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Maintaining a healthy and productive workforce is a challenge for most organizations. This is even truer for health organization, facing staff shortages and work overload. The aim of this study is to identify the resources and constraints that influence managers' mental health and better understand how they are affected by them.

A qualitative approach was chosen to document the resources, the constraints as well as their consequences on managers in their day-to-day realities. The sample included executive-, intermediate- and first-level managers from a Canadian healthcare facility. A total of 62 semi-structured interviews were conducted. The coding process was based on the IGLOO model of Nielsen et al. (2018) to which an employee-related level was added (IGELOO).

Results highlight the importance of considering both resources as well as constraints in examining managers' mental health. Overarching context, organizational constraints and the management of difficult employees played important roles in the stress experienced by managers.

The results offer a better understanding of the importance of intervening at different levels to promote better organizational health. Results also highlight the importance of setting up organizational resources and act on the various constraints to reduce them. Different individual strategies used by managers to deal with the various constraints and maintain their mental health also emerge from those results.

In addition to addressing the reality of healthcare managers, this study supplements a theoretical model and suggests avenues for interventions promoting more sustainable organizational health.

Realist evaluation seeks to answer the question of “what works for whom in which circumstances?” through developing and testing middle range theories (MRTs). MRTs are programme theories that outline how certain mechanisms of an intervention work in a specific context to bring about certain outcomes. In this paper, the authors tested an initial MRT about the mechanism of participation. The authors used evidence from a participatory organisational intervention in five worksites of a large multi-national organisation in the US food service industry.

Qualitative data from 89 process tracking documents and 24 post-intervention, semi-structured interviews with intervention stakeholders were analysed using template analysis.

The operationalised mechanism was partial worksite managers’ engagement with the research team. Six contextual factors (e.g. high workload) impaired participation, and one contextual factor (i.e. existing participatory practices) facilitated participation. Worksite managers’ participation resulted in limited improvement in their awareness of how working conditions can impact on their employees’ safety, health, and well-being. Based on these findings, the authors modified the initial MRT into an empirical MRT.

This paper contributes to the understanding of “what works for whom in which circumstances” regarding participation in organisational interventions.

The purpose of the research was to compare web site designs used by the fastest growing companies in the USA to the largest companies in the USA and to benchmark those designs against best practices as defined by a leading consultant in the industry.

This approach surveyed the web site designs by each group of companies against a set of best practices and developed summary data about the observations.

The largest companies in the USA used designs that are more consistent with the best practices as defined by a leading consultant in the industry.

The fastest growing companies did not use best practices in their web site design and still maintained very rapid growth as evidenced by their national rankings. A poorly executed design was less of a detractor to the company's success than anticipated. Web site design may have a role (positive or negative) in the company's growth rate but further research is required to understand the scope and nature of the role.

The reason why a company maintains a rapid growth rate may be dependent on numerous factors and as such, a comprehensive evaluation of why a company sustains a rapid growth rate should be undertaken. The role of the web site in the company's success should be evaluated in more depth.

This paper has value for web site designers, entrepreneurs, IT management, IT consultants, and large company personnel involved with web site design.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the link between transformational leadership and depressive symptoms among employees is mediated by such personal resources as occupational self-efficacy, perceived meaningfulness of the work, and work-related rumination.

The study was conducted using questionnaires among 557 Finnish municipal employees in various occupations. The statistical analysis was based on structural equation modeling. A multiple mediation model enabled us to investigate the specific indirect effects of each mediator. Model comparison was applied to ascertain whether the mediation should be considered as full or partial.

Results based on model comparison showed that the proposed factors fully mediated the negative relationship between transformational leadership and depressive symptoms. Thus high level of transformational leadership was associated with high levels of occupational self-efficacy and perceived meaningfulness of the work, and low level of work-related rumination during off-job time, which, in turn, were associated with low level of depressive symptoms. The fully mediated model explained 36 percent of the variance in depressive symptoms. All of the three mediators made a unique contribution to this relationship.

The results imply that transformational leadership behaviors may decrease depressiveness among employees through strengthening the personal resources of employees. However, as the study is cross-sectional, causal relationships can only be hypothesized.

The study sheds new light on the possible processes through which transformational leaders may exert their health-promoting effects on employees even in terms of depressive symptoms.

The purpose of this study is to find the connection between leader behaviour and employee sickness absence in public administration.

The research data was collected with the help of an online questionnaire. The SPSS statistical programme and structural equation modelling in AMOS were used to analyse the data.

The research was conducted in public administration institutions, and 3,220 employees from public administration were included in the research sample. The author found a negative one-way relationship between certain types of behaviour and sickness absence. The author defines leader behaviour as a multidimensional construct in which each dimension represents a separate cluster of leader behavioural characteristics. Leaders’ “progressiveness” is the most important dimension, and a one-point increase in “progressiveness” (five-point scale) leads to a reduction of 2.8 days in sickness absence for one employee.

The author focused only on one segment of factors (the behaviour of leaders) that affects sickness absence. To explain the maximum possible measure of the variability in sickness absence, it would be best to include several different influencing factors.

The study represents a structured model of the link between sickness absence and leader behaviour. With the model, it is possible to determine which behavioural forms of leaders influence sickness absence, where leader behaviour is treated as a complex whole, and not as an individual behavioural characteristic.

The study addresses calls for research on the relationship between leader behaviour and employee sickness absence within countries.

Outlines the work of the Interactive Image Based Device for Effective Communication project [IBIDEM] in its aim of developing a video phone useful for lip‐reading by hearing‐impaired people, based on a new generation of space‐variant sensors and using standard telephone lines. The IBIDEM project is constructing a video phone using a camera with a retina‐like sensor, a motorized system for moving the viewpoint of the camera, as well as a display for the transmitted images which will allow high resolution in the area of interest i.e. lips or figures, whilst still maintaining a wide field of view. Experiments have been carried out to evaluate the minimum requirements for the video phone in terms of spatial and temporal resolution and the technical limitations which have to be taken into account in the design of a visual sensor.

Outlines previous research on the links between board composition, firm performance and chief executive officer (CEO) compensation, and presents a study of CEO pay‐performance sensitivity, board independence and performance in the US banking industry. Explains the methodology and presents the results, suggesting that for large bank holding companies with average performance, increased board independence reduces pay‐performance sensitivity because internal monitoring is sufficient without extra alignment incentives. Adds that when performance is poor this no longer holds true and compensation contracts are then used to align the interests of managers and shareholders.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse three innovative Master's programmes designed for public and voluntary sector managers across three EU countries.

The paper compares similarities and differences between the programmes in order to shed light on the “innovation journey” which the authors took in establishing these programmes, and on the distinctive pedagogies which have been designed and developed to help address the complex dilemmas and challenges facing public and voluntary sector managers in the three countries.

The paper draws on theories of innovation and entrepreneurship to illustrate how these programmes were created, and how both new curriculum content and new approaches to pedagogy had to be developed.

The paper addresses the current and future learning needs of these public and voluntary service managers.

Optimizing material handling within the factory is one of the key problems of modern assembly line systems. The purpose of this paper is to focus on simultaneously balancing a robotic assembly line and the scheduling of material handling required for the operation of such a system, a topic that has received limited attention in academia. Manufacturing industries focus on full autonomy because of the rapid advancements in different elements of Industry 4.0 such as the internet of things, big data and cloud computing. In smart assembly systems, this autonomy aims at the integration of automated material handling equipment such as automated guided vehicles (AGVs) to robotic assembly line systems to ensure a reliable and flexible production system.

This paper tackles the problem of designing a balanced robotic assembly line and the scheduling of AGVs to feed materials to these lines such that the cycle time and total tardiness of the assembly system are minimized. Because of the combination of two well-known complex problems such as line balancing and material handling and a heuristic- and metaheuristic-based integrated decision approach is proposed.

A detailed computational study demonstrates how an integrated decision approach can serve as an efficient managerial tool in designing/redesigning assembly line systems and support automated transportation infrastructure.

This study is beneficial for production managers in understanding the main decisional steps involved in the designing/redesigning of smart assembly systems and providing guidelines in decision-making. Moreover, this study explores the material distribution scheduling problems in assembly systems, which is not yet comprehensively explored in the literature.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the reader to the Nordic tradition of Critical Utopian Action Research (CUAR) and to demonstrate how CUAR might reinvigorate participatory democracy as an intrinsic characteristic of social enterprise. This leads us to sketch out the beginnings of how researchers might work with communities to help realise their democratic impulses through social enterprise.

This paper aims to synthesise the participatory action research literature, particularly CUAR, with literature on social enterprise and democracy to demonstrate how the two approaches might fruitfully be combined.

The authors show how CUAR might be utilised by researchers, to articulate new social enterprise organisational responses to local problems or to reinvigorate democracy within existing social enterprises.

This exploratory paper marks (we believe) the first attempt to bring together social enterprise and CUAR.