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 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.

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 study examines the organization impression management (OIM) tactics used in agri-food cooperatives to communicate their intentions toward sustainable development. Based on content analysis of the chairperson and CEO statements of 14 agri-foods cooperatives from six years' annual reports, this study sheds light on the role of member-owned firms in shifts toward realizing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The paper proposes multistakeholder OIM tactics. These insights about sustainable development extend knowledge of how senior managers communicate their intentions in multistakeholder situations, which include shareholders, suppliers, customers, and local communities. This study contributes to the literature on organizational impression management and member-owned firms. Managerial implications are also outlined.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The researchers use established measures of job satisfaction (JS) and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) to analyze data obtained from nurses in an Australian hospital (N = 573), and to discuss implications for human resource management. In this study the researchers seek to understand the links between nurses' JS, OCB and their perceptions of the values espoused by the organization. Changes in JS and OCB as length of service increases are also examined. Findings suggest that JS and OCB are both significant predictors of nurses' perceptions of organizational values. The findings also suggest that nurses more readily internalize organizational values when levels of JS and OCB are high. A further finding is that the tendency to engage in OCB declines significantly as length of service increases.

How appropriate is the MBA as the major vehicle for management education in Australia as we enter this new century? This question is explored from two perspectives. First, the implications of the changing social, economic and political context of management education, particularly the emerging needs for a sustainable and reflexive society. The second perspective will explore the recent debates around epistemology and their potentially important implications for related curriculum design issues. Assumptions about the nature of knowledge dominant in the 1960s formed the very rationale behind the design. At this time the assumption that knowledge was cumulative and each discipline had an uncontested knowledge, which could be taught in foundational subjects was central to the MBA's development. We question the ability of such subjects to capture the diversity of the disciplines they seek to represent and whether this design is the best way to develop graduates with the ability for reflexivity in action, who can broach different worldviews and have skills that can negotiate the transformations required of corporate Australia. The MBA is at the crossroads - can it regenerate through an incremental changing of curricula, to incorporate the active engagement of students with these issues? Or do we acknowledge the contested nature of knowledge creation and that the MBA is fundamentally a child of modernism which is no longer appropriate, and create a new holistic and integrated curriculum which is separate from the wide range of assumptions that currently underpin the MBA.

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.

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.

We argue that social support can be helpful or hurtful in the context of performance outcomes for employees experiencing co-worker exclusion. We contend that employees' perceptions of co-worker exclusion are negatively associated with task performance and citizenship, and positively associated with interpersonal deviance. We further contend that whether social support strengthens or weakens the negative performance outcomes of co-worker exclusion depends on whether the source of social support is from co-workers or family and friends. Using data obtained from 135 supervisor–subordinate dyads across various occupational positions, we find that co-worker support is hurtful, whereas family and friends support is helpful. We also find a three-way interaction: task performance suffers most when employees who feel highly excluded also perceive higher co-worker support and lower family and friends support. These results suggest a need for a more nuanced view of social exchange/support, and build our knowledge about ambivalent relationships.