Search results

Research ethics and integrity stipulates that research must be conducted with responsibility towards the research community and should benefit the intended population. This chapter will share insights from an ongoing research programme to reduce family conflict in the context of dementia care while discussing the accompanying ethical considerations. Research into dementia care has primarily focused on improving outcomes for the care dyad, leaving the influence and input of the wider family unit under investigated. Family conflict can detrimentally impact the quality of care provided and leave caregivers vulnerable to psychosocial difficulties. Family conflict occurs in the context of dementia care but there is little research on how to reduce, or prevent, such conflict occurring. In this research programme, a systematic review investigated the effectiveness of interventions that include the wider family unit to reduce family conflict; only one study was included which evidenced the lack of interventions in this area. A qualitative scoping review was then conducted to explore the lived experiences of caregiving families with experience of family conflict and reported solutions. It was found that conflict occurred due to factors including care decisions and role transitions which impacted relationships and affected care provision. Solutions to conflict were less often reported, indicating an important gap in the literature. Interviews with Alzheimer's Society staff and volunteers revealed that stigma and denial surrounding dementia were prevalent, and families were often reluctant to seek external help. This research programme is currently establishing public patient involvement (PPI) to develop the research methodology and interview questions for people with dementia (PWD) and their family caregivers to explore their lived experiences and potential solutions to family conflict. To conclude, this research programme will propose a family-focused intervention aimed at systemic family conflict for those caring for someone with dementia.

This paper’s objective is to provide a systematic literature review of the contextual factors affecting downward communication from supervisors to subordinates in the audit environment. In addition, this review identifies emerging research themes and directions for future research.

I accomplish this review’s objectives by leveraging communication literature to establish a framework to identify and synthesize contextual factors affecting downward communication in the audit environment. The review identifies 50 published articles in the last 20 years from leading accounting and auditing journals.

This study consolidates research findings on downward communication under two primary contextual factors: (1) message and (2) channel. Findings indicate that empirical research examining communication in audit is fragmented and limited. Studies examining the message focus heavily on its content and treatment in the areas of feedback, nonverbal cues, and fraud brainstorming, and a handful of additional studies examine the effectiveness of the channel in these areas. Additional research is needed to understand a broader set of supervisor–subordinate communication practices, including those that are computer-mediated, and their effect on subordinate auditors’ judgments and behaviors in the contemporary audit environment.

Much of the audit literature examining communication to date is topic-versus construct-based, making it difficult to see how the research findings relate to one another. This review is the first to synthesize the literature to provide academics recommendations for a way forward, and inform practitioners of communication practices whereby supervisors can be trained to improve audit quality.

This paper describes a model of “Learning to care” derived from a study exploring how care workers in care homes learn to care for people living with dementia. The “Learning to care” model is primarily informal in nature in which influences such as formalised training and organisational culture impact care outcomes indirectly rather than directly.

This study used a focused, critical ethnographic approach in two care homes in England resulting in 63 h of observation of care of people living with advanced dementia, 15 semi-structured interviews and 90 in-situ ethnographic interviews with care staff.

The findings reveal a three-level model of learning to care. At the level of day-to-day interactions is a mechanism for learning that is wholly informal and follows the maxim “What Works is What Matters”. Workers draw on resources and information within this process derived from their personal experiences, resident influences and care home cultural knowledge. Cultural knowledge is created through a worker’s interactions with colleagues and the training they receive, meaning that these organisational level influences affect care practice only indirectly via the “What Works is What Matters” mechanism.

This study makes an original contribution by explaining the nature of day-to-day informal learning processes as experienced by care workers and those living with dementia in care homes. In particular, it illuminates the specific mechanisms by which organisational culture has an effect on care practice and the limitations of formal training in influencing such practice.

This article presents a novel case study that analyzes the applicability of DoE in the curling sport in order to improve their own performance and the performance of its athletes. Specifically, this study analyzes the most important factors to increase accuracy and precision in the draw game with curlers' opinions. It was decided to use the “Last Stone Draw (LSD)’ as an appropriate play situation.

Specifically, this study analyzes most important factors to increase accuracy and precision in the draw game with curlers opinions from the German Curling association. Three research techniques were used in this study: case study, interviews and a well-designed experiment. The analysis through the use of DoE includes a measurement system analysis, an initial variance test between two players, a screening and a characterization experiment.

The results obtained from DoE suggest that the factors routine, stress, release, balance, and the previous play situation have a substantial impact on the score of the player's draw game. However, no factor has a statistically significant impact on the average distance to the center of the target. Moreover, the DoE analysis also concludes that the accuracy and precision of the player's performance is not affected equally by all analyzed factors, but they turn into highly significant when examining their relationship to the other factors.

The findings of this study can be beneficial to other sports events in improving the performance. Moreover, DoE has proved to be an invaluable tool for many people in the German Curling Association in understanding the factors which influence the curlers performance and also factors which do not affect the curlers performance.

This research attempts to contribute to the existing sports management literature by identifying a way in which DoE can be an effective tool in non-manufacturing settings for identification of most important factors which influence the curling performance.

Sweeping changes are underway in the world of work where new work-models such as permanent work-from home mandates are being implemented by many organizations in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although cost benefits for organizations are obvious from such measures, little is known about how emotions of employees are affected by such measures. A recent industry survey reveals that some employees feel that they are being ostracized from their normal workplace while others are being allowed to return to their normal office settings. However, there appears to be dearth of empirical studies on how employees are coping with workplace ostracism (WO), and whether such emotions are related to factors such as their levels of mindfulness and perceived organizational support (POS). Therefore, this study deploys the stress and coping theory to suggest that individuals with high levels of mindfulness are less likely to experience WO, and that such a relationship is further moderated by POS.

The hypotheses developed in this study are tested through survey data collected from 240 employees who work for various large organizations in Oman. Eligible respondents are employees who have been directed by their employers to continue to work from home even after a large portion of their colleagues have returned to their physical offices.

The data is analyzed with R Core Team software. The findings reveal that employees with high levels of mindfulness reported lower levels of WO. Furthermore, POS moderates the inverse relationship between mindfulness and WO at moderate and high levels of POS but not when organizational support is perceived to be at low levels.

This study suffers from several limitations. First, the study is cross-sectional in nature and does not capture how the perceptions of workplace ostracism change over time. Considering that majority of the new directives to employees to permanently work from their remote locations are quite recent. Second, this study posits the effect of mindfulness as a trait on WO and does not consider other constructs. Third, the demographic details of the respondents indicates that bulk of the employees that were asked by their employers to continue to work from home even after the COVID-19 restrictions were lifted were women (68%).

Practically, the relationships between mindfulness, perceived organizational support and workplace ostracism provide useful managerial knowledge. This is particularly important considering the fact that the influence on employee perceptions due to these new work models are yet to be fully realized. As a result, managers can fine-tune their organizational communication and their training programs toward developing awareness of the present among employees to enable them to appraise new organizational policies from a more holistic long-term perspective. Additionally, the management can also emphasize sufficient material and psychological support for employees that are required to remain working from home.

This study appears to be among the first empirical research that provides evidence on the inverse relationship between mindfulness and WO, especially in the context of the new work-models in the post pandemic period. Additionally, the study demonstrates that moderate to high levels of POS can further mitigate WO among individuals with higher levels of mindfulness.