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This research study aimed to collect feedback from the learners on the usefulness and effectiveness of the online counselling sessions organised during COVID-19 lockdown through online platforms to provide academic support to the learners.

The link of a questionnaire designed in a Google Form sent to IGNOU learners of the January 2020 session enrolled under the jurisdiction of IGNOU Regional Centre (RC) Chandigarh through email as well as SMSs. Total responses received were 487, out of which 445 responses were complete, roughly 8% of the total registered learners during the January 2020 session. The questionnaire contained questions on a cross-section of online counselling issues, besides questions on the learners' profile.

Majority of the learners were satisfied with the input provided while organising online counselling sessions during COVID-19 lockdown in India. A significant proportion of learners (88%) used smartphones for attending counselling sessions. Facebook page of the RC rated as a relatively better option than other online platforms. However, more than 50% of learners faced Internet connection problems and found them a significant hurdle for smooth viewing of online counselling sessions. The proportion of learners who encountered difficulties in handling electronic devices was insignificant. The learner's feedback on many attributes such as usefulness and effectiveness of the online counselling sessions, interaction with the academic counsellors, e-content used in the counselling was significantly positive. A significant proportion of the learners have reported that face to face counselling could be replaced with online sessions in future, considering its flexibility in terms of place and schedule of learning and availability of recording of such sessions.

The research study was conducted under Chandigarh region of IGNOU which has a predominantly urban population. Thus the results of the study are limited to Chandigarh region and the region with similar socio-economic settings. This certainly limits the scope of the study.

The study certainly provides valuable feedback to the ODL policymakers to consider replacing face-to-face counselling with an online mode in a phased manner. Online counselling options will be highly cost-effective, easily manageable, and provide flexibility for learners and resource persons, resulting in addressing learners' non-attendance related issues in the face-to-face counselling sessions.

In the analysis of our finding it is clearly stated that the Internet connectivity and availability of electronic devices is an important issue to provide online counselling support to socially and economically disadvantaged groups. Therefore, the research study also identifies such social issues as a major challenge for providing online counselling support to the learners.

This is an original empirical research study and data collected is used in the analysis for the first time. This analysis is based on the feedback gathered from the learners registered at IGNOU RC Chandigarh during the January 2020 session. The data and derived results not used in any other study.

The article aims to identify the possibility of contextual shift in traditional notions of e‐government service environment. The authors propose the existence of a new institutional entity as core service providers in addition to the government (G) and citizens (C) in the existing G2C e‐government service environments. Considering the nature of actors involved, the authors position the new e‐government environment under “credence based” service setting that emphasizes user's perspective. The work expands the scope of e‐government to accommodate a much broader range of similar services.

Scenario study has been chosen to understand the proposed contextual shift in traditional e‐government service setting. Study of one of the e‐government practices – “e‐counseling in India” – has been illustrated to advocate the authors' viewpoint. The data is collected from authorized government websites in India that offer e‐counseling services. In addition, 15 in‐depth interviews were also performed with government officials and users to have a deeper understanding about the new service setting.

The study has revealed and defended the authors' proposition on “contextual shift” and validated the existence of “credence based” setting in e‐government service environments. Moreover, it provides preliminary insights about why and how information quality can be a critical element for the aforesaid setting.

Identification of “credence based” e‐government service environments may require a different design strategy for structures, policies, systems, and services to fulfil the user expectations.

Attention is given to developing credence based context for G2C e‐government environments. This “contextual shift” identified in this paper contributes to the existing stream of research that emphasizes user's perspective in e‐government services.

The purpose of this paper is to acknowledge the potential complexities in conventional notions of e-government service environments, which have earlier been conceptualized as a two party interaction system where the government is the service provider and other entities such as businesses, citizens, etc. are the service recipients. In this regard, the authors extend their attention to a core service context and identify the existence of “credence-based” service setting that may involve more than two parties such as government, citizens, and third-party institutions (TPIs).

An in-depth literature review is performed to build a conceptual foundation for the proposed service environment. A case of an Indian context is exemplified to understand the credence-based service setting and advocate the suitability of broader dimensions of service quality assessment, and propose a preliminary model of service quality assessment in the given context. The case study approach is adopted for gathering and analyzing the data. The data are collected from government web sites, semi-structured interviews with government officials, and students.

The paper finds that the existence of TPIs changes the nature of normal government to citizen (G2C) service interaction. Service quality conceptualization for this particular kind of e-government setting is bi-dimensional in nature which involves two separate but interdependent constructs quality of information, and quality of service Interaction that collectively contributes to service quality and empowerment of the recipients.

The present work attempts to differentiate the service context of credence-based e-government setting with the traditional conceptualizations of e-government service environments.

Drawing on the literature on pastoral power, a term introduced by Foucault that denotes a specific form of authority based on the subordinate's open communication regarding aspirations, interests and personal concerns, having the full faith in the leader's care of the subordinate's welfare, this article report empirical material from a study of Swedish construction industry.

Leadership practices are contingent on context and situation, and over time, authoritative leadership practices have been complemented by relational leadership that increasingly emphasizes the bilateral communication between manager and subordinate. The more communicative and “soft” leadership idiom may have both benefits and incur unanticipated consequences and conditions that need to be studied on basis of empirical materials.

Managers in the construction industry emphasize how subordinates increasingly turn to their closest managers to address a variety of concerns. Even though managers recognizes the value of providing personalized support, there is a risk that such a leadership idiom distract both managers and subordinates, i.e. counseling activities consume too much resources, making agents less prone to fully attend to proper project goals.

To consider contemporary leadership practices as partially premised on pastoral power provides new analytical possibilities that shed light on how leadership practice needs to correspond with new demands in the corporate setting.

This paper aims to examine the relationship between workplace bullying (WPB) and team performance (TP). And it also attempts to investigate the mediating role of team psychological contract breach (TPCB) in the relationship between WPB and TP.

Multiple sources and a time-lagged approach were applied at six-week intervals to 64 work teams across 12 different firms in Turkey to test the hypotheses. A linear regression analysis was conducted to evaluate the association between variables.

The results indicate that WPB leads to negative perceptions of TPCB, which, in turn, have a negative impact on TP.

This study design cannot establish causality, in spite of the fact that the authors used time-lagged data to decrease common method bias.

Managers or team leaders can design activities or programs (i.e. counselling sessions) to promote group cohesiveness, as well as immediately address complaints from team members who feel aggrieved to counteract the negative effects of bullying and reprimand perpetrators; such actions can mitigate perceptions of psychological contract breach.

Few studies have been conducted to test the mediating role of TPCB in the team context. This study stands out as it examines the mediating effect of TPCB in the relationship between WPB and TP. The findings advance the understanding of how WPB could negatively affect TP in a mediation model.

Dyadic services research has increasingly focused on helping providers facilitate transformative service conversations with consumers. Extant research has thoroughly documented the conversational skills that providers can use to facilitate consumer microtransformations (i.e. small changes in consumers’ thoughts, feelings and action plans toward their well-being goals). At the same time, extant research has largely neglected the role of servicescape design in transformative service conversations despite some evidence of its potential significance. To redress this oversight, this article aims to examine how servicescape design can be used to better facilitate consumer microtransformations in dyadic service conversations.

This article is based on an interpretive study of mental health services (i.e. counseling, psychotherapy and coaching). Both providers and consumers were interviewed about their lived experiences of service encounters. Informants frequently described the spatial and temporal dimensions of their service encounters as crucial to their experiences of service encounters. These data are interpreted through the lens of servicescape design theory, which disentangles servicescape design effects into dimensions, strategies, tactics, experiences and outcomes.

The data reveal two servicescape design strategies that help facilitate consumer microtransformations. “Service sequestration” is a suite of spatial design tactics (e.g., private offices) that creates strong consumer protections for emotional risk-taking. “Service serialization” is a suite of temporal design tactics (e.g., recurring appointments) that creates predictable rhythms for emotional risk-taking. The effects of service sequestration and service serialization on consumer microtransformations are mediated by psychological safety and psychological readiness, respectively.

The article details concrete servicescape design tactics that providers can use to improve consumer experiences and outcomes in dyadic service contexts. These tactics can help promote consumer microtransformations in the short run and consumer well-being in the long run.

This article develops a conceptual model of servicescape design strategies for transformative service conversations. This model explains how and why servicescape design can influence consumer microtransformations. The article also begins to transfer servicescape design tactics from mental health services to other dyadic services that seek to facilitate consumer microtransformations. Examples of such services include career counseling, divorce law, financial advising, geriatric social work, nutrition counseling, personal styling and professional organizing.

This study aims to investigate the external and internal stimuli, which affect the organismic experiences of the users and thereby influence their response in terms of behavioral intention toward the use of online doctor consultation platforms.

The study operationalized the stimulus–organism–response framework for the research model and surveyed 357 users in India who had experienced online doctor consultation platforms. The analysis has been done using the structural equation modeling approach.

The authors’ main results indicate the following key points. One, perceived usefulness, social influence, health anxiety, offline consultation habit and perceived technology usage risk are significant predictors of perceived value. In contrast, perceived ubiquity is identified to be an insignificant predictor of perceived value. Second, social influence and perceived technology usage risk have significant influence on trust. However, perceived usefulness is not a significant predictor of trust.

This study contributes to the theory by integrating technology-oriented factors with behavioral attributes for determining the behavioral intention of users toward the online doctor consultation platforms.

The managerial contributions of this study involve highlighting those technology-oriented and behavioral elements, which can be targeted to attract more users toward these platforms.

This is an original study that has looked beyond the role of technology-oriented factors in influencing the perceived value and trust elements while investigating the behavioral intention among the users toward the online doctor consultation platforms.

Discusses four ways of conceptualising counselling: as a set of skills, as a relationship, as a means of attaining outcomes, and as a set of definable tasks. Considers the issues arising from the BAC definition of counselling, Patterson′s (1974) approach, and the debate about counselling versus psychotherapy. Surmises that the four conceptualisations of counselling are not mutually exclusive, but it is important to examine the exact nature of counselling in order to do the job well.

This article is the second in a two‐part series. The first outlined why coaching is an imperative, the forces that create complexity, and the need to identify the behaviour that has to change as a critical first step in the coaching process. Part 2 explores the need for a coaching model; respect as a factor in the basic coaching relationship, the difference between counselling, tutoring, mentoring and performance improvement; the relationship between coaching and control; and the importance of setting the context if coaching interventions are to succeed. The material and the concepts behind the ideas explored are drawn from experience within the Lawson Mardon Group, a major international printing and packaging conglomerate with more than 40 businesses spread throughout six countries.