Workplace resources to improve both employee well-being and performance: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Organisations are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of employees in gaining and maintaining competitive advantage. The happy worker–productive worker thesis suggests that workers who experience high levels of well-being also perform well and vice versa; however, organisations need to know how to ensure such happy and productive workers. The present review and meta-analysis identifies workplace resources at the individual, the group, the leader, and the organisational levels that are related to both employee well-being and organisational performance. We examine which types of resources are most important in predicting both employee well-being and performance. We identified 84 quantitative studies published in print and online from 2003 to November 2015. Resources at either of the four levels were related to both employee well-being and performance. We found no significant differences in employee well-being and organisational performance between the four levels of workplace resources, suggesting that interventions may focus on any of these levels. Cross-sectional studies showed stronger relationships with well-being and performance than longitudinal studies. Studies using objective performance ratings provided weaker relationships between resources and performance than self-rated and leader/third-party-rated studies.     

Making Sense of After‐School Care Dilemmas in Mothers' Stories of After‐School Care in Finland and Sweden

The study focuses on dilemmas in storied experiences of everyday after‐school care arrangements among Swedish and Finnish mothers. Finland and Sweden, which share a history of strong labour market attachment among women, arrange institutional after‐school care in similar ways. The data consist of interviews with three Swedish and six Finnish mothers. A positioning analysis of four stories shows how decisions related to children's after‐school hours were allocated among different actors. Two reoccurring dilemmas, Competent‐dependent child stories and Unburdened‐deficient mother stories, emerged from the data analysis as related to prevailing moral discourses on childhood and motherhood.     

A cross-national look at married women's earnings dependency

Using the Luxembourg Income Study data we examine married women's dependency on their husbands' earnings in nine Western industrialized countries: Australia, Belgium, Canada, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United States. When we examine the level and degree of dependency, and the labor force participation of married women across countries, the nine countries fall into the three clusters delineated in Esping-Andersen's welfare states typology. But when we examine the determinants of the dependency within each country, the clustering disappears. Wives' dependency increases with age, the presence of young children, and the number of children. It is reduced when wives' labor force participation and education are high relative to their husbands' and in families that rely more on unearned sources of income. The similarity of patterns across countries suggests that gender differences in the work-family nexus are deeply entrenched in all countries and continue even in the face of very active social policy to minize their effects. This is a revised version of a paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, August 1995, Washington DC. Her current research focuses on gender inequality and parents' time allocation between work and family. She conducts research on various aspects of family demography, including household and family characteristics, co-resident grandparent families, cohabitation, and child care. With Suzanne Bianchi, she is completing a research monograph on trends in the American family. Her research focuses on gender, work, and family issues.     

Sequential Pattern Analysis: A Statistical Investigation of Sequence Length and Support

In sequential pattern analysis, the frequency of patterns is evaluated by the support. While computed efficiently from large databases, we show that the support cannot be compared between different databases, since it is influenced by the actual sequence length distribution. Models for this sequence length distribution are surveyed. One of these models, the Good distribution, appears to be sufficiently flexible for practice. It is used to exemplify an approach for adjusting the relative support such that the resulting adjusted support values are better comparable between different databases. We illustrate our findings with texts from the bilingual FinDe corpus.     

Responsibility in Home–School Relations — Finnish Parents' Views

Finnish parents' views on responsibility in the home–school relations were explored. Responsibility was here understood as responsibility over education and upbringing. The data consist of semi‐structured interviews with 24 mothers and four fathers. In the home–school discourses, parents and teachers were often referred to as partners, and active parental involvement in school life was seen as a key to children's success. However, in some discourses teachers and parents were seen as polar opposites, e.g. teachers as experts — parents as laymen. Few references were made to children's responsibility.     

Old age as a choice and as a necessity two interpretative repertoires

This article applies the method of discourse analysis to look at how older people talk about age and getting old. The data come from biographical interviews with people aged 90 years or over. The picture that emerges from these interviewees is one of ambivalence: old age is constructed through two contrasting repertoires that are described as the choice repertoire and the necessity repertoire. Talk about old age as a necessity produces it as a self-evident fact that the essence of old age is deterioration. Talk about old age as a choice is used to undermine the necessity repertoire and to argue for various and more positive definitions of old age among which one can make a choice. It is important to note that the contrast is not between cultural views and individual experience, but the ambivalence is rooted in people's minds. Both repertoires are reasonable and justifiable, which turns old age into a dilemma. Our thinking about old age is dilemmatic by nature     

Workplace flexibility and new product development performance: The role of telework and flexible work schedules

This paper investigates the effects of telework and flexible work schedules on the performance of teams in new product development projects. Organizations increasingly introduce workplace flexibility practices that provide flexibility with regard to where or when the employee works. The findings of NPD teams in five cases, situated in two telecommunication firms, show that telework has a positive effect on NPD performance through enabling knowledge sharing, cross-functional cooperation and inter-organizational involvement. This improves the speed and quality of product development, provided that face-to-face contact is not completely replaced by virtual contact. A basic level of face-to face contact is necessary to offset the negative effects of telework on the quality of the shared knowledge, which are larger when the knowledge is sticky. Flexible work schedules and unexpectedly hot-desking were found to increase telework usage. This implies for managers that workplace flexibility needs enablers and cannot do without a sufficient level of face-to-face contact.     

Narrating Childhood in Elena Chizhova’s Vremya zhenshchin

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the representation of the Soviet past through the figure of a child in Elena Chizhova’s novel Vremja ?en??in [Vremya zhenshchin] (2009). The concept of the vulnerable subject is applied to conceptualize the narrative’s ‘access’ to the past. Vremja ?en??in [Vremya zhenshchin] tells the story of a mute girl raised by her mother and three ‘grandmothers’ in 1960s Leningrad. The women decide to keep her muteness as a secret in order to protect her from being sent to a state institution for disabled children, and to raise her at home. The child figure is situated on the verge of two value systems: the collective, secular, and modern value system, represented by the outside world of home; and the private, spiritual, and traditional value system represented by the community of three old women. The position of the vulnerable child figure on the margins of society enables the representation of a ‘lost’ past and its alternative values. The article suggests that the vulnerable child figure can be seen to stand for a feeling of loss and abandonment in more general terms in contemporary Russia, and as representing a search for a lost inheritance.