Organizational Psychology

It can be argued that the successful management of change is crucial to any organisation in order to survive and succeed in the present highly competitive and continuously evolving business environment. However, theories and approaches to change management currently available to academics and practitioners are often contradictory, mostly lacking empirical evidence and supported by unchallenged hypotheses concerning the nature of contemporary organisational change management. The purpose of this article is, therefore, to provide a critical review of some of the main theories and approaches to organisational change management as an important first step towards constructing a new framework for managing change. The article concludes with recommendations for further research.

The social identity approach (comprising social identity theory and self-categorization theory) is a highly influential theory of group processes and intergroup relations, having redefined how we think about numerous group-mediated phenomena. Since its emergence in the early 1970s, the social identity approach has been elaborated, re-interpreted, and occasionally misinterpreted. The goal of this paper is to provide a critical, historical review of how thinking and research within the social identity approach has evolved. The core principles of the theories are reviewed and discussed, and their effect on the field assessed. Strengths and limitations of the approach are discussed, with an eye to future developments.

Despite of the importance of trust across multiple levels in organizations, extant reviews have focused predominantly on trust at the individual level. A systematic review of trust research across levels and trust referents is sorely needed to synthesize the growing number of both micro and macro studies on this topic. Moreover, as trust is a linchpin for divergent areas, such as negotiation, leadership, team processes, human resource management, organizational change, entrepreneurship, and strategic alliances, a multilevel-multireferent review of trust can facilitate integration in the field of organizational sciences. In this review, we adopt a levels of analysis approach to organize the research on trust between 2000 and 2011 in multiple referents that include interpersonal, teams, and organizations at the individual, team, and organizational levels and analyze the similarities and differences in antecedents, consequences, and theoretical perspectives dominant at each level. Building on this foundation, we further identify the current strengths, weaknesses, and research gaps, offer recommendations for integration across levels and referents, and discuss lingering questions that research so far has overlooked. In doing so, our review offers a systematic and comprehensive view of the current state of the trust literature in organizational sciences and provides a blueprint for future research.

With a diverse sample (N = 231 paired responses) of employees from various organizations in Pakistan, the authors tested for the main effects of perceived organizational politics and psychological capital on turnover intentions, job satisfaction, and supervisor-rated job performance. They also examined the moderating influence of psychological capital in the politics–outcomes relationships. Results provided good support for the proposed hypotheses. While perceived organizational politics was associated with all outcomes, psychological capital had a significant relationship with job satisfaction and supervisor-rated performance only. As hypothesized, the negative relationship of perceived organizational politics with job satisfaction and supervisor-rated performance was weaker when psychological capital was high. However, the result for turnover intentions was counter to expectations where the politics–turnover intention relationship was stronger when psychological capital was high.

Improving student achievement through building teacher capacity is a current focus of schools and districts in many countries. While studies suggest the importance of teacher collaboration for increased teacher capacity and student achievement, there is limited empirical evidence on the topic. This study examined teacher collaboration networks and their relationship to student achievement through teachers’ collective efficacy beliefs. Data were collected from 53 Dutch elementary schools. Using social network analysis and multiple regression we analyzed teacher survey and student achievement data. Findings indicate that well-connected teacher networks were associated with strong teacher collective efficacy, which in turn supported student achievement.

This article presents a review of the recent literature on change management in public organisations and sets out to explore the extent to which this literature has responded to earlier critiques regarding the lack of (public) contextual factors. The review includes 133 articles published on this topic in the period from 2000 to 2010. The articles are analyzed based on the themes of the context, content, process, outcome and leadership of change. We identified whether the articles referred to different orders of change, as well as their employed methods and theory. Our findings concentrate on the lack of detail on change processes and outcomes and the gap between the common theories used to study change. We propose an agenda for the study of change management in public organisations that focuses on its complex nature by building theoretical bridges and performing more in-depth empirical and comparative studies on change processes.

"Throughout the world, educational policy-makers, practitioners and scholars have acknowledged the importance of principal leadership in the generation and implementation of innovations.  In many studies, transformational leadership has emerged as a promising approach in response to increasing demands to develop and implement innovations in schools.  While research has also suggested that having access to leaders with expertise can significantly stimulate innovation, the link between transformational leadership and principals’ social network position has not yet been extensively studied. The goal of the study was to investigate the relationship between principals’ positions in their schools’ social networks in combination with transformational leadership and schools’ innovative climate. It was conducted among 702 teachers and 51 principals in 51 elementary schools in a large educational system in the Netherlands. Using social network analysis and multilevel analysis, we analyzed a quantitative questionnaire with social network questions on work related and personal advice and Likert-type scales for transformational leadership and innovative climate.
Findings indicated that transformational leadership was positively associated with schools’ innovative climate.  Principals’ social network position, in terms of centrality, was also related to schools’ innovative climate.  The more principals were sought for professional and personal advice, and the more closely connected they were to their teachers, the more willing teachers were to invest in change and the creation of new knowledge and practices.  Moreover, work related closeness centrality was found to mediate the relationship between transformational leadership and innovative climate.  Implications of the study are discussed."

In 4 experiments, the authors investigated whether race is perceived to be part of the business leader prototype and, if so, whether it could explain differences in evaluations of White and non-White leaders. The first 2 studies revealed that “being White” is perceived to be an attribute of the business leader prototype, where participants assumed that business leaders more than nonleaders were White, and this inference occurred regardless of base rates about the organization’s racial composition (Study 1), the racial composition of organizational roles, the business industry, and the types of racial minority groups in the organization (Study 2). The final 2 studies revealed that a leader categorization explanation could best account for differences in White and non-White leader evaluations, where White targets were evaluated as more effective leaders (Study 3) and as having more leadership potential (Study 4), but only when the leader had recently been given credit for organizational success, consistent with the prediction that leader prototypes are more likely to be used when they confirm and reinforce individualized information about a leader’s performance. The results demonstrate a connection between leader race and leadership categorization.

This study investigates the prevalence of the four types of destructive leadership behaviour in the destructive and constructive leadership behaviour model, in a representative sample of the Norwegian workforce. The study employs two estimation methods: the operational classification method (OCM) and latent class cluster (LCC) analysis. The total prevalence of destructive leadership behaviour varied from 33.5% (OCM) to 61% (LCC), indicating that destructive leadership is not an anomaly. Destructive leadership comes in many shapes and forms, with passive forms prevailing over more active ones. The results showed that laissez-faire leadership behaviour was the most prevalent destructive leadership behaviour, followed by supportive–disloyal leadership and derailed leadership, while tyrannical leadership behaviour was the least prevalent destructive leadership behaviour. Furthermore, many leaders display constructive as well as destructive behaviours, indicating that leadership is not either constructive or destructive. The study contributes to a broader theoretical perspective
on what must be seen as typical behaviour among leaders.

This study tested a model of survivor reactions to reorganization, which incorporated multiple predictors and consequences of procedural, interpersonal, and informational justice. The 3 justice types had different correlates: all 4 antecedents (employee input, victim support, implementation, and communication quality) predicted interpersonal fairness, implementation and communication quality were associated with informational fairness, and employee input was the sole predictor of procedural justice. Procedural justice was strongly related to all 4 outcome variables, and interpersonal and informational justice added unique variance to the prediction of trust in management. The reorganization effort was still predictive of employee outcomes, although primarily through procedural justice approximately 1 year after its completion.

The theory of separation assumes, with provocation, that an organization cannot reconcile profits and social function. Organizations can reconcile these two, apparently contrasting, missions, by considering emotions, especially moral emotions, to create a genuine motivation for focusing on goals beyond simple economic earnings and protecting organizations or groups of people from dysfunctional attitudes and behaviors, as well as considering the important role of the stakeholder accountability. Using the PRISMA method, we created a review of records using keywords relating to a socioemotional value within organizations, with a particular focus on the last 20 years. We used the SCOPUS database and, after removing irrelevant records, we used the VOSviewer tool to create a cluster map of different areas in this topic. Some records cite the socio-emotional value that is related to organizational and employee suffering, while other articles consider it a positive factor that improves performance and prevents problems in organizations.

"This two-wave (16-month lag) Belgian panel study is one of the first to test theory-driven hypotheses on the relations between job resources, work engagement, and actual turnover across time. The study focuses on three groups: stayers, workers who have obtained promotions (‘‘promotion makers’’), and external job movers. In line with the Job Demands-Resources model, we hypothesized normal crosslagged effects of job resources on work engagement for stayers. Based on broaden-and-build theory, a reversed causal effect of work engagement on job resources was predicted for the job changers. Additionally, we examined whether the changes in the job change groups matched the refuge hypothesis (that less engaged workers change to jobs providing more resources) or the positive gain hypothesis (that
engaged workers get promoted to jobs having even more resources). The results partially supported our hypotheses. We found that low work engagement, low job autonomy, and low departmental resources predicted actual transfer to another company. Furthermore, for stayers we found positive effects of job autonomy on work engagement, but also reversed causal effects. For external movers and promotion
makers the expected reversed causal effects of work engagement were found. The across time mean changes support the positive gain hypothesis for promotion makers, and the refuge hypothesis for external movers."

Previous research suggests that employee job crafting is positively related to job performance through employee work engagement. The present study expands this individual-level perspective to the team level by hypothesizing that team job crafting relates positively to team performance through team work engagement. In addition, on the basis of social psychological theories about norms, modeling, and emotional contagion in groups, we hypothesize that team job crafting relates to individual performance through (a) individual job crafting and individual work engagement; and (b) team work engagement and individual work engagement. Data was collected among 525 individuals working in 54 teams that provided occupational health services. The results largely supported the hypotheses. Specifically, team job crafting was associated with individual performance via the hypothesized sequential mediation paths. The practical implications of the study are discussed and we conclude that job crafting can be simultaneously used at the team and individual level to improve job performance.

Why do employees who experience abusive supervision retaliate against the organization? We apply
organizational support theory to propose that employees hold the organization partly responsible for
abusive supervision. Depending on the extent to which employees identify the supervisor with the
organization (i.e., supervisor’s organizational embodiment), we expected abusive supervision to be
associated with low perceived organizational support (POS) and consequently with retribution against the
organization. Across 3 samples, we found that abusive supervision was associated with decreased POS
as moderated by supervisor’s organizational embodiment. In turn, reduced POS was related to heightened
counterproductive work behavior directed against the organization and lowered in-role and extra-role
performance. These findings suggest that employees partly attribute abusive supervision to negative
valuation by the organization and, consequently, behave negatively toward and withhold positive
contributions to it.

This study investigates the prevalence of exposure to workplace bullying in a representative sample of 2539 Norwegian employees utilizing different measurement and estimation methods. The prevalence of workplace bullying varied from 2 to 14.3% depending on method of measurement and estimation.
Latent class cluster analysis is concluded to give the most reliable estimate (6.8%). Compared to a similar Norwegian study published in 1996, the prevalence of self-reported victimization from bullying is considerably reduced; from 8.6% in the early 1990s to 4.6% in 2005. In the 1996 study,4.6% labelled themselves as victims of severe bullying, the corresponding
number being 2% in 2005.

Change agents often play significant roles in initiating, managing or implementing change in organizations. Yet these roles are invariably exaggerated or misrepresented by one-dimensional models that ignore the full complexity and scope of change agent roles. Following a review and theoretical clarification of some of the literature and empirical research on change agency, a new fourfold classification of change agents is proposed, covering leadership, management, consultancy, and team models. The four models reaffirm the significance of the multifaceted and complex roles change agents perform in organizational change, while underlining the importance of conceiving change interventions within organizations as processes that need to be coordinated and effectively managed.

Mindfulness has grown from an obscure subject to an immensely popular topic that is associated with numerous performance, health, and well-being benefits in organizations. However, this growth in popularity has generated a number of criticisms of mindfulness and a rather piecemeal approach to organizational research and practice on the subject. To advance both investigation and application, the present paper applies The Balance Framework to serve as an integrative scaffolding for considering mindfulness in organizations, helping to address some of the criticisms leveled against it. The Balance Framework specifies five forms of balance: 1) balance as tempered view, 2) balance as mid-range, 3) balance as complementarity, 4) balance as contextual sensitivity, and 5) balance among different levels of consciousness. Each form is applied to mindfulness at work with a discussion of relevant conceptual issues in addition to implications for research and practice. Plain Language Summary In o...

Nurses spend more time with patients than do any other health care providers, and patient outcomes are affected by nursing care quality. Thus, improvements in patient safety can be achieved by improving nurse performance. We review the literature on nursing performance, including cognitive, physical, and organizational factors that affect such performance, focusing on research studies that reported original data from nurse participants. Our review indicates that the nurse’s work system often does not accommodate human limits and capabilities and that nurses work under cognitive, perceptual, and physical overloads. Specifically, nurses engage in multiple tasks under cognitive load and frequent interruptions, and they encounter insufficient lighting, illegible handwriting, and poorly designed labels. They spend a substantial amount of their time walking, work long shifts, and experience a high rate of musculoskeletal disorders. Research is overdue in the areas of cognitive processes in nursing, effects of interruptions on nursing performance, communications during patient handoffs, and situation awareness in nursing. Human factors and ergonomics (HF/E) professionals must play a key role in the redesign of the nurses’ work system to determine how overloads can be reduced and how the limits and capabilities of performance can be accommodated. Collaboration between nurses and HF/E specialists is essential to improve nursing performance and patient safety.

KEYWORDS: Healthcare, human factors, ergonomics, nursing, work, tasks, cognition, cognitive load, interruptions, occupational health, performance, complexity theory, complex adaptive system, situational awareness, nursing shortage, patient safety, organizational behavior, organizational development, sentinel event, adverse event, error, mistake; slip, lapse, human resource management.

This article introduces the concept of mindfulness meditation as an on-the-spot intervention to be used in specific workplace situations. It presents a model of when, why, and how on-the-spot mindfulness meditation is likely to be helpful or harmful for aspects of job performance. The article begins with a brief review of the mindfulness literature and a rationale for why mindfulness could be used on-the-spot in the workplace. It then delineates consequences of on-the-spot mindfulness interventions on four aspects of job performance - escalation of commitment, counterproductive work behaviors, negotiation performance, and task motivation. The article closes with three necessary conditions for an on-the-spot mindfulness intervention to be effectively used, as well as suggestions for how organizations, managers, and employees can facilitate the fulfillment of these necessary conditions. Possible negative consequences of mindfulness and which types of meditation to use are considered. Taken together, these arguments deepen our understanding of state mindfulness and introduce a new manner in which mindfulness can be used in the workplace.

Socio-technical systems thinking has predominantly been applied to the domains of new technology and work design over the past 60 years. Whilst it has made an impact, we argue that we need to be braver, encouraging the approach to evolve and extend its reach. In particular, we need to: extend our conceptualization of what constitutes a system; apply our thinking to a much wider range of complex problems and global challenges; and engage in more predictive work. To illustrate our agenda in novel domains, we provide examples of socio-technical perspectives on the management of crowd events and environmental sustainability. We also outline a research and development agenda to take the area forward.

There is an increasing focus on improving the pro-environmental attitudes, behaviour and habits of individuals, whether at home, in education, travelling, shopping or in the workplace. This article focuses on the workplace by conducting a multi-disciplinary literature review of research that has examined the influence of organization-based behaviour change initiatives. The review includes only research evidence that measured actual environmental performance (e.g. energy use) rather than solely using self-reported methods (e.g. questionnaires). The authors develop an 'employee pro-environmental behaviour' (e-PEB) framework, which contains individual, group, organizational and contextual factors that have predictive relevance across different behaviours and organizations. The review shows that the strongest predictors are environmental awareness, performance feedback, financial incentives, environmental infrastructure, management support and training. A key finding from this review is that attitude change is not necessarily a pre-requisite for behaviour change in the workplace.

We propose that hierarchy is such a prevalent form of social organization because it is functionally adaptive and enhances a group's chances of survival and success. We identify five ways in which hierarchy facilitates organizational success. Hierarchy (a) creates a psychologically rewarding environment; (b) motivates performance through hierarchy-related incentives; (c) capitalizes on the complementary psychological effects of having versus lacking power; (d) supports division of labor, and, as a result, coordination; and (e) reduces conflict and enhances voluntary cooperation. Overall, we specify a causal model linking organizational structure (hierarchy), processes (motivation, leadership, coordination, and cooperation) and outcomes (performance). We also discuss three variables that moderate the need for and acceptance of hierarchy-(a) the level of task interdependence; (b) the legitimacy of hierarchical differentiation; and (c) the alignment of different bases of hierarchy-and link them to the mediating processes through which hierarchy facilitates organizational success.

Levels of trust in a social relationship can fluctuate over time. However, few studies have directly examined the different trust decisions involved as the relationship evolves and delineated the various trust patterns that arise from these decisions. Our analysis examined the chief concerns in trust decisions during the phases of trust formation, dissolution, and restoration. These trust decisions across phases give rise to trust profiles, which have not been identified in the literature before. We focused on how individual and social contextual factors affect these patterns. Our model highlights the need to consider multiple trust phases both theoretically and empirically to offer a more holistic understanding of how trust unfolds in social relationships.

"The concept of improvisation has become increasingly popular in the discourse of organizational theory. This paper explores the several aspects of improvisation, in the context of musical, organizational, and everyday activities, in order to address some of the philosophical issues relevant to this emerging interest. It addresses, for instance, the way the term improvisation has fallen into disrepute, referring to something that is, ultimately, a pale and messy copy of the ‘correct’ way. It argues that in western music, this can be traced to the modernist valorization of the order provided by a written musical score, perfectly representing the composer’s wishes, and the concomitant devalorization of the spontaneity and creativity of musicians who, before approximately 1800, improvised a substantial amount of their performances. Connections are made between the modernist concept of organization and postmodern or complexity-based approaches that stress creativity as an emergent property of the relationship between order and disorder. It concludes by suggesting that the study of improvisation demands a profound immersion into (inter-)subjectivity, emotions, time, aesthetics, performance, and social creativity, none of which have traditionally been the focus of organization and management studies, or the social sciences in general."

Emotional labor (EL) is the process by which employees manage their true feelings in order to express organizationally desired emotional displays. We develop and test components of an organizing framework for emotional labor wherein various aspects of emotional labor are understood through the underlying discordance versus congruence in felt versus displayed emotions. Meta-analytic results from 109 independent studies (total N ¼ 36,619) demonstrate that discordant emotional labor states are associated with a range of harmful consequences (health-, attitudinal-, and performance-related), whereas congruent emotional labor states do not incur these harmful consequences. We identify different patterns of worker-and work-related correlates on the basis of emotional discordance-congruence, as well as interesting occupational differences in these relationships. Lastly, we find discordant forms of emotional labor partially mediate the effects of organizational display rules on burnout, whereas congruent states do not mediate this relationship.

Emotion is a critical but relatively unexplored dimension of sensemaking in organizations. Existing models of sensemaking tend to ignore the role of emotion or portray it as an impediment. To address this problem, we explore the role that felt emotion plays in three stages of individual sensemaking in organizations. First, we examine emotion's role in mediating the relationship between unexpected events and the onset of sensemaking processes. We argue that emotion signals the need for and provides the energy that fuels sensemaking, and that different kinds of emotions are more and less likely to play these roles. Second, we explore the role of emotion in shaping sensemaking processes, focusing on how emotions make sensemaking a more solitary or more interpersonal process, and a more generative or more integrative process. Third, we argue that sensemakers' felt emotion plays an important role in concluding sensemaking, particularly through its effect on the plausibility of sensemaking accounts.

M. Weber (1947) proposed that exposure to Calvinist Protestantism is associated with limited attention to relational concerns in work settings. Two experiments provide support for this proposition. Study 1 showed that Protestant European Americans raised in traditions of Calvinism were less attentive to affect in spoken words when primed with a work context relative to a nonwork context, and to participants raised as Catholics in either context. Study 2 used an unconscious mimicry paradigm to measure relational focus and showed that within a work setting, male Protestants mimicked a confederate's foot shaking less than male non-Protestants and women in either group. Within a nonwork setting, male Protestants mimicked more and did not differ from male non-Protestants. Women showed greater mimicry than men.

Job seeking is an important aspect throughout people's careers. Extant theory and research has focused on one particular dimension of job search, that is, intensity/effort (i.e., job search quantity), posing that intensity/effort importantly affects employment success. The present conceptual paper extends job search theory by arguing for the importance of job search quality in explaining job search and employment success. We conceptualize job search quality as consisting of process quality and product/behavior quality, and propose that high-quality job search products/behaviors are more likely with a high-quality job search process. A four-phased cyclical self-regulatory model is presented, specifying the components of job search process quality. We build theory regarding the interrelations between quality components, the antecedents and outcomes of job search quality, and the moderators of these relations. This theory offers new and more detailed explanations for previous findings, directions for future research, and practical guidelines regarding (re)employment success and services.

"Corruption has become one of the most popular topics in the social scientific disciplines. However, there is a lack of interdisciplinary communication about corruption. Models developed by different
academic disciplines are often isolated from each other. The purpose of this paper is to review several major approaches to corruption and draw them closer to each other. Most studies of corruption fall
into three major categories: (i) rational-actor models where corruption is viewed as resulting from cost/benefit analysis of individual actors; (ii) structural models that focus on external forces that determine corruption; and (iii) relational models that emphasize social interactions and networks among corrupt actors. Focusing on actors’ behavior and the social context, this article explains corruption concepts taken from sociology, economics, organization studies, political science, social anthropology, and social psychology."

Leaders' behaviors manifesting ability, integrity and benevolence play a central role in enhancing followers' trust in the leader. The current paper examines the relative impact of these leader behaviors with respect to two unexplored issues: the differences between the building and erosion of subordinates' trust in their leader, and the differences between situations in which the subordinate are highly vulnerable or less vulnerable as a result of the leader's actions. On the basis of content analysis of 988 critical incidents collected from 733 cadets in officers training courses, we compared the relative importance of the different leadership behaviors in trust-building versus trust-erosion incidents and in situations varying in their magnitude of followers' vulnerability. The findings show that behaviors reflecting leader ability and integrity were more salient in trust-erosion incidents and that behaviors reflecting leader benevolence were more salient in trust-building incidents. Greater subordinate vulnerability increased the importance of behaviors reflecting leader integrity or ability (depending on the nature of the vulnerability) compared to behaviors reflecting the leader's benevolence, and vulnerability increased the likelihood that trust would be eroded. We discuss the implications of these findings for both theory and practice.

In an attempt to explain why the gender gap in leadership positions persists, we propose a model centered on legitimacy. When women hold powerful positions, they have a harder time than men eliciting respect and admiration (i.e., status) from subordinates. As a result, female power-holders are seen as less legitimate than male power-holders. Unless they are able to legitimize their role, relative illegitimacy will prompt a variety of consequences such as more negative subordinate behavior and reduced cooperation when the leader is a woman. Subordinate rejection will likely put female leaders in a precarious mindset, and trigger negative responses toward subordinates; such behavior can confirm negative expectations of female leaders and further undermine female authority in a self-reinforcing cycle of illegitimacy. Leader or organizational features that enhance status attributions and/or lower subordinates' perceptions of power differentials may increase legitimacy for women in leadership roles.

Purpose – Achieving intergenerational interaction and avoiding conflict is becoming increasingly difficult in a workplace populated by three generations – Baby Boomers, Generation X-ers and Generation Y-ers. This paper presents a model and proposes HR solutions towards achieving co-operative generational interaction.

Design/methodology/approach – This paper adapts Park’s theory of race relations to explain the distinctiveness of generational work groups and the challenges and opportunities that these groups present when interacting in organisations. Rashford and Coghlan’s cycle of organisational change, based on the Kubler-Ross grief cycle, is then mapped onto Park’s race relations cycle in order to link generational interaction to emotional reactions to change over time.

Findings – The paper sets out a research agenda for examining how generations interact in the workplace. It acknowledges the limitations of using Park’s theory of race relations, in particular the criticisms levelled at assimilationist approaches.

Originality/value – The paper provides an alternative viewpoint for examining how generations co-exist and interact and shows how HR solutions can respond to the needs of different generations.

The primary aim of the current paper is to explore ways in which organizations can benefit from virtual environments to expand their social and professional spheres. Applying the theory of third places to virtual worlds, our conceptual model incorporates practical organizational affordances within three composite dimensions. First, we propose that through their unique, supportive and neutral environments, virtual worlds may reduce the prevalence of social hierarchies, via decreasing the emphasis on predetermined ranks, stereotypes, and cultural or geographic variation. Second, we posit that via encouraging open communication within the form of synchronous and real-time interactions, virtual worlds enable efficient teamwork and collaborative learning. Finally, we emphasize that these friendly, secure, and supportive environments may contribute to the reduction of certain work-related stressors, and in turn promote professional development activities. We conclude by discussing practical implications and future research directions.

Through a number of comprehensive reviews, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) has recommended that healthcare organizations develop safety cultures in order to align delivery system processes with the workforce requirements to improve patient outcomes. Until health systems can provide safer care environments, patients remain at risk for suboptimal care and adverse outcomes. Health science researchers have begun to explore how safety cultures might act as an essential system feature to improve organizational outcomes. Since safety cultures are established via modification in employee safety perspective and work behavior, human resource professionals need to contribute to this developing organizational domain. The IOM indicates individual employee behaviors cumulatively provide the primary antecedent for organizational safety and quality outcomes. Yet, many safety culture scholars indicate the concept is neither theoretically defined nor consistently applied and researched as the terms safety culture, safety climate, and safety attitude are interchangeably used to represent the same concept. As such, this paper examines the intersection of organizational culture and healthcare safety by analyzing the theoretical underpinnings of safety culture, exploring the constructs for measurement, and assessing the current state of safety culture research. Safety culture draws from the theoretical perspectives of sociology (represented by Normal Accident Theory), organizational psychology (represented by High Reliability Theory), and human factors (represented by the aviation framework). By understanding not only the origins, but also the empirical safety culture research and the associated intervention initiatives, healthcare professionals can design appropriate human resource strategies to address the system characteristics that adversely affect patient outcomes. Increased emphasis on human resource management research is particularly important to the development of safety cultures. This paper contributes to the existing healthcare literature by providing the first comprehensive critical analysis of the theory, research, and practice that comprise contemporary safety culture science.

KEYWORDS: Safety culture, safety climate, safety attitude, safety industry, patient safety, high reliability theory, normal accident theory, complexity theory, complex adaptive system, human factors, organizational psychology, organizational sociology, human resource management, strategic human resource management, organizational behavior, organizational development, leadership, sentinel event, adverse event, errors, mistakes, Institute of Medicine, Charles Perrow, James Reason.

This article presents an overview of the literature on daily fluctuations in work engagement. Daily work engagement is a state of vigor, dedication, and absorption that is predictive of important organizational outcomes, including job performance. After briefly discussing enduring work engagement, the advantages of diary research are discussed, as well as the concept and measurement of daily work engagement. The research evidence shows that fluctuations in work engagement are a function of the changes in daily job and personal resources. Particularly on the days that employees have access to many resources, they are able to cope well with their daily job demands (e.g., work pressure, negative events), and likely interpret these demands as challenges. Furthermore, the literature review shows that on the days employees have sufficient levels of job control, they proactively try to optimize their work environment in order to stay engaged. This proactive behavior is called job crafting and predicts momentary and daily work engagement. An important additional finding is that daily engagement has a reciprocal relationship with daily recovery. On the days employees recover well, they feel more engaged; and engagement during the day is predictive of subsequent recovery. Finding the daily balance between engagement while at work and detachment while at home seems the key to enduring work engagement.

n this study, we conceptualized a framework capturing recurring troublesome elements of mental states such as depression and general anxiety, assessing them by applying standard clinical inventory. The study explores the extent to which danger control and fear control under the Extended Parallel Processing Model (EPPM) threat impact job insecurity, with uncertainty phenomenon causing afflicting effect on the experiential nature of depression heightened by anxiety. With the aim to explore the job insecurity relationship with anxiety and depression, and measure the impact of EPPM threat, an empirical study was conducted in the United States on a sample of 347 white collar employees. Demographic data, EPPM threat, job insecurity, anxiety, and depression data were collected via a standardized questionnaire during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. The questionnaire consisting of multi-item scales was distributed online. All the scale items were evaluated on a 5-point Likert scale. SEM software AMOS version 23 was used to perform confirmatory factor analysis with maximum likelihood estimation. In the structural model, relationships between the threat of COVID-19, job insecurity, anxiety, and depression were assessed. The findings of the study suggest that job insecurity has a significant impact on depression and anxiety, whereas the threat of COVID-19 has a significant impact on depression. Mediating effects of job insecurity and EPPM threat impact on anxiety were not established in the study. The study contributes to the apprehension of the repercussions of major environmental disruptions on normal human functioning, and it investigates the effects of self-reported protective behaviors on risk perception. The study also explains the underlying mechanisms of coping behavior as possible antecedents to mental disorders. When subjected to stressful events, heightened psychological arousal causes physical and psychological challenges of affected employees to manifest as behavioral issues.

The basic premise of Transformative Leadership is that everyone can lead, and that particularly in this transformative moment, everybody contributes to, and in fact co-creates, the world we live in, whether conscious of their agency or not. Every choice, every action, every discussion, every interaction is a reflection of how we are leading our own lives. Transformative Leadership invites everybody to ask what kind of a world they are creating through their thoughts, beliefs, actions and interactions. Transformative leadership is, at its heart, a participatory process of creative collaboration and transformation for mutual benefit. At the core of Transformative Leadership are 4 orienting concepts, Ways of Being, Relating, Knowing, and Doing, that assist in the framing and development of our understanding of the world, and our own approach to living and leading.

In the public administration discipline, there have been a number of important studies on leadership. However, here, scholarly inquiry still lags behind related disciplines such as psychology and business administration. This article contributes by analyzing the role public leaders can play in making work more meaningful for their employees, which in turn positively influences employees’ job outcomes. More specifically, it analyzes the mediating role of work meaningfulness in the relationships between Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) and organizational commitment, work effort, and work-to-family enrichment. Samples from education, healthcare, and local government are used. Results show firstly that leadership strongly influences work meaningfulness, which in turn influences job outcomes. Secondly, it was found that the impact and extent of leadership and work meaningfulness are higher in healthcare and education than in local government. The results emphasize the importance of leadership and meaningful work in the public sector.

Similar to the United States, governmental efforts to improve education in the Netherlands are focused on innovation and the development of collaborative structures to support the generation of new knowledge.  However, empirical evidence of the relationship between social linkages and innovation in education is scarce.
The aim of the study was to examine the impact of social network structure on schools’ collective orientation towards innovation, as mediated by collective involvement in decision-making.
This article reports on a study among 775 educators in 53 elementary schools in a large educational system in the Netherlands.
A quantitative survey using Likert-type scales and social network questions on work-related and personal advice was analyzed using social network analysis and multiple regression analyses.
Findings indicated that the more densely connected teachers were in regard to work related and personal advice, the more they perceived their schools’ climate to be supportive of innovation.  Highly dense work-related network structures also typified teams that perceived strong teacher involvement in decision-making.  Moreover, results suggested that the positive relationship between density of work-related advice networks and innovation-supportive school climate could be partially explained by increased shared decision-making.  Implications of the study for teachers, organizations, leadership, and policy are discussed.

Individuals' willingness to remain in their organizations contributes to workforce stability and organizational effectiveness. Working from the notion that different leadership styles encourage followers to self-regulate in distinct ways, we propose regulatory fit between leadership styles and followers' self-regulatory preferences may reduce followers' turnover intentions. Corroborating our reasoning, a survey study showed transformational leadership reduced turnover intentions for highly promotion-focused followers, whereas transactional leadership reduced turnover intentions for highly prevention-focused followers. Thus, tailoring leadership to followers' self-regulatory preferences may contribute to workforce stability and organizational effectiveness.