Role clarity, work overload and organizational support: multilevel evidence of the importance of support

The present study extended the demands-control-support model used in occupational stress research in two ways. First, it hypothesized that role clarity (i.e. role ambiguity), like control, would moderate the relationship between demands and psychological strain. Second, the study assessed support (from leaders) as a macro characteristic of the work-group environment. Data were drawn from a large study of US army soldiers, the study sample consisting of 1786 lower enlisted male soldiers. The inclusion of support as a work-group characteristic lead to a multilevel test of the model. A three-way multilevel interaction among work demands, role clarity and support was observed. As predicted, the relationship between demands and psychological strain was moderated by role clarity; however, this moderating relationship was found only when work-group support was high.     

Role clarity,work overload and organizational support: Multilevel evidence of the importance of support

The present study extended the demands-control-support model used in occupational stress research in two ways. First, it hypothesized that role clarity (i.e. role ambiguity), like control, would moderate the relationship between demands and psychological strain. Second, the study assessed support (from leaders) as a macro characteristic of the work-group environment. Data were drawn from a large study of US army soldiers, the study sample consisting of 1786 lower enlisted male soldiers. The inclusion of support as a work-group characteristic lead to a multilevel test of the model. A three-way multilevel interaction among work demands, role clarity and support was observed. As predicted, the relationship between demands and psychological strain was moderated by role clarity; however, this moderating relationship was found only when work-group support was high.     

Workplace Bullying,Mobbing and General Harassment: A Review

Research into workplace bullying has continued to grow and mature since emerging from Scandinavian investigations into school bullying in the late 1970s. Research communities now exist well beyond Scandinavia, including Europe, the UK, Australia, Asia and the USA. While the terms ‘harassment’ and ‘mobbing’ are often used to describe bullying behaviour, ‘workplace bullying’ tends to be the most consistently used term throughout the research community. In the past two decades especially, researchers have made considerable advances in developing conceptual clarity, frameworks and theoretical explanations that help explain and address this very complex, but often oversimplified and misunderstood, phenomenon. Indeed, as a phenomenon, workplace bullying is now better understood with reasonably consistent research findings in relation to its prevalence; its negative effects on targets, bystanders and organizational effectiveness; and some of its likely antecedents. However, as highlighted in this review, many challenges remain, particularly in relation to its theoretical foundations and efficacy of prevention and management strategies. Drawing on Affective Events Theory, this review advances understanding through the development of a new conceptual model and analysis of its interrelated components, which explain the dynamic and complex nature of workplace bullying and emphasize current and future debates. Gaps in the literature and future research directions are discussed, including the vexing problem of developing an agreed definition of workplace bullying among the research community, the emergence of cyberbullying, the importance of bystanders in addressing the phenomenon and the use of both formal and informal approaches to prevention and intervention.     

Alternative ways of studying time in qualitative international business research: A review and future agenda

Our study provides a systematic theoretical review of 304 qualitative-based articles published in seven international business journals from 2010 to 2020. We constructed a typology that provides alternative ways of studying time and is constituted by two dimensions: ontological conceptions of time (objective vs subjective) and theorising style of research (variance vs process). Our analysis and findings illustrate that time is mostly treated as objective and linear, and they highlight some concerning trends: lack of conceptual clarity; lack of diversity within and between paradigms; and lack of methodological clarity. We propose three pathways for advancing future research on time.     

Organizational Resilience: A Valuable Construct for Management Research?

Recently, the concept of resilience has gained new momentum in organization studies. It is held to be a very promising concept to explain how organizations can survive and thrive amidst adversity or turbulence. However, findings from an earlier review about resilience in the organizational and business context show that, although empirical research on the concept has increased, there is still a need for more clarity in terms of its measurement. The aim of this paper is to present a systematic review of the organizational resilience construct that covers both conceptual and operational issues. We discuss why researchers criticize resilience for being fuzzy and move on to identify and analyse existing literature under the lens of construct development and taxonomies. With this study, we aim to point out conceptual problems for future researchers to address conceptual clarity and to develop a clearer, more parsimonious concept. We conclude with a suggestion about future measurement.     

A successful physician referral service.

Developing a successful hospital-based physician referral service can create a win-win-win venture involving the hospital, its medical staff, and the community at large. As a marketing tool for the hospital, it effectively targets two of the hospital's most important markets: physicians and the consumers of health services, the general public.     

The Beta Poisson Dose-Response Model Is Not a Single-Hit Model

The choice of a dose-response model is decisive for the outcome of quantitative risk assessment. Single-hit models have played a prominent role in dose-response assessment for pathogenic microorganisms, since their introduction. Hit theory models are based on a few simple concepts that are attractive for their clarity and plausibility. These models, in particular the Beta Poisson model, are used for extrapolation of experimental dose-response data to low doses, as are often present in drinking water or food products. Unfortunately, the Beta Poisson model, as it is used throughout the microbial risk literature, is an approximation whose validity is not widely known. The exact functional relation is numerically complex, especially for use in optimization or uncertainty analysis. Here it is shown that although the discrepancy between the Beta Poisson formula and the exact function is not very large for many data sets, the differences are greatest at low doses--the region of interest for many risk applications. Errors may become very large, however, in the results of uncertainty analysis, or when the data contain little low-dose information. One striking property of the exact single-hit model is that it has a maximum risk curve, limiting the upper confidence level of the dose-response relation. This is due to the fact that the risk cannot exceed the probability of exposure, a property that is not retained in the Beta Poisson approximation. This maximum possible response curve is important for uncertainty analysis, and for risk assessment of pathogens with unknown properties.     

Blocking in Healthcare Operations: A New Heuristic and an Application

We consider the problem of optimal capacity allocation in a hospital setting, where patients pass through a set of units, for example intensive care and acute care (AC), or AC and post‐acute care. If the second stage is full, a patient whose service at the first stage is complete is blocked and cannot leave the first stage. We develop a new heuristic for tandem systems to efficiently evaluate the effects of such blocking on system performance and we demonstrate that this heuristic performs well when compared with exact solutions and other approaches presented in the literature. In addition, we show how our tandem heuristic can be used as a building block to model more complex multi‐stage hospital systems with arbitrary patient routing, and we derive insights and actionable capacity strategies for a real hospital system where such blocking occurs between units.     

Leadership clarity and team innovation in health care

The relationships among leadership clarity (i.e., team members' consensual perceptions of clarity of and no conflict over leadership of their teams), team processes, and innovation were examined in health care contexts. The sample comprised 3447 respondents from 98 primary health care teams (PHCTs), 113 community mental health teams (CMHTs), and 72 breast cancer care teams (BCTs). The results revealed that leadership clarity is associated with clear team objectives, high levels of participation, commitment to excellence, and support for innovation. Team processes consistently predicted team innovation across all three samples. Team leadership predicted innovation in the latter two samples, and there was some evidence that team processes partly mediated this relationship. The results imply the need for theory that incorporates clarity and not just style of leadership. For health care teams in particular, and teams in general, the results suggest a need to ensure leadership is clear in teams when innovation is a desirable team performance outcome.     

End-to-end process management: implications for theory and practice

The term ‘end-to-end’ process management is now commonplace in the language and practice of operations. Managers are encouraged to migrate from functional process management to end-to-end process management to realise a range of performance improvements. However, these improvements are often elusive; the specific challenges associated with such a migration are under-researched. This paper uses a cross-sector study to identify the challenges of end-to-end process management and to generate practical managerial guidance. Three areas are identified that demand particular managerial attention: the need to move beyond process mapping, the role of IT in process management and maintaining the process infrastructure as a strategic asset. More significantly, the findings highlight the need for greater conceptual clarity regarding the end-to-end concept itself. The existing literature suggests that scope is the primary differentiator of the end-to-end process – the requirement to manage an extended boundary from customer order through to customer fulfilment. However, this research suggests that the end-to-end concept is more complex, comprising of three core constructs with seven dimensions: scope (boundary conditions, sequence/flow and controls); scale (resources and input/output transformation) and complexity (interrelationships and orientation). End-to-end process management involves much more than an extended boundary. It requires a systemic perspective and clarity regarding controls and transforming resources.     

Sticking it all together: A critical assessment of the group cohesion–performance literature

Although group cohesion is a widely studied construct in the group dynamics literature, there is a considerable lack of consistency and agreement regarding the construct. This paper reviews the current state of the cohesiveness literature. Cohesion is now generally defined as the group members' inclinations to forge social bonds, resulting in the group sticking together and remaining united. Unfortunately, the large number of definitions and measures used by researchers has created a literature that is inconsistent and confusing. This review focuses on the considerable research on the cohesion–performance relationship. The general consensus of this research is that there is a generally positive association between cohesion and performance, but the theoretical and operational mechanisms creating this association are unclear. This lack of clarity may be due to the wide range of measures and assessments of cohesion and the cohesion–performance association. Two underlying contentious issues within this aspect of the literature are whether cohesion is unidimensional or multidimensional and the appropriate level of analysis required for measuring the construct. The resolution of these inconsistencies requires researchers to take a step back toward grounding the research in broader theoretical frameworks, to determine whether the cohesion–performance association has an underlying common cause, and to use longitudinal studies that use more sophisticated analytical models.     

Servant Leadership: A systematic review and call for future research

Notwithstanding the proliferation of servant leadership studies with over 100 articles published in the last four years alone, a lack of coherence and clarity around the construct has impeded its theory development. We provide an integrative and comprehensive review of the 285 articles on servant leadership spanning 20?years (1998–2018), and in so doing extend the field in four different ways. First, we provide a conceptual clarity of servant leadership vis-à-vis other value-based leadership approaches and offer a new definition of servant leadership. Second, we evaluate 16 existing measures of servant leadership in light of their respective rigor of scale construction and validation. Third, we map the theoretical and nomological network of servant leadership in relation to its antecedents, outcomes, moderators, mediators. We finally conclude by presenting a detailed future research agenda to bring the field forward encompassing both theoretical and empirical advancement. All in all, our review paints a holistic picture of where the literature has been and where it should go into the future.     

FLEXIBILITY,ADAPTABILITY, AND EFFICIENCY IN MANUFACTURING SYSTEMS

There are many different approaches and conceptualizations of flexibility in the present literature. This lends itself to a lack of clarity and can result in confusion on the central concept. Here we identify shortcomings in the existing literature. To clarify some of the important concepts, we distinguish between flexibility (ability to change states), adaptability (ability to change within a state), and efficiency (resources utilized). To illustrate such distinctions, we present a capacity expansion model that takes flexibility and adaptability into consideration. Numerical examples show how the concepts of flexibility and adaptability can be used in manufacturing.     

Board of directors structure and firm financial performance: A qualitative comparative analysis

Previous research about the effects of board structure and process on the firm financial performance is based on conflicting theoretical perspectives, and empirical results, mostly based on regression analysis, are inconclusive. Building from Complexity Theory and configurational analysis, this study offers clarity to inconclusive previous empirical results about the link among several board features and firm financial performance. From a sample of 295 non-financial firms from Southern Europe for the period 2001–2010, and by using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis, findings of this study show that firm financial performance depends on a complex configuration of several board features (board size, board independence, leadership structure and board activity) and several corporate characteristics (firm size, firm leverage and firm age). This paper has implications for academics. Despite different theoretical arguments and inconclusive results of the wide empirical literature addressing the effect of board characteristics on the firm performance, building from Complexity Theory this paper adds to our knowledge because it empirically explores under which circumstances different board features should contribute positively or negatively to firm performance. The results of this study have also implications for policy makers and practitioners by providing some useful hints to the controversial relationship between corporate governance and financial performance. In this sense, general corporate governance recommendations must be rethought.     

How environmental communication supports employee participation: A case study of EMI music

Environmental management is an artful mix of technology, clarity of vision, and working with your people to get the job done. Each component can not stand alone; rather, it is the job of the leader to find the right combination of employee communication, participation, feedback and recognition to make consequential change. In these further lessons from Europe, International Istitute for Management Development, research associate Catherine Ramus details the results of EMI Music, the best performer in a recent benchmarking survey that shows how these efforts lead to increased business value.     

A Matrix-Based Approach to Uncertainty and Sensitivity Analysis for Fault Trees1

System unavailabilities for large complex systems such as nuclear power plants are often evaluated through use of fault tree analysis. The system unavailability is obtained from a Boolean representation of a system fault tree. Even after truncation of higher order terms these expressions can be quite large, involving thousands of terms. A general matrix notation is proposed for the representation of Boolean expressions which facilitates uncertainty and sensitivity analysis calculations.     

Work satisfaction, health, and stress: A study of Dutch nurses

A study was conducted to compare nurses' work satisfaction and feelings of health and stress in five different nursing departments: a cardiac care unit and a general surgical ward in a general hospital; and an admissions department, a short-stay department, and a long-stay department in a psychiatric hospital. One hundred nurses took part in the study: the instruments used were questionnaires and structured interviews. The main results showed that:

(1) nurses in the cardiac care unit had the most positive satisfaction scores

(2) nurses in the general surgical ward had the most positive scores on the health and stress variables

(3) feelings of dissatisfaction and stress were most prominent in the short-stay department and, to a lesser extent, in the long-stay department.

The findings are interpreted in terms of the different work situations and die implications for hospital management are discussed.

Dr J. A. Landeweerd graduated in industrial and organizational psychology in 1968 (PhD in 1978). He has worked at Eindhoven University of Technology (Department of Industrial Engineering) and now holds a position as senior lecturer at Limburg University (Department of Health Sciences), where he is project-leader for a number of research projects on the relationships between work and health.

Nicolle Boumans, MA, graduated in health sciences in 1985 (specialization: nursing science) and is now a research assistant. She is working on a PhD thesis concerned with the relationship between task characteristics of nurses and their reaction in terms of job satisfaction, health and stress.     

心理因素、交易环境变化与结构性产品风险测度:一个研究综述

随着互联网金融的兴起，先前的交易环境已由线下交易为主逐步转变为基于线上平台的交易，金融产品市场呈现出与众不同的新特征。结构性产品繁荣发展的背后蕴藏着极大风险，风险测度与管理研究对结构性产品市场发展具有重要意义。研究表明，心理因素对投资者信念和预期产生重要影响，并且交易环境变化可以加剧投资者心理偏差，进而使其产生非理性的投资决策和行为。本文在梳理国内外有关结构性产品供需研究、心理偏差与投资者情绪等个体心理因素、交易环境变化以及风险测度理论与方法文献的基础上提出：面向互联网金融服务平台的结构性产品风险测度研究应将外部交易环境变化和内部心理偏差因素共同加以考虑，以有效地实现新环境下复杂金融产品市场的风险评估和管理。     

Work satisfaction,health, and stress: A study of Dutch nurses

Abstract

A study was conducted to compare nurses' work satisfaction and feelings of health and stress in five different nursing departments: a cardiac care unit and a general surgical ward in a general hospital; and an admissions department, a short-stay department, and a long-stay department in a psychiatric hospital. One hundred nurses took part in the study: the instruments used were questionnaires and structured interviews. The main results showed that:

(1) nurses in the cardiac care unit had the most positive satisfaction scores

(2) nurses in the general surgical ward had the most positive scores on the health and stress variables

(3) feelings of dissatisfaction and stress were most prominent in the short-stay department and, to a lesser extent, in the long-stay department.

The findings are interpreted in terms of the different work situations and die implications for hospital management are discussed.

Dr J. A. Landeweerd graduated in industrial and organizational psychology in 1968 (PhD in 1978). He has worked at Eindhoven University of Technology (Department of Industrial Engineering) and now holds a position as senior lecturer at Limburg University (Department of Health Sciences), where he is project-leader for a number of research projects on the relationships between work and health.

Nicolle Boumans, MA, graduated in health sciences in 1985 (specialization: nursing science) and is now a research assistant. She is working on a PhD thesis concerned with the relationship between task characteristics of nurses and their reaction in terms of job satisfaction, health and stress.     

`Quantitative' and `Qualitative' Research: An Analysis

It is widely believed that there is a clear distinction between `quantitative' and `qualitative' research, and these embedded or institutionalised terms profoundly affect the practice of such research. In this article the clarity and/or usefulness of the distinction is challenged together with the whole idea that there are given `methodologies' for research. Almost everything turns on conceptual clarity in relation to the initial research-questions: that leads the research to methods which follow logically from the concepts involved. The alleged `quantitative'/`qualitative' distinction does no more than pre-empt methods and procedures of research which should be left open.