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This paper aims to examine the occurrence and management of conflict in Chinese organizations, from an emic perspective. The authors provide an in-depth understanding of Chinese working adults’ lived experiences regarding workplace conflicts.

The study is a qualitative one, consisting of open-ended questionnaires administered to 55 Chinese nationals who worked in governmental, public or international organizations in China. A thematic analysis of the answers was conducted.

Chinese participants adopted a normative mental model that defined their preferred “way of doing” things. A skillful balance was expected in conflict management that incorporated integrated open communication and strategic silence. Chinese working adults emphasized maturity in the workplace and the recognition of shared goals.

The online questionnaire format may have constrained participants’ responses. Also, the data were collected from various organizational contexts, but there were not enough participants from each type of organization so that comparisons between institutions could be made.

The results could help expatriate populations better prepare their lives abroad in China. Also, the findings could aid organizational or management consultants who work closely with Chinese partners.

The findings enhance our understanding of how Chinese working adults deal with workplace conflicts and the circumstances in which conflicts arise in the workplace, which also reflected the social and cultural contexts of the Chinese workplace experience.

This study provides an alternative interpretation of workplace conflicts and their management in China that is anchored in the unique organizational and national cultural context. They constitute the base for future development of culture-based explanations of Chinese organizational conflict behaviors.

Although informal communication at work has been shown to serve important functions of sociality, little is known about the messages that comprise routine, everyday interaction. The purpose of this paper is to examine two different informal interactions between 100 remote employees and their central office peers to determine the kinds of messages used in informal interaction using thematic analysis.

Teleworkers recalled informal interactions with central office peers; interactions were coded using constructivist methodology, then collapsed into dominant themes using a constant comparison approach. Patterns in responses were then related to a literature‐based (constructivist) analysis of how informal communication functions.

Five key themes were identified: personal disclosure, sociality, support giving and getting, commiserating/complaining, and business updates and exchanges. These informal workplace interactions also reflected underlying dimensions of perceived organizational membership: need fulfillment, mattering, and belonging, and suggest ways the framework could be strengthened.

Themes from reported interactions provide message‐level evidence that informal communication serves both instrumental and constitutive functions. Including interactions reported by co‐located employees would have allowed for a comparison.

Results have important implications for how informal communication functions between peers. Managers can use the results to facilitate communication opportunities for remote and co‐located employees.

Message‐level analysis of informal communication between peers has not been considered as important as hierarchical communication within businesses and organizations. Reported interactions illuminate how informal communication functions, and suggest a link between informal interaction and important individual‐ and organizational‐level outcomes, adding to existing knowledge about the understudied population of permanent, high‐intensity teleworkers.

Mental health is a growing concern amongst UK employers, yet eight in ten employers currently have no mental health policy. This paper aims to highlight why employers should implement such a policy and gives advice on implementing an effective well-being policy.

Punter Southall Health and Protection recently released “Employee Wellbeing Research 2018”, carried out in association with Reward & Employee Benefits Association. This research report looks at the current trends in workplace well-being.

The Employee Wellbeing Research 2018 report revealed that 73 per cent of respondents said high pressure working environments are now the biggest threat to well-being and are worried about the negative impact on their employees. But one striking issue the research revealed is that programmes are not being driven by the Board. Less than one in ten (8 per cent) said that their Board actively drives the organisation’s well-being agenda and one in 20 (5 per cent) reported that their Board has little or no interest in employee well-being.

This paper is aimed at HR professionals, senior management, CEOs and board members.

The study aims to examine the role that gendered talk plays in the workplace in both task and non‐task related interactions.

The research undertaken is a hybrid of qualitative and quantitative research using a single case study. The case study, comprising mixed gender and mixed status employees of an American multinational corporation, demonstrates similarities and differences between women's and men's speech patterns in this workplace setting. Through the recording and subsequent transcription of meetings that took place among the participants, a data archive was created, enabling analysis of the conversations to take place.

The research findings imply that organisations may need to move away from cultures that favour particular talk related norms to ones that facilitate the integration and assimilation of different types of talk, recognising that women and men use language differently.

The speaking dimension of communication is very rich and can be understood at many different levels. Thus, by virtue of the nature of this undertaking along with the richness and the time and energy constraints within which it operated, it was impossible to broaden the scope of the inquiry any further. It is necessary to continue this research involving various other combinations of participants on a gender and a status dimension.

This research uncovers the impact of gendered talk on decision making and leadership in the organisation.

This paper offers valuable insights for practitioners in relation to the challenge faced by organisations in their need to achieve a more balanced representation of women and men in decision‐making positions.

The purpose of this paper is to situate the concept of gendered learning in the workplace.

The paper presents the results of two closely related, qualitative studies of apprenticeship learning in two major industrial companies in Denmark.

The paper finds that the creation of a situated‐gendered “being” or “doing” in the workplace constitutes an important and often overlooked aspect of young people's learning processes in vocational training. Two themes of gender and learning are identified and discussed in an empirical analysis. These themes are learning and gendered identities, and gender and future family life.

The paper is exploratory in nature, so that it would be useful to confirm the results through further validation and comparison with other professions and workplaces.

The design of proliferate learning practices in the workplace should consider gender as a factor which influences the trajectories of the individual learner.

The main thrust of the paper is that young people engaged in vocational training in the workplace are “gendered” through their participation in particular work and work‐related practices. The “telos” of learning in the context of vocational training in the workplace entails more than just the pursuit of a career trajectory or an occupational identity. The main contribution of the article is therefore its emphasis on the notion that theories on workplace and apprenticeship learning should consider a broader perspective on the learner than possible when focussing only on professional or occupational identity.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the role of language ideologies in negotiating organisational relationships in a Korean multinational company (MNC). By adopting an interactional sociolinguistics (IS) approach, this paper illustrates how language becomes part of a mechanism of negotiating group membership and of perpetuating or challenging power asymmetries through social and ideological processes.

This paper draws on interview data from an ethnographic case study of a Korean MNC to understand language ideologies in one working team. The interview data are analysed through an IS framework to connect the situated interaction to the broader social context.

This paper shows that participants’ discourse of linguistic differentiation becomes an interactional resource in challenging the organisational status quo. Linguistic superiority/inferiority is constructed through particular sequencing and the systematic production of a dichotomy between two groups – expatriate managers and local employees – at various levels of their company structure. Group membership is enacted temporarily in positioning the self and the others.

This paper offers a methodological contribution to international business language-sensitive research on language and power by conducting interactional analysis of interview talk. Through the lens of IS, it provides insights into how discourse becomes a primary site of negotiating power and status and a multi-level approach to the study of organisational power dynamics and the complex linguistic landscape of any workplace.

The purpose of this paper is to look at workplace learning through research into sociology of work. It explores the “learning discourse” at work place level looking for possibilities to oppose learning.

This paper is based on case studies conducted at six workplaces. The data on the cases include interviews and observation and three of the cases can be characterized as being based on action research.

In light of the case studies, learning at workplaces shows up as action and discourse that is quite interest‐laden and contested. Employers demand learning but employees find ways to oppose these demands.

In the planning of measures that support workplace learning it is important to identify general structures and trends of working life, as well as the different interests at the workplace. In this way, a situation can be avoided in which adult educators and their activities are used as weapons in campaigning for some groups' interests.

The article's distinctive feature lies in its critical approach to workplace learning through in‐depth data sets. It explores further so‐called positive learning discourse and its implications at different kind of workplaces and to different kind of personnel groups.

Workplace abuse, interpersonal mistreatment that occurs within the victim’s work environment, has attracted considerable attention in recent years. In this chapter, we argue that problems with the conceptualization and measurement of workplace abuse have thwarted scientific progress. We identify two needs that we believe are especially pressing: (a) the need to consider the construct breadth of workplace abuse scales and (b) the need to test whether the measures of various types of workplace abuse effectively capture the unique qualities of the constructs they purport to assess. To guide our discussion of these issues, we conducted a review of the item content of several workplace abuse measures. We offer suggestions for addressing these and other conceptualization and measurement issues, and we discuss the possible implications of these issues on the study of the hypothesized predictors and consequences of workplace abuse.

Despite the fact that women are increasingly reaching the highest levels of management in business organisations, negative stereotypes persist concerning their ability to handle the discourse of leadership. Drawing on a large database of recorded material collected from women in a variety of New Zealand workplaces by the Victoria University of Wellington Language in the Workplace Project, this paper illustrates the value of both qualitative and quantitative analysis in challenging such stereotypes. The analysis indicates that effective women managers adapt their style with sensitivity and skill to the specific setting and refutes misconceptions about the ability of women chairs to handle workplace humour, making them sociolinguistically very proficient communicators in the workplace.

This paper aims to investigate how workplace fun is experienced in two public Egyptian banks by addressing the employees working there.

To investigate workplace fun in the selected banks, the author employed virtual ethnographic field research by spending two weeks (virtually and full-time) inside each of the two selected public banks. Besides this virtual ethnographic experience, the author employed semi-structured interviews and focus groups with the bank employees. Moreover, the author digitally examined documents such as posters, cartoons, brochures and a WhatsApp group. A total of 188 respondents were contacted and involved in eight semi-structured interviews and 36 focus groups. All interviews and focus groups were conducted in Arabic, the mother tongue of all respondents. The author subsequently used thematic analysis to determine the main ideas in the transcripts.

The findings confirmed that workplace fun has not been carefully understood, developed and sustained in the selected public Egyptian banks. To the best of the author's knowledge, this study is the first of its kind in the context of a developing nation to focus on workplace fun, and subsequently, it is the first to address the banking sector in one of the leading developing nations in Africa and the Middle-East. Furthermore, based on the analysis of the focus groups and interviews the author created a model of four obstacles: work environment realities, managerial practices, bank-related behaviour and meaning-related obstacles. Managing those four obstacles secures a relevant foundation on which banks can develop and maintain a systematic implementation of workplace fun and humour.

This paper contributes by filling a gap in HR management, in which empirical studies on workplace fun have been limited so far.