-dominant logic, self-congruity theory and self-determination theory, this study aims to understand what motivates VE and how it may evolve into a co-creation process valuable to NPO and its stakeholders.

Based on survey data collected from 450 volunteers, working with a diverse set of NPO, a comprehensive model of drivers and outcomes of VE was empirically tested using PLS-SEM, considering the mediating role of volunteers' congruence with the core values of the NPO.

The impact of volunteers' perceived autonomy, competence and relatedness on VE and its subsequent role in volunteers' loyalty and extra-role engagement behaviors (i.e. co-development, influencing and mobilizing behaviors) were validated. Moreover, the study validates value congruence as an internalizing mediating mechanism in the engagement process, a role that has been implied but not empirically tested.

The study contributes to the engagement and volunteering literature, which despite an unprecedented parallel have developed almost independently, with limited reference to one another. As the nomological network of VE is still underexplored, the study extends the engagement literature to the volunteering sector, validating the key (but underexplored) role of self-determination needs and value congruence in driving VE and value co-creation behaviors. The study further adds to engagement research while addressing other actors' engagement beyond the customer–brand dyad. While adopting a seldom explored marketing perspective of VE, this study provides NPO valuable insights on how to manage and engage volunteers.

Immigrants are important contributors to workplaces, but HRM scholars have only recently begun to study them systematically. We document the prevalence and cross-national variation in populations of immigrant employees. Going beyond a treatment that considers them as another element of diversity, we propose how gradients of status at each level of country, organization, and work group admittance can result in unique outcomes for immigrants who are equally (dis)similar. We offer a taxonomy of immigrant pathways into their destination countries to explore the status hierarchies they are assigned by governments and reinforced by organizations. We provide insights into the ascribed status of immigrants and develop a typology of individual and organizational acculturation strategies based on the cultural tightness and looseness of the destination and origin cultures. We then describe how the reactions of members of an immigrant employee’s social environment are sensitive to ascribed status and cultural tightness-looseness. We do so in a three-stage process that begins with immigrant categorization, followed by conferral of (il)legitimacy, and finally brought together with perceptions of outcome interdependence. Finally, we offer ideas about HRM interventions to guide management scholars in their quest for understanding and improve the experiences of immigrants in the workplace.

Using the basic framework of the service profit chain, this study aims to develop an integrated model that explains the relationships among role overload (RO), customer orientation (CO), service interaction quality (IQ), customer satisfaction (CS) and sales performance.

A large-scale survey of 872 customers and 530 frontline employees across 50 branches of a major retail bank in New Zealand serves as the study setting.

The results indicate that RO has a significant negative effect on IQ. Nevertheless, CO mitigates the negative outcome of RO on IQ. IQ fully mediates the relationship between RO and CS. Additionally, the effect of IQ on branch sales is fully mediated by CS.

The cross-sectional nature of the current survey does not permit causal inferences. Thus, future studies should adopt longitudinal designs. Also, future studies should explore the roles of other variables (e.g. job crafting, work-related self-efficacy) as possible moderators.

Results suggest that service managers should create a balance between the role requirements and organizational resources to mitigate the adverse effects of employee RO. To enhance IQ and CS, bank managers should coach employees about work overload and train them in CO while prioritizing the tasks.

Empirical research pertaining to employee–customer interaction through a nested framework accommodating data from customers, employees and firm performance is scarce. This study fills in the void.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss four main research questions which are as follows: how does a consumer turn into a devoted fan? How does a devoted fan react to the expansion of a human brand? What kind of strategies does a devoted fan take when facing challenges encountered by a human brand? And are devoted fans homogeneous, or can they be further divided into different subgroups?

The basis of grounded theory process is intensive depth interviews with 14 devoted fans of a famous Taiwanese pop singer in a qualitative manner along with content analysis of messages from online fan clubs.

Using the metaphor of kingdom to parallel the phenomenon of fandom, the research also explicates the importance of initial brand position, and the construction and expansion from the core castle – the core positioning of the human brand – to become a kingdom where devoted fans swear to be loyal to the human brand and cross-buy the derivative products of the latter. Five fan’s subgroup and a theoretical framework are obtained.

The theoretical framework derived in this study explicates how consumers’ initial perceptions of the human brand are formed and reinforced and how they become different kinds of fans which in turn influence the strategies they take in the face of the expansion or withdraw of the human brand.