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The purpose of this paper is to address the research-practice gap in management and advocate the need for an independent organization, called the evidence-based management (EBMgt) collaboration to facilitate generation and dissemination of knowledge that is rigorous, relevant, and actionable.

The authors use a theory-building approach to collaboration. They identify existing challenges in the research-practice gap literature and argue that EBMgt offers the most viable alternative to narrow this gap. They offer a theory of collaboration with supporting propositions that engages the generators, disseminators, and users of management knowledge in an ongoing sustainable collaboration toward EBMgt.

The authors envision evidence at the center of the EBMgt collaboration. They offer a process model of EBMgt incorporating a collaboration that ensures the fusion of rigor, relevance, and actionability of management knowledge toward the production of strong evidence that is of value to a decision maker. They suggest that the collaboration generate evidence in the form of a systematic review (SR) using a standard template and make it available online to management decision makers around the world in real time. They outline the parameters of the SR and offer details on the design of the Template.

The theory of collaboration brings together various competing ideas and recommendations made over the past few decades to close the research-practice gap in management. The theory can be used as a guideline to establish and maintain the operation of an EBMgt collaboration.

The authors offer details on the format and content of a standardized SR along with a template to execute it. They believe it would appeal to a practicing manager to know the state-of-the-art knowledge that applies to a decision that he or she is about to make in real time.

The work provides a theoretical platform for the idea of EBMgt collaboration that was not available before. The authors add value to the research-practice gap literature by addressing critical concerns including the identification of relevant research questions, evaluating and grading evidence, fostering communication between researchers and practitioners, and translating research to practicing managers. The integration of research and organizational knowledge in the form of an SR that provides decision support to a practicing manager is of significant value to the profession. The conceptualization of the collaboration, not as a research method but as a separate social system that links key management knowledge stakeholders together adds originality to collaboration research.

The purpose of this study is to explore the impact of mental health on the job performance among nurses, how shiftwork affects the impact and how social support alters it.

Data were collected through a questionnaire survey from 683 Indian nurses working in multiple hospitals in two major cities in Northern India. Descriptive statistics, correlations and hierarchical regressions were employed to investigate the links between job stress, emotional exhaustion and job performance along with the simultaneous moderating effects of shiftwork and social support on this relationship.

Both job stress and emotional exhaustion were negatively related to job performance. However, three-way interaction analysis revealed that social support moderated the above relationships differently between shift workers and day workers. Social support significantly altered the pattern of the relationship between the independent and dependent variables among day workers but had no impact in mitigating the relationship among shift workers.

The findings endorsed the usefulness of the stress theory, burnout theory, the conservation of resources model and the social support resource theory in modeling the phenomenon and explaining the behavior of day workers but not that of shift workers.

It paved the way for evidence-based practices in health-care management.

This study extends theoretical predictions to India and demonstrates their global portability. It focuses on shiftwork and social support as simultaneous moderators, and through a unique three-way analysis, documents complex interaction patterns that have hitherto been unrecorded. It also brings scholarly attention to the nursing population in India whose organizational behavior is poorly documented in the empirical literature.

This study aims to explore how gender influences the impact of interpersonal trust among subordinates on spontaneous work behaviors such as sharing responsibility and knowledge and engaging in organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). The goal is to understand factors that contribute to the effectiveness of women as supervisors and subordinates in the manufacturing sector.

Data were gathered from 308 subordinates and 71 supervisors working in the manufacturing sector in mainland China using a survey methodology. Descriptive statistics, correlation, confirmatory factor analysis and hierarchical moderated regression were the statistical techniques used.

Results indicate that both affect- and cognition-based trust among subordinates positively impact responsibility- and knowledge-sharing behaviors, OCB-individual (OCB-I) and OCB-organization (OCB-O). For female subordinates, the gender of the supervisor alters the relationship between both forms of trust and responsibility-sharing behavior and OCB-O, but not knowledge-sharing behavior and OCB-I. Cognition-based trust plays a dominant role for male subordinates, while affect-based trust is more relevant to female subordinates. Finally, while the gender of the supervisor moderates the impact of both affect- and cognition-based trust, it is significant for female subordinates only.

This study is not without limitations. First, the authors had access to a limited sample of female supervisors and female subordinates, which is not uncommon in the manufacturing sector that is mostly composed of male employees. Second, the cross-sectional nature of the study does not allow the capture of the impact of change in trust over time. However, it is believed that the multi-source design, the novelty of the study’s findings and their implications to interpersonal trust theory and supervisory practice compensate for the limitations. For starters, this study endorses the crucial role of interpersonal trust among employees in predicting important organizational behaviors. It corroborates the conceptual distinction between affect- and cognition-based trust and empirically validates the concepts of affect- and cognition-based trust, RSB, KSB and OCB in China. It uses multi-source data and measures behavioral outcomes of workers as observed by their immediate supervisors. These contributions speak to the empirical viability of our theoretical framework that may be useful to those contemplating cross-cultural research.

The study started with the question, does gender matter. The answer is that it does and that it has implications for human resource management. The gender of both supervisors and subordinates affect the way interpersonal trust among workers elicit desirable organizational behaviors such as sharing responsibilities, sharing knowledge and other forms of citizenship behavior. Female supervisors need to build trust among their female employees before they can expect effective organizational behavior. The story is different for male supervisors and male employees. This has implications in the way male and female supervisors are trained. It also has implications for work group formation and composition. What the study does not know is whether these findings are limited to the manufacturing sector or unique to China. It is recommended that a cross-cultural comparative research be undertaken to address those questions.

In light of the study’s findings, it is proposed that supervisory training and development programs should take into consideration that female supervisors encounter more challenges in eliciting favorable behaviors on the part of female subordinates in a work environment that is male-dominated.

The unique value contribution of the study pertains to the role of gender – the gender of the supervisor and the gender of the subordinate in shaping organizational behavior. Specifically, the authors show that the supervisor’s gender influences the relationship between affect-based trust and RSB, KSB and OCB-O and the relationship between cognition-based trust and OCB-O. Their point is that these relationships are significant only for female supervisors. In addition, they show that gender similarity between the supervisor and the supervised matters, only when both are female. These findings limit the role of interpersonal trust in eliciting favorable organizational behavior across the board and question the portability of interpersonal trust theory across industries and cultures.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of role stressors on job stress among airline employees in mainland China. More specifically, the aggravating effects of shift work and the mitigating effects of decision latitude are explored to facilitate strategies of intervention aimed at reducing job stress.

Data are collected using a field survey in Mandarin from 485 airline employees, including pilots, flight attendants, and service employees in five major cities in mainland China.

The findings demonstrate that role overload and role conflict have significant positive effects on job stress. Furthermore, both shift work and its interference with non‐work activities significantly elevated the impact of role overload on job stress. Findings also reveal that decision latitude mitigated the detrimental effect of role overload on job stress for employees working on fixed shift, but not for employees working on rotating shift.

This is a cross‐sectional study using perceptual measures.

The findings suggest that aviation managers in China need to focus not only on decision latitude but also on job and organizational design to mitigate the impact of job demands on stress. While decision latitude works to ease demands among those who work on fixed shifts, it does not work in the same way for those working on rotating shifts.

This paper corroborates the cross‐cultural applicability of stress theory by demonstrating the detrimental role of rotating shift on stress while at the same time calling attention to some cultural shaping of the findings.

The purpose of this paper is to address the gap between management research and management practice by suggesting that, in addition to rigor and relevance, management knowledge should be actionable to be of practical value. To this end, an index for evaluating actionability is proposed and empirically tested.

Based on reflective and formative conceptualizations of actionability and a critical review of both evidence-based management (EBMgt) and evidence-based medicine literature, the authors developed 40 items that would best represent attributes of actionable research. The authors asked 187 management scholars, members of the editorial boards of influential management journals, and practicing managers to rank the extent to which each item was important to their perceptions of research to be actionable in practice. The authors treated actionability as a two-level construct consisting of first-order reflective factors and second-order formative ones.

Using principal component analysis with varimax rotation six factors were extracted, explaining 68 percent of variance in actionability: operationality, which also included items from causality; contextuality; comprehensiveness; persuasiveness, which split into two dimensions of rigor and unbiasedness; and lastly comprehensibility. Using partial least squares analysis, the authors demonstrated that these six factors formatively contribute to an overall index of actionability of management research.

The index offers an empirical measure to advance research on EBMgt by facilitating theory testing in different management contexts.

The developed index promotes EBMgt by providing producers, disseminators, and users of management knowledge with a metric to appraise actionability of management knowledge.

This index is the first theory-based and empirically tested tool for effectively evaluating the practical value of management research.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of job demand, job control, and supervisory support on stress among nurses in China, Japan, Argentina, and the Caribbean using the Job demand‐control (JDC) and the Job demand‐control‐support (JDCS) models.

The authors have employed a comparative research design, cross‐sectional survey methodology with convenient random sampling, and a commonly used statistical analytic strategy.

The results highlight that job demand, job control, and supervisory support are important variables in understanding stress among nurses. This has been corroborated in China, Japan, Argentina, and the Caribbean. Based on their findings and what is available in the literature, the authors report that the JDCS model has universal significance albeit it works somewhat differently in different contexts.

This study's contribution comes from its comparative nature, theoretical anchor, its use of one of the most popular models of stress, its focus on a profession that is demonstrably stressed, its use of common measures and an established analytic strategy. The study's findings underscore the cross‐cultural usefulness and application of the JDCS model along with its threshold and substitution effects and limiting conditions.

The purpose of this paper is to integrate existing body of knowledge on evidence‐based management, develop a theory of evidence, and propose a model of evidence‐based decision making.

Following a literature review, the paper takes a conceptual approach toward developing a theory of evidence and a process model of decision making. Formal research propositions amplify both theory and model.

The paper suggests that decision making is at the heart of management practice. It underscores the importance of both research and experiential evidence for making professionally sound managerial decisions. It argues that the strength of evidence is a function of its rigor and relevance manifested by methodological fit, relevance to the context, transparency of its findings, replicability of the evidence, and the degree of consensus within the decision community. A multi‐stage mixed level model of evidence‐based decision making is proposed with suggestions for future research.

An explicit, formal, and systematic collaboration at the global level among the producers of evidence and its users akin to the Cochrane Collaboration will ensure sound evidence, contribute to decision quality, and enable professionalization of management practice.

The unique value contribution of this paper comes from a critical review of the evidence‐based management literature, the articulation of a formal theory of evidence, and the development of a model for decision making driven by the theory of evidence.

This paper aims to raise some important questions for cross‐cultural research on occupational stress and well‐being and sets the stage for the five papers in the special issue.

This paper reviews some previous literature on cross‐cultural understanding of occupational stress and well‐being, why such research is difficult to undertake, and summarizes the five original manuscripts that comprise this special issue.

Manuscripts in this special issue represent authors from several countries and report data collected from over a dozen countries. Some contributions attempt to replicate previous North American and European research findings in other countries while others undertake comparative studies of two or more countries.

It is important to undertake more cross‐cultural comparative research of the effects of occupational stress and well‐being to determine whether any boundary conditions exist for previous results based in North American and European samples. In addition, future research should include assessments of some national culture values.

In the context of the growing feminisation of membership in Canadian labour unions, this study examines the relationship between gender and multiple dimensions of worker commitment to the union organisation. Based upon survey responses from 223 female and 222 male union members in Saskatchewan, the results reveal no gender differences with regard to expressed levels of union “loyalty” and “responsibility to the union”. However, a small but significantly lower level of “willingness to work for the union” was expressed by female union members. In comparative analyses of males and females, the results are generally supportive of greater commonality than differences in the correlates of union commitment for men and women.