According to self-determination theory, employees' well-being is related to the autonomy-supportive style of a supervisor. However, the effect of supervision style on well-being remains understudied in low-skilled occupations. This study employed a mixed-method, multi-level approach to examine the impact of autonomy-supportive training (AST) on supervisors and employees and to identify factors contributing to the maintenance of supervisors' autonomy support (SAS). The quantitative phase evaluated the effect of AST on supervisory style and employees' well-being, with a sample of 44 supervisors and 240 employees in New Zealand. The qualitative phase used focus groups and interview with 15 supervisors to explore factors that could influence the maintenance of SAS. Overall, supervisors can be trained to adopt an autonomy-supportive style, but these skills can also be diluted by organisational factors such as pressures and managerial behaviour. This study contributes to autonomy-supportive style research in order to account for factors affecting the maintenance of SAS in low-skilled occupations.

The purpose of this study is to employ Koeske and Koeske’s stressor-strain-outcome model of stress to examine the extent to which strain, a central component of occupational stress, mediates the relationship between safety climate and safety-related outcomes. The relationship between safety climate, strain and safety outcomes has been relatively under tested where strain is a mediating variable. This study makes a contribution to the literature by examining the dynamics of these relationships. Questionnaires were sent to 1,800 employees of an electricity provider, with a 41.4% response rate. The hypothesized model was tested using structural equation modeling. Analysis of the hypothesized model indicated that, while safety climate had a significant direct relationship with safety-related behaviors, the model was also partially mediated by the experience of strain. Understanding the relationship between safety climate, strain and safety outcomes is important. Support for the model verifies that safety climate is mediated by strain in terms of safety outcomes. Practical implications include the need to manage safety climate through management attitudes to safety, maintaining high safety standards and communication to reduce ambiguity on safety norms.

This paper argues that people's careers have great personal significance for them and energise much organisational activity, but that in the context of organisations and management they often appear irrelevant. Contrasting career metaphors are used to show how careers develop through tensions between organisational and social structure, and individual agency. The findings of a New Zealand research study show how new flexibilities and ambiguities in economic and organisation structures result in people developing careers which, like the Australasian “Big O.E.” institution, are mobile, improvisational, and learning-based. A reflexive model is used to show how careers can create organisations as well as vice versa. The implications of new career theories for workers, managers and management educators are indicated. Greater appreciation of career dynamics results in the subversion of some traditional management ideas and the development of new models of self- and organisational management.

Drawing on detailed qualitative case study evidence from four retail banking organisations, this article highlights the connections between customer relations strategy, the psychological contract and employee behaviour. The purpose of the research is to extend our understanding of the links between employees and customers by showing how this relationship evolves over time and by highlighting that a front-line employee's service orientation needs to be understood within the broader context of the employee's service experience. It is suggested that a better understanding of these connections could facilitate improved customer service standards and enhance the experiences of those working in service industries.

Behavioral integrity refers to the consistency of an individual's words and actions. This consistency facilitates trust. Nevertheless, an individual's behavioral integrity often changes, to various extents, with one's surroundings. This study employs social contracts and scenarios to examine the underlying behavioral assumptions made by a specific gender within definite contexts in Taiwan. This study demonstrates that gender differences exist in behavioral integrity with contextual variations. Males under conformity pressures in public possess higher behavioral integrity, but exhibit lower behavioral integrity in private under pressure to protect themselves. This knowledge helps improve understanding within organizations as well as workplace communication between genders.

Drawing on social learning theory and taking a motivational perspective, this study mainly investigates how leader humility can promote employees' other-oriented motivations, and uncovers the other-serving motivational mechanism through which leader humility can impact their employees' different types of voice behavior. By collecting data from 152 leader–subordinate dyads through an online survey, the results revealed that leader humility was positively related to both employees' prosocial motivation and organizational concern motivation. Meanwhile, these two motivations play mediating roles in explaining how leader humility can positively affect employees' supportive voice and challenging voice. It is noteworthy that leader humility, which features highlighting the value and strength of others, is more likely to trigger employees' prosocial motivation and thus influence their voice behavior. This research extends our understanding of leader humility, employee motivation, and workplace voice. Practical implications and limitations of the results are also discussed.

This paper investigates how employees' experience of workplace incivility may steer them away from idea championing, with a special focus on the mediating role of their desire to quit their jobs and the moderating role of their dispositional self-control. Data collected from employees who work in a large retail organization reveal that an important reason that exposure to rude workplace behaviors reduces employees' propensity to champion innovative ideas is that they make concrete plans to leave. This mediating effect is mitigated when employees are equipped with high levels of self-control though. For organizations, this study accordingly pinpoints desires to seek alternative employment as a critical factor by which irritations about resource-draining incivility may escalate into a reluctance to add to organizational effectiveness through dedicated championing efforts. It also indicates how this escalation can be avoided, namely, by ensuring employees have access to pertinent personal resources.

In this paper, we contend that business education could benefit from attention to a field of study concerned with the way in which adults learn, and their motivation as students. We warrant the assertion that, although university business faculty tend to present a conventional wisdom set in the traditional paradigm(s) of their discipline areas, there is growing need for managers and academics to reject the concept of certainty, and to be open to conflicting values, change, uncertainty, and continuous learning. Conformity to a central paradigm requires that any ideas that stray from the established path be ignored, but emerging paradigms in business theory and research increase the urgency of the need for significant changes in the traditional curriculum and methodology of business education. We consider it long overdue for students of organisations, including current and future practitioners, to participate in the dialogue and benefit from new approaches, which will challenge the community of business academics to redesign both the content and the methodology of courses.

Scholars suggest that in the ‘intangible’ economy, firms need to exploit intangible, rather than tangible resources to generate superior performance. In this study, we theoretically developed the proposition that intangible assets and capabilities would be linked to superior performance while tangible assets would be linked to low performance. Drawing upon a broad sample of manufacturing and services firms in Australia and by segmenting out the central cluster of firms, we found that tangible resources were linked to low performance while as hypothesised, intangible assets and capabilities were linked to superior performance. Studies such as the present one offer some support for resource-based theory which argues that in today's economy, resources that are intangible in nature are more likely to be sources of competitive advantage than resources that are tangible in nature.

While an increasing number of studies focus on the positive effects of Chinese supervisor–subordinate guanxi on its focal parties, little research has examined in what situations guanxi may instead cause negative impacts on these individuals. Drawing on conservation of resources theory, the objectives of this study is to identify how the culturally remarkable aspect of supervisor–subordinate guanxi – personal-life inclusion – may cause ‘burden’ for Chinese employees and to reveal the moderated mediation mechanism between personal-life inclusion and turnover intention by examining the mediating role of work interference with family and the moderating effect of perceived family demands. Data were collected from 182 Chinese employees. The results indicate that personal-life inclusion is positively correlated with turnover intention and work interference with family mediates this relationship. Perceived family demands serves as a moderator on the mediated relationship between personal-life inclusion, work interference with family, and turnover intention. We discuss the theoretical and managerial implications of our findings.

Limited academic attention has been afforded to young workers relative to their adult counterparts. This study addresses a phase of the employment relationship for young people that is very infrequently examined – during or around the time when the relationship ends. It examines the relative frequency of different forms of dismissal and the circumstances preceding the dismissals via a content analysis of 1259 cases of employee enquiries to a community advocacy organisation in Australia. Results indicate that dismissal was most commonly associated with bullying, harassment, and taking personal leave. Young men, compared to young women, were disproportionately likely to report allegations of misconduct as preceding dismissal, while females experienced higher rates of sexual harassment and discrimination. The research highlights the types and circumstances of dismissal across a range of employment contexts and reveals the complexities of youth employment relationships which may differ from those of the general workforce.

This paper contributes to the growing stream of organization research that explores the relationship between professional identities and gender. Our central question pertains to how account managers ‘do gender’ in constructing their professional identities. While account management has been considered a sales occupation with a strong masculine connotation, some indications towards ‘feminization’ have also been observed. Our analysis of 39 interviews with white women and men working as account managers in the Netherlands suggests that these account managers construct a ‘tough salesman’ identity and a ‘co-operative communicator’ identity. These identities have different gender connotations. The ‘co-operative communicator’ identity facilitates a critical dialogue with the – often implicit – masculinity in the ‘tough salesman’ identity norm. We reflect on the effects of these gender connotations both for account managers and for our practice as organization researchers who intend to deconstruct rather than reproduce gender stereotypes in our study of professional identities.

Organisations and associated management practices are generally considered responsible for promoting employees' enjoyment of work. Our study, on the other hand, seeks to examine the capacity of individual workers to regulate their own experience of fun. We interviewed eight ‘remarkable’ workers who claimed to always (or nearly always) have fun at work. We utilised a critical realist approach in the analysis that enabled the consideration of both structure and agency in the experience of workplace fun. A key research finding was that participants possessed a strong sense of control over their own happiness at work, demonstrated in four ways: (1) a priority placed on fun, (2) a sense of responsibility for fun, (3) a positive orientation to the world and (4) a sense of mastery and challenge in work tasks. Research findings may inspire both individual workers and organisations to adopt an agentic outlook in the workplace, implementing strategies that enhance employee control.

Most research on the factors driving employees to work longer than expected or preagreed has focused on behaviors of work extension and has widely neglected work intensification. Therefore, the aim of this study is to investigate whether job demands, as well as employees' job-related resources and personal resources (skill discretion, educational level), predict behavioral indicators of work extension (total working hours, overtime) and work intensification (skipping mandatory rest breaks). We use data from the sixth wave of a large cross-sectional and representative German employee survey (N = 10 148). The findings suggest that job demands and skill discretion are positively associated with the different behaviors of working longer. The relationship between work extension and skill discretion is stronger for higher-educated employees than for lower-educated employees. Our findings suggest that specific job demands and resources must be considered simultaneously to explain working longer and to differentiate between behaviors of working longer.

This study utilizes self-consistency motivational theory to investigate the association between employees' experience of co-worker ostracism and their promotive voice, while also examining the mediating role of organization-based self-esteem (OBSE) and the moderating effect of emotional stability. We collected three-wave data from personnel in North American organizations and found that social exclusion by co-workers hinders employees' expression of constructive views about work-related matters as it dampens their OBSE. We observed that this mediating role of OBSE is mitigated to the extent to which employees have emotional stability, a dispositional feature that helps them control emotions, discipline impulses, and handle challenges. Overall, our study identifies a key mechanism, employees' belief about their self-esteem and proficiency as an organizational member, through which co-worker exclusion hampers promotive voice, and it reveals how their emotional stability might contain this process.

We examine the relationship between high-performance work system (HPWS) and job satisfaction, drawing on the ‘too much of a good thing’ theory, to establish whether a non-linear relationship can explain conflicts in previous findings. Moreover, we extend the study by exploring the mediating role of work overload and the moderating role of person–organization fit (P–O fit). Based on a cross-sectional data set of 220 employees and a longitudinal data set of 373 employees from organizations in China, the empirical findings show an inverted U-shaped relationship between HPWS and job satisfaction. Results also indicate that the relationship between HPWS and job satisfaction is fully mediated by work overload, and that P–O fit negatively moderates HPWS-work overload and HPWS-job satisfaction relationships. These results shed new light on how HPWS impacts employee outcomes and practical implications for managers are discussed.

Drawing on conservation of resources and signaling theories, this research aims to develop a cross-level serial mediation model of branch-level predictors of frontline employees' service performance. Specifically, we examined whether the service-oriented human resource practices bundle (SO-HRP bundle) affects frontline employees' service performance via person–environment fit (P–E fit) and work engagement. Based on a sample of 327 employees and their supervisors across 70 branches of two service corporations in Taiwan, it was found, first, that the SO-HRP bundle and work engagement have a significant positive relationship; second, that person–organization fit and person–job fit was each positively linked with work engagement; and finally, that the SO-HRP bundle sequentially formed a positive link with frontline employee service performance through P–E fit and work engagement. The findings shine new light on the cross-level serial mediation processes whereby employee service performance is enhanced owing to the SO-HRP bundle.

Based on the fundamental principles of social identity theory, this study examines how inclusive leadership can help build employees' organizational identification, stimulate leader-directed helping behavior, and improve task performance by facilitating insider status and relational coordination. Furthermore, we explored how these relationships are conditional on the synergy diversity climate in a moderated mediation model. We collected temporally segregated data (n = 300) from employees in diverse workforces at three time intervals with a 2-week gap between intervals. The results support the indirect effects of inclusive leadership on employee outcomes through the development of perceived insider status and relational coordination. Additionally, these indirect effects are more pronounced at higher levels of a synergy diversity climate. In conclusion, our study offers critical insights into the diversity and leadership literature by answering why and under what conditions an inclusive leader can generate favorable employee outcomes.

This paper examines the influence of risks on alliance governance modes in high-tech industries. The extant literature has devoted little attention to the preferred governance mode based on the risks surrounding alliances. In this paper, we examine why risks are key factors in the alliance governance decision and investigate the choice of alliance governance mode in high-tech industries. Hypotheses are formulated based on risk perspectives; these hypotheses are empirically tested using data on 3,228 alliance records generated over the past 5 years in high-tech industries. The results suggest that risk perspectives provide an effective rationale for choosing an alliance governance mode in a high-tech industry. In the conclusion, we discuss critical issues in the current debates on predicting alliance governance modes.

Emerging empirical evidence has noted that multimarket firms may not always behave in ways that are consistent with their multimarket positions. Assuming multimarket ties between firms exists that are sufficient to permit tacit agreement among them to refrain from aggressive competition, we describe how additional factors are likely to affect the decision of managers of multimarket firms to abide by such an agreement. In particular, we focus on factors that are likely to make the negative consequences of violating a tacit agreement of mutual forbearance more salient and those that encourage managers to direct their firms to behave in more cooperative ways.