Search results

The purpose of this research was to investigate a successful company, Atlas Container Corporation, that practices the values of egalitarianism, democracy, mutuality, and transparency. Moreover, this research sought to identify the human resource policies and practices (HRPP) used to reinforce these values and create a distinctive culture.

An ethnographic approach was used to produce a case study. Interviews, observations, archives, and documents were all part of the collected data.

The HRPP were distinctively different from the normal practices in the industry. Thus, these differences appeared to explain its success.

While this case study focused only on a single organization, it provides an illustration of the importance of reflecting the organization’s culture through its HRPP, and of how they could operate synergistically for optimal impact.

This case illustrated how a company following a set of HRPP contrary to industry norms could succeed. In addition, it pinpointed some areas where HRPP either reduced costs or made the company more responsive to customer needs.

This case illustrated that a company can be both humanistic and efficient. Moreover, it demonstrated a number of ways that the financial success of the company could be shared with its employees.

A review of the literature found that companies that practiced a progressive set of HRPP and made decisions based on democratic principles are rare. Thus, knowledge of such a company should be valuable.

This chapter explores what academic librarians and their supervisors must consider when looking to a remote or telework arrangement as a staffing solution. The popular and scholarly literature on remote work is surveyed and contextualized for information professionals. Research is clear that with proper planning, remote work arrangements can succeed, benefitting organizations and individuals. Even so, liaison librarians are unlikely to have central support for remote work arrangements due to communication and cultural hurdles unique to the profession. While these have been mitigated by technology to varying degrees in other sectors and industries, adoption in libraries has been slow. When librarians do pursue remote work, they are often unsure how to gauge fit, negotiate an arrangement, overcome technical obstacles and cultural misconceptions, and balance work and life. Authors Hickey and Tang: (1) summarize and apply research on remote work for library science professionals; (2) propose a theoretical framework for understanding the future of remote work for practitioner librarians in higher education; (3) present a case study of a successful remote work arrangement at Cornell University; (4) provide thought-provoking coaching questions for librarians and supervisors considering remote arrangements; (5) and identify next-steps for advancing the discussion and study of remote work in libraries. The practical implication of this information, aimed at service providers and managers, is to help them create a better workplace where flexible remote work arrangements are an opportunity for both the individual and organization that facilitate the achievement of personal, library unit, and institutional goals.

Although employee helping behaviors have been widely examined by organizational and human resource management scholars, relatively little is known about the antecedents and consequences of help-seeking in the workplace. Seeking to fill this gap, I draw from the social and counseling psychology literatures, as well as from research in epidemiology and health sociology to first conceptualize the notion of employee help-seeking and then to identify the variables and mechanisms potentially driving such behavior in work organizations. My critical review of this literature suggests that the application of existing models of help-seeking may offer limited predictive utility when applied to the workplace unless help-seeking is conceived as the outcome of a multi-level process. That in mind, I propose a model of employee help-seeking that takes into account the potential direct and cross-level moderating effects of a variety of situational factors (e.g., the nature of the particular problem, organizational norms, support climate) that might have differential influences on help-seeking behavior depending on the particular phase of the help-seeking process examined. Following this, I focus on two sets of help-seeking outcomes, namely, the implications of employee help-seeking on individual and group performance, and the impact of help-seeking on employee well-being. The chapter concludes with a brief examination of some of the more critical issues in employee help-seeking that remain to be explored (e.g., the timing of help solicitation) as well as the methodological challenges likely to be faced by those seeking to engage in such exploration.

The missing employee voice has become a salient topic in China. This paper aims to document the newest developments relating to the topic by reviewing the recent literature on employment relations and employee voice. The findings of this paper suggest that the purposes of and channels for the employee voice in China have been undergoing significant changes. Different stakeholder groups have approached the issue. ‘Democratic management’ in China, the country’s home-grown concept of employee voice, has been resurrected to encourage more effective employee representation. Apart from this top-down influence from the government and All-China Federation of Trade Unions, this paper also identifies the bottom-up approach driven by the workers, and the external influence from the global corporate social responsibility campaign and nongovernmental labour organizations. Based on the review of the newest developments in workplace democracy and the employee voice in China, this paper proposes a stakeholder framework incorporating these developments. The authors also suggest some directions for future research.

Law Enforcement agencies across the nation are in the midst of generational turnover in the workforce. Current practices place most of the decision-making authority and responsibility in the hands of professional managers, far-removed from routine contact with the public. It is the exercise of this authority that impacts organizational performance. Equity forms a cornerstone of a just society, and the functions of law enforcement lend themselves to demonstrate the multiple facets of equality. The underpinnings of this concept are based on the Rawlsian “veil of ignorance,” and Adams' Equity Theory of Motivation. A just society can only be based on the equitable treatment of all its members, regardless of relative status, and in practical terms, this chapter explores how law enforcement organizations can excel, or fail, based on how they practice fairness, both internally and externally.

Most research on the work conditions and family responsibilities associated with work-family conflict and other measures of mental health uses the individual employee as the unit of analysis. We argue that work conditions are both individual psychosocial assessments and objective characteristics of the proximal work environment, necessitating multilevel analyses of both individual- and team-level work conditions on mental health.

This study uses multilevel data on 748 high-tech professionals in 120 teams to investigate relationships between team- and individual-level job conditions, work-family conflict, and four mental health outcomes (job satisfaction, emotional exhaustion, perceived stress, and psychological distress).

We find that work-to-family conflict is socially patterned across teams, as are job satisfaction and emotional exhaustion. Team-level job conditions predict team-level outcomes, while individuals’ perceptions of their job conditions are better predictors of individuals’ work-to-family conflict and mental health. Work-to-family conflict operates as a partial mediator between job demands and mental health outcomes.

Our findings suggest that organizational leaders concerned about presenteeism, sickness absences, and productivity would do well to focus on changing job conditions in ways that reduce job demands and work-to-family conflict in order to promote employees’ mental health.

We show that both work-to-family conflict and job conditions can be fruitfully framed as team characteristics, shared appraisals held in common by team members. This challenges the framing of work-to-family conflict as a “private trouble” and provides support for work-to-family conflict as a structural mismatch grounded in the social and temporal organization of work.

This chapter explores what managers in the library and information science workplace can do to keep stress and burnout levels low. The literature on stress and burnout in human services, or the helping professions, is surveyed and the differences between the two phenomena are explained. Research is clear that keeping stress levels low and burnout at bay in the workplace benefits both employees and the organization. Even so, managers are given little training on how to identify and deal with stress and often fail to notice that their employees are chronically stressed. When managers become aware that they do have employees who are seriously stressed or burned out, they are often unsure whether they should address the problem and how to handle it. The author explains the differences between stress and burnout and clarifies how managers can minimize their negative impact by monitoring six areas in which workers are most likely to experience them: (1) the demands of the job which include the quantity of work and the knowledge required to perform; (2) the amount of control employees are permitted to exercise in the workplace; (3) the amount of the social support employee’s feel they have from managers and colleagues; (4) the quality of workplace relationships; (5) the clarity of one’s role on the job; and (6) support and honest communication during times of change. The practical implication of this information aimed at managers is to help them create a better workplace and mentally and physically healthier staff members.

This chapter examines how increased digitalisation shapes employee voice behaviour through informal digital channels. A growing body of literature found positive effects of employee voice on organisational outcomes, and companies are offering various formal and informal channels for employees to speak up. However, despite the vast literature on employee voice, research on the role of the voice channel is limited. With digital voice channels gaining popularity since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, investigating how the interaction of employees with communication technologies affects their willingness to speak up digitally is ever more important. To do so, the authors chose a qualitative research design with semi-structured interviews. Adaptive structuration theory (AST) guided the qualitative content analysis. Findings indicate that the shift from analogue to digital informal voice channels influences employees’ willingness to speak up. Despite an effort to mimic analogue face-to-face conversations through advanced technologies, employees perceive a missing spark when communicating digitally, which discourages them from speaking up through informal digital channels. In this chapter, the authors analyse which factors constitute the missing spark.