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Ethiopia operates a large agricultural extension service system. However, access to extension-related knowledge, technologies and agricultural inputs is unequally distributed among smallholder farmers. Social learning is widely practiced by most farmers to cope with this unequal distribution though its practices have hardly been documented in passing on knowledge of agriculture and rural development or embedding it into the local system of knowledge production, transfer and use. The purpose of this study is, therefore, to identify the different methods of social learning, as well as their contribution to the adoption and diffusion of technologies within Ethiopia’s smallholder agricultural setting.

A mixed methods approach was used, comprising farmer and expert interviews, focus group discussions, informal individual discussions and key informant interviews. The data were documented, coded and later analyzed using SPSS and ATLAS.ti.

The findings showed that 55 per cent of the farmers in the studied areas fully relied on social, community-level learning to adopt agricultural technologies, while 35 per cent of them relied on social learning only partly. Farmers acquired knowledge through social networks by means of communication, observation, collective labor groups, public meetings, socio-cultural events and group socialization. Informal institutions such as iddir, debo and dado, helped farmers learn, adopt and diffuse technologies.

This study used the concept of epistemic oppression by Dotson (2014) as a conceptual framework to examine farmers’ access to extension services and to analyze how informal institutions serve as workplace learning for the smallholder farmers. The authors suggest community-level social learning serves as a coping mechanism against the prevailing limitations of the formal extension system, and at the same time, it guards against the deepening of social, political and epistemic inequalities that are inherent to the knowledge system.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of engagement on job burnout and turnover intention (plan to leave the organization) among blue-collar workers in manufacturing facilities. In addition, this study also explores the role of happiness as a moderator in explaining the effect of engagement on burnout and turnover intention.

The data required to examine the hypothesis were collected using well-established research instruments from 1,197 blue-collar employees working at three manufacturing facilities that are owned and operated by the same company in India. The hypotheses were examined and the conceptual model was validated using structural equation modeling. The statistical analyses were conducted using two statistical packages, namely, SPSS and SPSS–AMOS.

The results indicate that a disengaged employee is at higher risk of burnout and is likely to leave the organization in the near future. Furthermore, employee burnout was positively associated with turnover intentions. Happiness was established as a significant moderating factor in the relationship between employee engagement and burnout and turnover intention. Besides, the prevalence of happiness and turnover intention was higher in males.

The results showed the importance of engagement and happiness on reducing burnout and turnover intention. Organizations could capitalize on these findings by implementing new and improving their existing quality management initiatives, which, in turn, could improve the employee’s organizational commitment.

This study contributes to the industry and academia by exploring the perceptions of working-class, blue-collar employees, which has received limited attention till date, despite specific negative job characteristics.

With the enhancing notions of job insecurity in employees, the objective of this study is to revisit the association between job insecurity and employee performance behaviour (task performance and contextual performance) with the mediating role of organizational identification. Specifically, the study examines how and why there is a negative link between job insecurity and performance and whether organizational identification may serve as a mediating mechanism.

A time-lagged survey of 192 employees having heterogeneous working background was analysed using the structural equation modelling (SEM) technique.

The findings highlight that the nexus between job insecurity and organizational citizenship behaviour is fully mediated by organizational identification. However, the organizational identification partially mediated the association between job insecurity and task performance.

The tendency of job insecurity in India is on the rise. This investigation gives a more profound comprehension of behavioural responses of job insecurity on employee performance behaviour with the social identity theoretical perspective. The study contributes to the extant literature by revisiting the model proposed by Piccoli et al. (2017) and includes organizational identification as a mediating mechanism, which has remained unexplored till now in the context of Indian manufacturing industry.

Understanding of antecedence of organizational identification (OID) will help managements to improve the efficiency of organizations by enabling employees to perform their roles and responsibilities with total commitment. Many micro-level factors have been found to influence OID. The present study aims to examine the role of organizational culture (OC) which encompasses all micro-level factors and the moderating role of organizational learning (OL) which is a framework either to totally submit to or redefine the tenets of different cultural orientations adopted by organizations.

Four cultural types, namely clan, ad hocracy, hierarchy and market, were treated as independent variables; two learning styles, namely single loop (SLL) and double loop (DLL) learning styles, were included as moderator variables and four OID dimensions, namely positive identification, ambivalent identification, neutral identification and disidentification, were treated as dependent variables of a path analysis model. Three hundred and seventy-eight employees of ten private sector insurance companies located in south India were included as subjects and data on three questionnaires were collected. Best fitting path models one for each dependent variables, which had conceptual and practical relevance, were retained.

Adhocracy and hierarchy cultures show direct positive impact on positive identification and show direct negative impact on other three modes of identification. Clan culture shows a weak tendency towards positive identification and does not influence other three modes. Market culture shows no impact on positive identification but influences other modes. DLL and SLL learning both in isolation and in combination moderate the relationships to cultural orientations and various modes of OID.

This study highlights the importance of OC and OL in developing OID among the employees. The insights drawn from the findings can be used to build comprehensive model of OID.

COVID-19 pandemic has overturned the work and family life challenging the world in unpredictable ways that were previously unimaginable. With universities shutting down and emergence of online classes, this phenomenon is prevalent among academicians as well. With this background, the current study aims to investigate the direct relationships between workplace isolation (WPI) during COVID-19 and work–family conflict (WFC) with psychological stress (PS) mediating and organizational identification (OI) moderating the relationship between the two.

The authors employed time lagged survey and collected data at three different time intervals (T1, T2, T3) from 203 academicians working across various universities and colleges in India. The data were analyzed quantitatively using SPSS PROCESS Macro and AMOS.

The results indicated that WPI during COVID-19 has a significant positive relationship with PS and WFC . It was also found that PS partially mediated the relationship between WPI during COVID-19 and WFC. Further, OI emerged as a potential moderator.

Based on the current empirical studies, it remains unclear if WPI during COVID-19 is associated with WFC. Therefore, drawing upon stress–strain–outcome (SSO) model and the conservation of resource theory, this study makes a significant contribution to the existing body of literature by exploring the unexplored associations. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, such an association has not received much scholarly attention before.

Past studies have proved the effect of justice on performance. However, the findings across studies have been inconsistent and there remains a substantial unexplained variance between the constructs. Therefore, justice researchers urge for further exploration of the underlying mechanism of the relationship by introducing influencers. This study responds to such call of the researchers by testing the influence of organizational identification (OID) on the justice-performance relationship in the context of Indian Public Sector Units (PSUs).

The study is grounded in the positivism philosophy. The research hypotheses were tested using cross-sectional data gathered using a pre-tested questionnaire. In this study, the authors have used covariance-based structural equation modeling commercial software (AMOS 24.0).

OID did not mediate the relationship between justice facets and performance. Rather, informational justice, followed by procedural and distributive justice had direct positive influences on performance. OID, however, moderated the procedural justice-performance such that the relationship strengthened at higher levels of OID and the interpersonal justice-performance relationship such that the relationship dampened at higher levels of OID. Interestingly, the relationship between interpersonal justice and performance was insignificant in the absence of the moderator, showcasing the strongest case of moderation.

The paper explores OID as an influencer to justice-performance relationship in Indian PSU context for the very first time, thereby highlighting unique finings. It contributes to the further understanding of the unexplained variance in the justice-performance relationship.

Based on the social identification theory, this study aims to understand employees’ reactions to corporate social responsibility (CSR) in oil companies. This study finds that employees’ perceived CSR is positively related to the employee organizational identification in controversial sector companies.

The authors chose to analyze five oil companies in India. These companies are large in size and revenue and provide a valid context for the present study. A survey of 316 employees had been carried out in the year 2015 at the headquarters of these companies located in India.

The finding shows that organization CSR activities enhance employees’ organizational identification, which in turn leads to employee commitment to their organization. Furthermore, the finding highlights the relationship between perceived CSR and organizational identification, which is mediated by perceived external prestige and perceived organizational support.

The limitation of this study is the cross-sectional research design. The variables under investigation were measured only at one specific point of time. Another restriction of the study is that the data had been collected from the self-reported questionnaire. The results were dependent on how employees perceive and interpret how outside world assesses or views their organization.

This study provides a first step of empirical evidence suggesting that CSR engagement is important and can help in building the relation with stakeholders even in controversial industry.