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Learning at work generalises through socialisation into behaviours away from the workplace. The aim of this study is to give empirical evidence of a positive relationship between job design, self‐efficacy, competence efficacy and personal initiative at work, and proactive job search while under notice of redundancy and in unemployment.

The results are based on a detailed work task analysis and self‐reported data by individuals who had been made redundant (n=176).

The paper finds that the theoretical model received substantial, but not full support. Job design has impact on personal initiative through self‐efficacy and competence‐efficacy as mediating variables between job design and personal initiative. Personal initiative at work affects proactive job search when facing unemployment.

A limitation is that the respondents in general had jobs that were low‐skilled and routine. It is likely that a research group with larger differences in job design would show stronger relations between job design and personal initiative.

Work task analysis identifies conditions at work that minimise and mitigate individual initiative and makes it possible to correct them in order both to enhance organisational effectiveness and the individuals' long‐term employability.

The paper proposes that autonomy and complexity, which are the aspects most predominant in the study of how job design affects personal initiative and self‐efficacy, are too limited. The sequential completeness provides a broader or narrower scope of work tasks and more or less feed back which is crucial for learning and mastery‐experiences. Demand on cooperation, demand on responsibility, cognitive demand and learning opportunities affect initiative‐taking as well.

The purpose of this paper is to determine empirically the influence of leader-member exchange (LMX) on employees’ creativity and innovation. In addition, this study investigated the moderating role of employees’ personal initiative on the associations.

Data were gathered from 1,221 employees working in organizations across various industries in Australia.

The findings of this study revealed positive and significant relationships between LMX and employees’ creativity and innovation. Also, the findings indicated employees’ personal initiative moderated the LMX-employees’ creativity and LMX-employees’ innovation relationships.

Organizations should invest in LMX training and in the selection of leaders with this leadership style if their aim is to nurture and intensify employees’ creativity and innovation. They also should invest in personal initiative training in order to amplify the effect of LMX on creativity and innovation in organization.

This study makes vital theoretical contributions in different ways. In the domain of creativity and innovation, it addresses factors that impact employees’ creativity and innovation. It expands knowledge about organizational resources that nurture and enhance the creativity and innovation of employees. For LMX, this study supplements existing research by examining employees’ creativity and innovation as outcomes. Also, identifying personal initiative as an amplifier of the LMX-employees’ creativity and innovation relationships extends research in that domain. This study is also a rare investigation of the Australian context.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of protean-related traits and attitudes in the development of international mobility (expatriation) and entrepreneurial intentions among early career professionals. Career mobility is of increasing relevance to achieving career success in the era of protean and boundaryless careers, and in the present day highly globalized labor market. International mobility provides opportunities for work in organizations (corporate expatriation) as well as in entrepreneurship (expat entrepreneurship).

This paper reports two studies examining the role of “protean career personality,” conceptualized as consisting of personal initiative and flexibility on entrepreneurial and expatriation intention, looking at career orientation attitude as the mediating mechanism. In study 1, the impact of personal initiative and flexibility on the two career mobility paths is explored using a sample of 442 German undergraduate students. Study 2 replicates these relationships among a sample of 100 early career professionals who graduated with a diploma in psychology.

Results indicate that for the sample of undergraduate students, flexibility and career orientation were positively related to expatriation intention. However, the mediation path was non-significant. On the other hand, personal initiative and career orientation were essential for entrepreneurial intentions, with a significant mediation path. For the early career professionals in contrast, only flexibility turned out to be resourceful for both expatriation and entrepreneurial intentions.

Suggestions for supporting early career professionals to develop interest in working abroad or in entrepreneurship are provided. Particularly, the results indicate that protean traits affect mobility intentions differently. To strengthen intentions for expatriation work, attention should be paid enhancing the ability for staying flexible when it comes to career choices. This applies to both undergraduate students and early career professionals. However, a strong career orientation is also essential to the development of expatriation intention among current students. On the other hand, enhancing proactivity could strengthen entrepreneurial intention among undergraduate students.

This study applies protean-related traits and attitudes; and how they work together in the development of mobility intentions among undergraduate students and early career professionals. The study reveals differential roles of these traits and attitudes among these groups, with regard to expatriation and entrepreneurship. This is important for career guidance.

Organizations facing issues related to growth, innovation, and strategy are embracing design thinking, a problem-solving process. This study explores 40 design thinking initiatives and identifies operational practices emerge and empirical categories across various contexts. Quantitative analyses of the initiatives and qualitative interview data are used to distinguish four configurations of action analogous to races: training, emphasizing learning-by-doing; marathons, capturing personal reflection over a long project; relays, highlighting team collaboration; and sprints, reflecting fast-paced product innovation. The initiatives are differentiated as designer-led versus team-driven and, low-urgency versus high-urgency. Implications of practicing design thinking in Organization Development and Change are discussed.

A positive perception of work helps counteract the stress and psychological loss because of non-optimal working conditions. This paper aims to hypothesize two pathways through which social-psychological resources in the workplace contribute to positive work perception: one pathway is direct and the other is through the mediating mechanism of youth’s internal resource.

Filipino working youth from a government program for out-of-school poor youth, or working students enrolled in a free night high school, completed pertinent scales of the Multicontext Assessment Battery of Youth Development.

Co-workers’ endorsement of work values and their joint exercise of resilience-building skills build youth’s positive work perception. Youth’s personal initiative contributes to their positive work perception by its direct influence and also by its mediating mechanism.

The cross-sectional survey of this study does not allow for a definitive temporal progression from resources to positive work perception as does a longitudinal study.

For poor working youth, the threats of a financially bleak future can be tempered by an attitude that recognizes work not only as financially necessary but also as beneficial to one’s growth. The social-psychological resources in the workplace and the youth’s emerging personal initiative jointly contribute to a positive perception of work.

The current research shifts the focus of analysis from disadvantageous employment conditions to the affective and motivational aspects of employment and uses the conservation-of-resources theory to plot the flow of resources from the workplace to the worker.

In order to understand the driving forces behind intensified job demands (IJDs), the purpose of this paper is to examine demographic factors, structural work-related factors, personal and job resources as antecedents of IJDs.

The study is based on cross-sectional (n=4,963) and longitudinal (n=2,055) quantitative data sets of Austrian employees. Data sets were analyzed via regression analyses.

The results showed that IJDs, as assessed through five sub-dimensions: work intensification, intensified job-related, career-related planning and decision-making demands, intensified demands for skills and for knowledge-related learning, remained fairly stable overtime. The most consistent antecedents of IJDs were personal initiative and ICT use at work. Job resources, e.g. variety of tasks and lacking support from supervisor, related to four sub-dimensions of IJDs.

The findings suggest that personal (being initiative) and job resources (task variety) may have negative effects as they associated with IJDs. Moreover, supervisors’ support is crucial to counteract IJDs.

Employers should recognize that certain personal (e.g. personal initiative) and job-related resources (e.g. lacking supervisory support) might implicate higher IJDs, which, in turn, may cause more job strain as IJDs can be conceived as job stressors.

IJDs have received very little research attention because they are new job demands, which however, can be expected to increase in future due to faster technological acceleration in working life. The study has methodological value as longitudinal design was applied.

Individuals differ in their levels of self-control. Trait self-control has been found to relate positively to desirable and negatively to undesirable behaviors in contexts like physical health, academic performance, and criminality. The purpose of this study is to examine the relevance of trait self-control in work-settings. The authors distinguished between two types of self-control, stop-control (inhibitory control) and start-control (initiatory control), and tested their differential validity in predicting contextual performance.

In two independent employee samples, stop-control, start-control, organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), personal initiative, and proactive coping were measured. Counterproductive work behavior (CWB) was added in Study 2.

Results showed that only start-control was positively related to OCB, personal initiative, and proactive coping. Both stop-control and start-control were negatively related to CWB.

Findings support the validity of distinguishing between stop-control and start-control, suggesting that self-control theory and models should be refined to incorporate this distinction. Limitations include the correlational design and self-report measures. Although results were similar across two independent studies, future research is needed to test the generalizability of the conclusions in other settings, using non-self-report data.

The distinction between stop-control and start-control may help organizations in selecting staff and assigning tasks.

The present research introduces the distinction between two conceptually different types of self-control (stop-control and start-control), demonstrating their relevance to work-related behavior.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the emerging crowd‐funding phenomenon, that is a collective effort by consumers who network and pool their money together, usually via the internet, in order to invest in and support efforts initiated by other people or organizations. Successful service businesses that organize crowd‐funding and act as intermediaries are emerging, attesting to the viability of this means of attracting investment.

The research employs a “grounded theory” approach, performing an in‐depth qualitative analysis of three cases involving crowd‐funding initiatives: SellaBand in the music business, Trampoline in financial services, and Kapipal in non‐profit services. These cases were selected to represent a diverse set of crowd‐funding operations that vary in terms of risk/return for the investor and the type of payoff associated to the investment.

The research addresses two research questions: how and why do consumers turn into crowd‐funding participants? and how and why do service providers set up a crowd‐funding initiative? Concerning the first research question, the authors' findings reveal purposes, characteristics, roles and tasks, and investment size of crowd‐funding activity from the consumer's point of view. Regarding the second research question, the authors' analysis reveals purposes, service roles, and network effects of crowd‐funding activity investigated from the point of view of the service organization that set up the initiative.

The findings also have implications for service managers interested in launching and/or managing crowd‐funding initiatives.

The paper addresses an emerging phenomenon and contributes to service theory in terms of extending the consumer's role from co‐production and co‐creation to investment.

As part of its restructuring and commitment to collaboration and advances in healthcare, the author's organisation has recently adopted personal outcomes to ensure that services are aligned to meet patient needs more effectively. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate this advancement in healthcare in the light of recent research findings, changing policies and the author's own understanding.

The paper introduces the concept of collaboration as a means of achieving personal outcomes. In addition, the paper puts forward suggestions as to how the nurse can foster interdisciplinary/multidisciplinary teamwork, utilising the core concepts of the advanced nurse practitioner, namely transformational leadership, in support of this.

While success stories of personal outcomes abound much of it anecdotal based. Therefore, the need to initiate research in this area is of paramount importance as the latter would be helpful in examining meaningful quality outcomes. Reform in structure, finance and policy will also be necessary, as these are vital ingredients to the success of personal outcomes. Despite the overlapping conflict of Irish government policy, the extra finance announced in the 2005 Budget can only serve to assist organisations in achieving accreditation through initiatives like personal outcomes. Central to the success of personal outcomes, is to engage in collaborative practice by way of fostering interdisciplinary/multidisciplinary team working.

Further study of the impact on patient outcomes of collaboration is warranted.

The paper examines organisational, professional and interpersonal challenges.

The joint influence of personality traits, age and gender on environmental citizenship behavior (ECB) is relatively unknown among youth. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the independent and joint influence of the Big Five traits, age and gender on the three dimensions of ECB of students in a Nigerian university community.

A quantitative cross-sectional survey was adopted to collect data from 290 students in a Nigerian university.

The findings show that personality traits of openness and agreeableness were more related with eco-initiatives and eco-helping. Likewise, traits of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion and agreeableness were more associated with eco-civic engagement. Age was also consistently associated with the three dimensions. The Big Five traits, age and gender also have joint influence on the dimensions of ECB.

This is a self-reported survey, which limits the ability to draw any firm conclusions regarding the causal relationship between the study variables. Future research needs to consider other methods suitable for establishing causal relationship.

The findings imply that knowing the associations of personality traits, age and gender with environmental actions can help organizers of environmental initiatives to target their recruitment messages toward youth who might be pre-disposed to taking environmental actions, and also consider alternative actions that might appeal to their counterparts.

The originality of this paper lies in combining personality traits, age and gender to gain a better understanding of the three dimensions of ECB in a student sample against monolithic approach of authors of previous studies.