Endangering one’s health to improve performance?

Background: Companies are increasingly applying both goal- and performance-oriented leadership practices. For employees, such indirect control practices make higher self-regulatory demands: They become responsible for their work outcomes and have to bear the consequences of failure just like the self-employed. The current study focuses on the concept of “self-endangering work behaviors” as representing a possible negative effect of indirect control and a possible mediator between work demands and negative outcomes. Method: An online survey was conducted with 607 employees, who reported to work in an indirect control setting. It assessed extension of working hours, intensification of working hours, sickness presenteeism, and faking as possible self-endangering work behaviors together with exhaustion as a subjective well-being measure. The lavaan package was used to test the mediation hypothesis with a structural equation model. Results: Results supported the assumption that self-endangering work behaviors might partly explain the association between work demands and exhaustion. A mediation effect was found for extension of working hours, intensification of working hours, and for faking. However, sickness presenteeism delivered no statistically significant mediation effect in the association between work demands and exhaustion. Discussion: As a mechanism for coping with high work demands, the new concept of self-endangering work behaviors offers one possible explanation for the negative association between high work demands and both subjective well-being and health. The concept needs to be addressed in occupational health prevention initiatives. Such interventions should balance the negative and positive effects of indirect control and take self-endangering work behavior into account.     

Distribution and selection of experts in the intergovernmental science-policy platform on biodiversity and ecosystem services (IPBES): the case of the regional assessment for Africa

In 2013, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) agreed to carry out a regional assessment for Africa. Since then, roughly 100 authors have been working to deliver, in 2018, a document that not only synthesises existing knowledge on biodiversity and ecosystem services for the African region but to distil from it knowledge that is relevant, credible, and legitimate for both societal and scientific practise. This requires, firstly, to carefully constituting the group of authors and, secondly, to design an assessment process that allows for deriving at an integrated perspective amongst these experts. Such a joint process of knowledge production that encompasses both interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaboration can be framed as co-creation. In this contribution, we analyse whether the IPBES African assessment accounts for these two prerequisites for an effective assessment process. Our particular interest lays in the question whether scholars from social sciences and the humanities are sufficiently involved. Our analysis is based on the curriculum vitae of 97 members of the expert group, and reads quite straightforward: there is an overall lack of non-natural science perspectives and expertise that might lead to essential knowledge and data gaps when wishing to understand the effects of the diverse human concepts of and activities on biodiversity and ecosystem services. In order to address these gaps and to derive at an assessment report truly relevant for policy makers as well as other social and scientific actors, IPBES needs to widen its outreach to networks of scholars from the social sciences and the humanities and to inform them appropriately about the specific roles they could play within IPBES processes, particularly assessments.     

„Manchmal muss es einfach sehr schnell gehen …“

In career counseling, time and resources can sometimes be scarce. One case in point are scholarship holders. Some scholarship programmes include succinct individual career counseling sessions. This condensed counseling programme consists of a group workshop, a one-on-one coaching session and an individual remote follow-up. This consultation programme includes values clarification, an analysis of biography and career as well as a profile development. For this succinct form, intensive preparatory work on both sides is essential. The participants receive tasks and instructions beforehand. The results thereof are then the basis for the workshop and coaching session. Despite these challenging general conditions excellent results can be achieved.     

Trajectories of Prosocial Behavior and Physical Aggression in Middle Childhood: Links to Adolescent School Dropout and Physical Violence

Trajectories of prosocial behavior and physical aggression between 6 and 12 years of age were identified for a sample (N=1,025) of males. The trajectories were then used to predict school dropout and physical violence at age 17. Using a group‐based semi‐parametric method, two trajectories of prosociality (low and moderate declining) and three trajectories of physical aggression (low, moderate, and high declining) were obtained. Only a small minority (3.4%) of the boys were characterized by both high aggression and moderate prosociality. Physical aggression predicted both school dropout and physical violence, but contrary to expectations, prosocial behavior did not have additive or protective effects.     

Knowledge Management in Strategic Alliances: A Review of Empirical Evidence

Knowledge‐related and organizational learning processes in alliances have received much attention throughout the last 25 years. The field has generated a rapidly growing body of empirical evidence on how knowledge is managed in alliances. However, the sphere is highly complex, fragmented, incoherent, and heterogeneous in terms of the theoretical approaches applied. This paper presents an integrative and organizing framework for the empirical literature on knowledge management in strategic alliances. It illustrates how the knowledge management outcomes of knowledge creation, transfer and application are determined by four distinct sets of factors: knowledge characteristics, partner characteristics, partner interaction, and active knowledge management. Based on this framework, this review analyses and integrates empirical evidence in order to identify where findings converge and where results conflict. So far, research has focused strongly on singular interrelations between these four sets of factors and the transfer of knowledge. Conversely, the questions of how knowledge is created, retained, retrieved and applied and how the interplay of the different factors affects knowledge management in strategic alliances remain widely unexplored. The review concludes with a summary of the current state of the art in empirical research and discusses some promising avenues for future investigation.     

Überall ist unterdessen „E“ – E‑Coaching als ein adäquates Format

More travelling, increasingly flexible working hours, omnipresent technologies, more complex tasks: coaching using digital channels and tools perfectly dovetails with modern work routine. This article explains what virtual coaching is (and can be) and presents the variants blended coaching and immersive coaching. The advantages and potential points of criticism of virtual coaching are also described. Finally, the seven phases of the ideal-typical virtual coaching process are presented.     

The race relations “Problematic” in American sociology: Revisiting Niemonen’s case study and critique

Using articles drawn from the years 1996-1999, this paper updates and expands Jack Niemonen’s 1997 TAS analysis of the articles dealing with race and ethnicity in the four core sociology journals. We found a greater rate of publication and several new substantive areas incorporating race and ethnicity, but many of the patterns Niemonen identified remain in place. These articles are highly quantitative, rely heavily on U.S. Census categories, tend to explain racial and ethnic phenomenon as by-products of broader social forces (such as class-based stratification), and subsume these analyses under the headings of alternative subfields. Niemonen used these findings to offer a powerful critique of the status of race and ethnicity in sociology, the under-development of the racial and ethnic relations “problematic,” and its marginalization within the discipline as a whole. To reassess these interpretations and conclusions, we examined the relationships between methodology and substance, and compared the main sample with a subset of more specialized articles focused on race and ethnicity. We found a close connection between quantitative methods and the use of Census definitions of race and ethnicity, but surprisingly few differences between the race and ethnic subset and the more inclusive main sample appeared. These findings allow us to offer support and some important qualifications to Niemonen’s original conclusions. We would like to thank Jordan Bartlett for serving as our research assistant on this project, and the members of the Fall 2000 Race Theory Seminar at the University of Minnesota (Sociology 8211) who participated in and gave commentary on a preliminary version of this study. Thanks also to Professor Jack Niemonen who communicated at length with us about his coding procedures and even consented to code a number of articles for us.