For some years now there has been growing enthusiasm amongst practitioners, managers and some academics about the value of promoting fun at work, resulting in a substantial body of managerial literature. As a result, the authors believe that fun at work deserves further research attention. In this paper the authors critically review the large body of practitioner and management literature promoting fun at work. We find this literature dependent on a number of untheorised, untested assumptions about the nature of fun, its desirability and usefulness to business. Utilising Schein’s organisational theory, alongside ethnographic research into fun at work, we highlight the complexity of implementing fun at work initiatives in practice. Drawing on organizational psychology we also make a short case study of the current use of fun at work as a job marketing tool by recruitment agencies in New Zealand. Our discussion does make it possible to come to some conclusions about fun at work. However, we also pose a series of research questions that emerge from our discussion that will provide a framework for ongoing research.

Previous research has identified that values affect attitudes and behaviour, and value differences may be associated with conflict in organizations. This paper examines potential national and gender differences in values in a group of 345 young people soon to be entering the Australian workforce. Although there were national, and small gender, differences in the importance placed on particular values, the young people in the study were consistent in the relative importance placed on happiness, work success and friendship, and the unimportance of life and work activities that contributed to society. Implications for organizations and suggestions for future research are explored.

There is substantial evidence showing that it is not uncommon for workers to face, for example, unfriendly relationships, poor organizational climate, and aggressive bosses in their work settings. While self-help readings, relaxation exercises, yoga, mentalization therapies and psychological counseling help to address workers' reactions, this paper focuses on prayer and its effects, through a phenomenological study. The results indicate that the sample members usually pray everyday and/or many times during the day. The majority of them seek for some form of celestial support, like to express gratitude to some deity, and believe that there is no right place or time to pray. The findings show that the average time that is spent on praying varies. Further, prayer is also seen as a form of communication with a divine power and it is also regarded as beneficial to deal with tasks, colleagues' relationships, negative emotions and spiritual vibrations at work settings, among other things.

Although the use of intuition in managerial decisions has been documented, many questions about the intuitive process and its antecedent stages remain unanswered, in particular the role of affective traits and states. The study reported in this article investigates whether decision makers who are more attuned to own emotions and experience a particular mood have an easier access to intuition. Our findings indicate that emotional awareness has indeed a positive effect on the use of intuition, which appears to be stronger for women. Surprisingly, positive and negative mood seem to influence intuition according to their intensity rather than positive/negative distinction.

The literature on knowledge transfer is confident in its assertion that a ‘stickiness’ pervades knowledge disclosure process. This phenomenon is often attributed to structural communication barriers but an equally valid explanation could stem from the individual feeling a sense of ownership of their knowledge which then engenders a reluctance to be open about their knowledge within a formal knowledge transfer process. We pursue this idea theoretically through notions of possessiveness and psychological ownership; and empirically by exploring the concept of willingness to disclose. Assuming willingness to be unidimensional a methodology is put forward that uses indicators to measures its direction. Using a sample of 1050 UK engineers we illustrate the direction of willingness on a reluctance–willing dimension. We argue that knowledge transfer requires management to examine more closely the stimuli that affect the process.

In a sample of 243 women from a Midwestern healthcare organization, we found that the work-to-family interference (WIF) was positively related to intentions to quit. Significant relationships were found among work flexibility, WIF, and intention to quit. This relationship was supported, allowing us to conclude that employees who perceive personal control and autonomy in their work environment (as defined by how, when and where they work) will report lower levels of WIF and intentions to quit. The implications of these findings on future research and organizational practice are discussed.

The concept of ‘emotional labour’ is concerned with occasions when feelings are managed to create publically observable emotions in organizational settings in ways that involve them being ‘sold for a wage’ and therefore taking on an ‘exchange value’ (Hochschild (1983: 7). Drawing on an in-depth literature review, this paper explore grounds for arguing that business academics in Australia are experiencing emotional labor. The authors consider the application of findings concerned with emotional labor in a variety of occupations in relation to the context of university business schools. More specifically, they discuss how two decades of increasing marketisation, commercialisation and service orientated university practices may have contributed to emotional labor in Australian university business schools. The paper draws two conclusions. Firstly, educational managers need to be better informed about the positive and negative implications of emotional labor so that they can develop appropriate strategies, guidelines and workplace environments at the organizational level. Secondly, that a review of the literature suggests that empirical research is warranted in order to address the question posed in the title of the paper.

The importance of teams has been largely recognized in recent management and entrepreneurship research. This article critically reviews the literature of entrepreneurial and management teams by comparing the key concepts, and the development and foci of research from the SME performance viewpoint in particular. The comparison reveals that entrepreneurial teams differ from management teams, and so the concepts should not be considered interchangeable. Such teams also operate largely in different contexts, however, both having different roles for management and a significant impact on firm performance. Moreover, the review suggests that entrepreneurial and management teams are often groups rather than teams and they are more common than previously believed, though there is much variation in their prevalence by industry sector and firm size.

This paper introduces the ontology of electronic collaboration (e-collaboration) and applies it for modeling the readiness analysis of e-collaboration through the electronic marketplace (EM). Our search of the literature shows that the publication of papers in the areas of e-collaboration and EM has reached to the third phase of S-shape growth, which indicates that these areas have arrived at a certain level of maturity. However, while most of the e-collaboration studies focus on the application of collaboration technologies, less attention has been paid to the development of frameworks and the models that can describe the concept of the collaboration. Based on the notion of e-collaboration at the organization level, this paper introduces the ontology of e-collaboration. The proposed e-collaboration ontology is further applied to the case of readiness analysis for EM-based collaboration. Following the proposed ontology, the readiness model displays key measures of readiness at the strategy, process, and technology levels. At each level, the measures are segmented into internal and external contexts.

In recent years the Business Council of Australia (BCA) has drawn attention to the importance of the availability of a well-trained supply of employees for the Australian workplace. Specifically the BCA highlighted the benefits of a quality education imparting skills in the areas of collaboration, teamwork and leadership all of which greatly assist the effective practice of creativity, innovation and strategy. This paper makes a useful contribution to teaching practice in several ways. The paper links comments from the BCA to a significant and ongoing debate in the strategy literature on the best approaches to teaching the practice of strategy. The paper then demonstrates, with case studies from the RMIT University MBA and the Central Queensland University MBA programs, different approaches to how this can be done. This is followed by a critical discussion of the literature and case studies. Suggestions are made for future research and teaching practice.