Mission impossible? Effects of crisis,leader and follower strain on health-oriented leadership

Previous studies underline positive effects of health-oriented leadership for follower well-being. However, it is not clear whether and to what extent situational and personal factors influence health-oriented leadership behavior towards employees (i.e., staff care). We examine the effect of crises and the moderating role of strain for the relationship between strain and staff care in two studies. The first study investigated main and interactive effects of crisis and leader strain on staff care in a cross-sectional survey (N = 201). To test for causality, we complemented our findings with an experimental vignette study (N = 169) and extended our findings with regard to the influence of follower strain. As expected, results of both studies showed negative effects of crisis and leader strain on staff care. Furthermore, crisis effects on staff care were contingent on both leader strain (Study 1 and 2) and follower strain (Study 2): While leader strain strengthened the negative relationships between crisis and staff care, follower strain served as a buffer. These findings support the assumption that staff care is at risk in crises particularly when leaders are strained. However, it is a positive finding that staff care is still feasible on a moderate and relevant level and that leaders respond to follower strain with additional efforts regarding staff care even in crises. The study contributes to the clarification and better understanding of situational contingencies of leadership behavior.     

Occupational stress in universities: staff perceptions of the causes, consequences and moderators of stress

In recent years, the Australian university sector has undergone large-scale organizational change, including restructuring, downsizing and government funding cuts. At the same time, research from across the globe reports an alarming increase in the occupational stress experienced by university staff. We report on the first phase of a longitudinal investigation of occupational stress. A total of 22 focus groups were conducted with a representative sample of 178 academic and general staff from 15 Australian universities. The groups focused on understanding staff 's experience of occupational stress, and perceptions of the sources, consequences and moderators of stress. Both general and academic staff reported a dramatic increase in stress during the previous 5 years. As a group, academic staff reported higher levels of stress than general staff. Five major sources of stress were identified including: insufficient funding and resources; work overload; poor management practice; job insecurity; and insufficient recognition and reward. The majority of groups reported that job-related stress was having a deleterious impact on their professional work and personal welfare. Aspects of the work environment (support from co-workers and management, recognition and achievement, high morale, flexible working conditions), and personal coping strategies (stress management techniques, work/ non-work balance, tight role boundaries and lowering standards), were reported to help staff cope with stress. The findings provide a timely insight into the experience of stress within universities.     

Occupational stress in universities: Staff perceptions of the causes,consequences and moderators of stress

In recent years, the Australian university sector has undergone large-scale organizational change, including restructuring, downsizing and government funding cuts. At the same time, research from across the globe reports an alarming increase in the occupational stress experienced by university staff. We report on the first phase of a longitudinal investigation of occupational stress. A total of 22 focus groups were conducted with a representative sample of 178 academic and general staff from 15 Australian universities. The groups focused on understanding staff 's experience of occupational stress, and perceptions of the sources, consequences and moderators of stress. Both general and academic staff reported a dramatic increase in stress during the previous 5 years. As a group, academic staff reported higher levels of stress than general staff. Five major sources of stress were identified including: insufficient funding and resources; work overload; poor management practice; job insecurity; and insufficient recognition and reward. The majority of groups reported that job-related stress was having a deleterious impact on their professional work and personal welfare. Aspects of the work environment (support from co-workers and management, recognition and achievement, high morale, flexible working conditions), and personal coping strategies (stress management techniques, work/ non-work balance, tight role boundaries and lowering standards), were reported to help staff cope with stress. The findings provide a timely insight into the experience of stress within universities.     

Stress and situation specific coping behaviour in intensive care unit nursing staff

The relationships between situation specific stressors and the coping behaviour of intensive care nursing staff were analysed. The results were discussed with regard to additional data relating to 'contentment with coping' and 'psychosomatic reactivity (FPI)'. It was observed that the majority of stress situations in intensive care are tackled by staff members using active external coping strategies', whereas coping with personal stress involves passive strategies. Relationships between 'contentment with coping', 'psychosomatic reactivity (FPI)' and type of stressor and coping behaviour were found.     

Training perceptions,engagement, and performance: comparing work engagement and personal role engagement

The purpose of this study was to compare two engagement constructs (work engagement and personal role engagement) with regard to their relationship with training perceptions and work role performance behaviours. It was hypothesised that personal role engagement would show incremental validity above that of work engagement at predicting work role performance behaviours and be a stronger mediator of the relationships between training perceptions and such behaviours. Questionnaire data were gathered from 304 full-time working adults in the UK. As predicted, personal role engagement was found to explain additional variance above that of work engagement for task proficiency, task adaptability, and task proactivity behaviours. Moreover, personal role engagement was a stronger mediator of the relationship between training perceptions and task proficiency as well as between training perceptions and task adaptability. Both work engagement and personal role engagement mediated the relationship between training perceptions and task proactivity to a similar degree. The findings suggest that personal role engagement has better practical utility to the human resource development domain than work engagement and indicates that future research may benefit from adopting the personal role engagement construct.     

Becoming who you are.

It's difficult to predict success based only on educational background and career experience, important as they are. More is needed. And one of the aspects that needs to be evaluated is the degree of self-actualization. Self-actualized individuals have worked out their personal issues well enough that their personal life no longer has to intrude into their professional lives and actions. In a word, they are free people. In career terms, self-actualized people are "company people," but not "yes-people." They are executives who have freed themselves to be able to internalize the growth, development, and strategic planning of their organization--because they are able to rise above personal considerations, to shed emotionalism, and see more clearly. Some methods you can use to figure out where you stack up are: Conduct a self-evaluation; identify role models; do what is called "a 360 evaluation."     

The Professional,the Personal,and the Ideal Worker: Pressures and Objectives Shaping the Boundary between Life Domains

Abstract

Both scholarly literature and popular accounts suggest that modern organizational practices have moved toward encouraging employees to “integrate” or blur the boundary between their personal and professional domains, for example, through self-disclosure at work, company-sponsored social activities or providing on-site child care. Concurrently, an ideology underlying U.S. professional norms discourages integration practices such as referencing non-work roles during workplace interactions, expressing emotions in the workplace, and/or displaying non-work-related items in workspaces. In this review, we posit that these two norms firmly coexist because they differentially serve two objectives corresponding to the parallel bodies of research we examine: one addressing boundary management as a tool for handling role responsibilities, and the other considering boundary management as a tool for shaping workplace identity and relationships. Specifically, we posit that segmenting personal and professional domains facilitates the management of role responsibilities, whereas integration is more beneficial for managing workplace identity and relationships. Furthermore, both objectives serve the “ideal worker” imperative of work primacy. We identify key contingencies that help us to further understand existing research findings, and prompt future research directions informing theories for understanding the attractiveness and efficacy of different personal–professional boundary management strategies for both organizations and individuals.     

Strategic adaptation as a partially rational process

Limits to the action of strategic adaptation derive essentially from the temporal and dimensional complexity of the system of the firm. Consequently, a ‘temporal/organizational area decision-making matrix’ has been developed and decisions classified accordingly. Problem-solving approaches adopted in facing complexity and uncertainty appear to be based mainly on the criterion of simplification and on that which ensues of decomposition. Measures currently applied in the process of simplification are examined, including utilization of models. Extra-rational or even irrational elements intervene in the process of strategic adaptation, caused primarily by complexity and by the social-heuristic nature of planning. Basic areas in which extra-rational elements (such as personal opinions, imagination and intuition) play an essential role are singled out and appropriate organizational mechanisms are identified which could assist in attaining the maximum synergic effect from the combined application of rational and extra-rational contributions to planning.     

Who Shall Follow? factors affecting the adoption of succession plans in Taiwan

Succession planning is widely believed to help business organizations with internal resourcing, reduce attrition of the work force caused by job-hopping high-fliers, and prepare qualified candidates for appointment to senior management positions. It is further known that when organizations fail to treat their succession plans as living documents, they may not only threaten their own continuity but also lose the opportunity to revitalize themselves. Even so, succession planning has been slow to take root in traditional Chinese businesses, which have been noted for their informal organization, top-down decision making, and emphasis on personal ties and relationships. However, rapid growth and increasingly tougher competition may force these firms to change their style of management. This study assesses the extent to which formal succession planning has taken hold among Taiwanese business firms, and identifies factors underlying the decision to adopt a formal plan. For those local firms that have not introduced formal planning, it seeks to determine the concerns that have inhibited or prevented them from doing so. Finally, this paper attempts to detect differences that may exist between Chinese- and foreign-owned firms in the tendency to adopt succession plans.     

Development of corporate planning staff

This article considers the problems associated with the development of corporate planning staff in multi-divisional organizations. The author points out that formal planning has grown phenomenally during the last decade and there is a need to consider the development of corporate planning staff to meet the exacting challenges of the job.     

Rollenkonflikte und Stress in hoch kompetitiven Systemen als Coachingthema

For psychological coaching the insurance distribution as an extremely competitive setting still is widely unexploited in Germany. However, the increasing staff shortage in sales in the course of the demographic change creates a growing readiness on the side of the insurer to invest in coaching as a highly personal and practical form of human resources development. The article discusses role conflicts and stress of sales agents as consequences of the systems parameters and the development of social and emotional competencies as tasks for coaching in insurance distribution. The article furthermore points out strategies of intervention that are adjusted to the setting of sale.     

Planning for hospitals: No focus, no strategy

This is a study of the role of long-range planning and strategic management in 400 hospitals in the United States. It examines not only the structural aspects of planning but also investigates how the data base generated through the planning process is actually used in making operating decisions. In addition to a questionnaire survey of 400 hospitals on the structural aspects of planning, 78 personal interviews with functional heads and hospital administrators were conducted to analyse the operational part of the study. The major findings are that the possibilities and constraints of planning are remarkably similar to those of industrial corporations. The linkage of planning with operational decisions was found to be lacking. There were wide divergences in views between the functional heads and the hospital administrators in terms of internal and external activities, and also in performance reward relationship. These divergences are thought to be counter- productive in realizing the strategic focus of cost containment. Implications of the findings are also discussed.     

A MILP model for the long term academic staff size and composition planning in public universities

This paper proposes a model for dealing with the long term staff composition planning in public universities. University academic staff is organized in units (or departments) according to their field of expertize. The staff for each unit is distributed in a set of categories, each one characterized by their teaching hours, cost and other specificities. Besides the use for planning (and updating a plan), the model can be used to assess the impact that different strategies may have on the personnel costs and the structure of a university. The proposed model is formulated generally, so it can be applied to different types of universities attending to their characteristics. The model is applied to a real case and validated by means of a computational experiment considering several scenarios. The analysis is focused on achieving a preferable academic staff composition under service level constraints while also minimizing the associated economic expenditures considering a long term horizon. The results show that the model successes in approaching the staff composition to a previously defined pattern preferable one.     

Production planning and inventory control in a company manufacturing PC parts: A case study

In this paper, we present a case study on the production planning and inventory system in a company manufacturing personal computer (PC) parts. In the case study, the targets are specified for developing a system for production planning and inventory control. The current state of the company is analysed for clarifying the points necessary to achieve the targets. Also, a system based on the analysis is proposed and its effects are estimated.     

Hospital medical director. Documenting roles and responsibilities

Establishing the position of medical director for a hospital entails making a clear exposition of the role of the medical director in relation to the board, the basic administrative structure, and the medical staff. The responsibilities assigned to the medical director in one hospital may differ in more than a minimal manner from those in another institution, and the nature of these relationships may also vary because hospitals differ in their traditions, internal power relationships, and functions. Because of these differences, the need to be precise about roles and responsibilities becomes even more obvious.     

Hospital and medical staff strategic planning: developing an integrated approach

The physician as the principal customer of the hospital is a relatively new concept, indicative of the shift to a more complete market orientation in strategic planning. Although medical staff and medical community dynamics receive increasing attention in strategic planning, much more sophistication is now needed to involve physicians constructively in strategic planning for the hospital and medical staff. While full consonance of physician and hospital plans may be achievable only in a completely integrated delivery system, there is considerable room for improvement in current organizational models.     

The Role of Positive Psychology in Enhancing Satisfaction,Motivation, and Productivity in the Workplace

Abstract

Positive psychology offers scope for enhancing satisfaction, motivation, and productivity in the workplace. Wiegand and Geller (2004, this issue) point to a number of strategies to enhance individuals' success orientation and conclude their discussion with the actively caring model which appears to be a useful means of representing pivotal facets of a positive and supportive workplace climate. The discussion in this article extends some of the concepts presented in their paper, adapts a model of motivation to develop the Occupational Motivation and Engagement Wheel, and also further discusses some particularly key strategies alluded to by Wiegand and Geller. These include a discussion of workplace resilience, authoritarian versus authoritative leadership/management styles, motivating workplace climates, personal bests, staff morale, flow in work, the value individuals attach to tasks and outcomes, and the centrality of relationships in the performance context. The article concludes with a multi-level “broaden and build” framework for enhancing satisfaction, motivation, and productivity in the workplace.     

The relationship of organizational and social coping resources to employee coping behaviour: A longitudinal analysis

Abstract

Research on the determinants of coping behaviour has focused primarily on stressor-specific influences and on personal attributes and skills that serve as coping resources. However, coping resources can also include aspects of the organizational and social environment. This study investigates the role of supportive work relationships and of participation and influence in decision-making in determining the coping behaviour of employees in a manufacturing plant. Since the relationships between worksite coping resources and employee coping behaviours may be causally reciprocal, longitudinal models were analysed to sort out causal priorities. Results showed that organizational and social coping resources did influence subsequent coping behaviour. Perceiving oneself to have influence over decision-making at work predicted increases in active, problem-solving coping attempts and decreases in resignation in response to worksite stressors. Also, employees who perceived their co-workers and supervisors to be supportive were more likely to increase their mobilization of that support when faced with worksite stress. In addition, the use of certain employee coping behaviours influenced subsequent levels of participation in decision-making, as well as the quality of relationships with co-workers and supervisors.     

Supervision mit Ehrenamtlichen

For a better understanding of the requirements for the supervision of staff members in “crisis hot line” (“Telefonseelsorge”) the organization structure and the specific setting of telephone counseling are presented. The motives of the voluntary staff members are proving to be various and they are transforming from an altruistic desire to be helpful towards an increased need for personal development. In co-operation with volunteers the supervisor plays a special role. In addition to the routine supervision the supervisor is continually working with the volunteers to increase their scope of the basic principles of professional counseling. Finally, practical supervisory work is illustrated with case studies including frequently discussed topics such as intervention in situations of an existential crisis and dealing with sexually motivated calls and repeat permanent calls.