Search results

This chapter examines the changing nature of frontline supervision in light of the supervisory training and development programme which was provided to shift-bosses in order to complement the workplace change processes that AfricaGold embarked on to improve operational efficiency, productivity and safety of its mining operations. Although the training course was an important workplace change initiative taken by top management to improve organisational, individual and team performance at the rock-face where it mattered most, lack of organisational and managerial support prevented frontline supervisors from effectively implementing what they learned on the training course. The chapter highlights the importance of not only providing organisational change-focused training, but also systematically and strategically involving frontline supervisors in the conceptualisation, design, execution and evaluation of workplace change initiatives. It is only when frontline supervisors are supported, managerially and organisationally, that they can be deal-makers rather than deal-breakers for a successful introduction and execution of change initiatives on the shop-floor.

This chapter critically examines the dynamics that exists between workplace violence, employee well-being, and governance as experienced and perceived by employees in the Forestry context. The purpose of this research is to explore what signals the prevalence of workplace violence in the Forestry sector; to understand the consequences of workplace violence; to explore the degree to which workplace violence can be stopped; and how can employers strive for a violence “free” and healthy workplace. This chapter focuses on research into workplace violence in the Forestry sector in British Columbia, Canada.

A questionnaire survey, telephone interviews, and focus groups were used to focus on managers, union, and employees' verbal accounts of their own experiences and perceptions of workplace violence. Managers completed 367 questionnaire surveys. The union and employees from across five different organizations also completed the survey that was analyzed. Twenty semi-structured telephone interviews were conducted with each interview lasting 60–75 minutes, tape-recorded, and transcribed verbatim. Two focus groups were the one with 15 managers only and the other with 10 union representatives. Each focus group lasted 45–60 minutes, tape-recorded, and transcribed verbatim.

This research adopted an interpretivist approach, which allows a positivist and an interpretivist viewpoint that examines situations to establish the norm by using questionnaires, interviews, and focus groups. The mixed methodology is appropriate for addressing the research aims and provided insight into the lifeworld of participants, providing the opportunity for managers, union, and employees to share their personal experience of workplace violence. Using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) provided insight into the lifeworld of participants, providing the opportunity for employees, managers, and union representative to share their personal experience of workplace violence and its implications for governance, violence prevention, and employee well-being at work.

The data revealed that 13 key themes emerged as salient to forestry workers' perspective of workplace violence, the prevalence of violence, consequences of violence, prevention of violence, and how employers can strive toward a violent “free” and healthy workplace. These themes include Stress Management, Mental Health, Leadership Development, Trust, Employee Involvement and Engagement, Communication and Collaboration, Education and Training, Employee Violence Assistance Program, Violence Response Protocol, Respectful Workplace Culture, Job Redesign, Fear of Change, and Employee Appreciation. This research has relevance for employee well-being, leadership, governance, corporate social responsibility, and performance for practitioners and academics alike. The findings and insights from this research can be extrapolated to other organizations inBritish Columbia, Canada, and other parts of the world.

This chapter discusses the miners’ informal working strategy of making a plan (planisa) in context of the relationship between teamwork training that was provided to the mining teams above the ground and its implementation in the underground mining workplace. The training programme was essentially about empowering and transforming frontline mining teams to self-directed work teams (SDWT) to understand the gold-mining business through the eyes of management. Its aim was to create new kinds of mineworkers who understood the what, how and why of the twenty-first-century mining business. AfricaGold sought to restructure the underground workplace through SDWT training in order to create a congenial, humane, democratic and more meaningful form of work processes, which permitted the mining teams to have greater flexibility in the production tasks they performed. The chapter reveals that the SDWT training seemed to have motivated the mining teams. Interestingly enough, this motivation tended to prevail even in situations of production bottlenecks. At the heart of this motivation was the miners’ organisational practice of making a plan. It is arguable that the SDWT training enhanced the desire of the mining work teams to make a plan in response to production blockages and managerial inefficiencies. This is essentially what the training aimed to do – to create new kinds of frontline mineworkers who are committed to achieving the productivity goals of a modern mining workplace. Ironically, the management of production did not seem to complement the inspiration and energy that the training instilled in the minds and hearts of the mining teams.

We investigate the relationship between job complexity and skill development of adult workers in Europe using the Cedefop European Skills and Jobs Survey. ¹ The results suggest that challenging workplaces in which jobs are designed to include complex tasks that place high demands on workers’ skills also stimulate skill development. Increasing the degree of job complexity has positive and robust effects on the degree of skill development. Skill development is also positively linked to job tenure. The analysis stresses the importance of on-the-job learning and contextual workplace characteristics for adult workers’ skill development.

In this paper, we review the literature on learner control and discuss the implications that increased control may have for training in e-learning environments. The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive review of the learner control literature, focusing on adults and workplace training. We begin by reviewing the literature on learner control, focusing on the positive and negative effects associated with providing adult learners with control in e-learning environments. We organize our review into instructional design factors that have been manipulated to provide learners with control and person issues that moderate the relation between learner control and outcomes. Then, we summarize developments in training research and in adult learning that relate to learner control in order to provide a theoretical context for understanding learner control in adult workplace e-learning.

Human capital theory hypothesizes that no firm rationally invests in general job skills training because its competitors might hire the trained employees away before the firm could recoup its costs through higher worker productivity. Drawing from four explanatory perspectives, we developed several research hypotheses about the organizational and environmental sources of variation in company-provided job skills training for core employees, which we tested with a national sample of U.S. work establishments. Contrary to human capital theory expectations, the large majority of employers with core training programs reported providing skills that were either “to a great deal” or “to some extent” useful to other employers. Our general skills training analysis supported only one hypothesis, suggesting the inadequacy of human capital theory for explaining company training investments. We found evidence that the substantive contents of company job skills training programs differentiated into technical skills and social skills dimensions. Multivariate equations supported several hypothesized effects of organizational and environmental factors on the social and technical skills contents of company core training investments. We conclude with a reassessment of the classic general-specific job skills hypothesis and speculate about future directions for job skills training theory and research.

We use household panel data to explore the wage returns associated with training incidence and intensity (duration) for British employees. We find these returns differ depending on the nature of the training, who funds the training, the skill levels of the recipient (white- or blue-collar), the age of the employee and if the training is with the current employer or not. Using decomposition analysis, training is found to be positively associated with wage dispersion: a virtuous circle of wage gains and training exists in Britain but only for white-collar employees.