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Police stress is a critical concern for public safety agencies. This study proposes a research model to examine the relationship between police operational stress and affective commitment, mediated by psychological safety.

A survey was developed and administered to law enforcement professionals from two large police agencies in a Midwestern US state and Rio de Janeiro state, Brazil.

The results suggest the research model applies similarly in both countries. A significant relationship between police operational stress and lower affective commitment was found. Psychological safety mediated this effect, suggesting its importance in mitigating stress. The focus on psychological safety offers valuable insights for understanding officer well-being in high-stress environments.

Qualitative methods might be used to help better understand the contextual elements around police stress and its consequences. Results indicate that supportive work environments that foster psychological safety can be a powerful tool to buffer the negative effects of stress and promote officer well-being and retention.

A comprehensive understanding of the psychological factors influencing officer morale and engagement is essential for developing interventions to enhance law enforcement effectiveness. Psychological safety helps create a supportive work environment, reducing stress’s negative impact on officer commitment.

This study makes a distinctive contribution by examining the mediating role of psychological safety in the relationship between operational stress and affective commitment among police officers in two countries. Building upon prior research that has examined the impact of stress and psychological safety, this study is among the first to investigate how psychological safety specifically mitigates the negative impact of stress on officer commitment.

Pregnant employees experience considerable interpersonal discrimination. This study explores the range of possible reactions of observers to pregnancy self-disclosure, interpersonal discrimination and various allyship interventions, and the attentional processes that lead to those reactions. Consequently, it uncovers socio-cognitive processes underlying support for and backlash toward pregnancy in the workplace.

This study used a thought-listing technique to explore observers’ spontaneous thoughts related to pregnancy. Working adults were randomly assigned to read through one of the six scenarios depicting pregnancy self-disclosure, interpersonal discrimination and male allyship interventions (i.e. stating the organization’s anti-discrimination policy, confronting the transgressor by calling out sexism, pivoting the conversation to highlight the strengths of the pregnant employee and a hybrid intervention combining highlighting strengths and confrontation) after which participants listed the top three thoughts that came to their mind (1,668 responses). Responses were thematically analyzed to explore spontaneous reactions toward the pregnant employee, transgressor and ally in the scenario.

Surprisingly, across all scenarios, the most sexist thoughts emerged during pregnancy self-disclosure, even in the absence of any transgression. After a transgression occurred, any allyship intervention was better than none in eliciting lesser sexist backlash against the pregnant employee. Stating the organization’s anti-discrimination policy was most beneficial for the pregnant employee in eliciting the least sexist backlash but at the cost of generating unfavorable impressions of the ally. Calling out the transgressor’s bias elicited the most sexist backlash toward the pregnant employee, yet it created favorable impressions of the ally. In contrast, highlighting the strengths of the pregnant employee created the most favorable impression of the ally while eliciting a few sexist thoughts about the pregnant employee. Overall, the hybrid intervention was the most effective at balancing the competing goals of generating support for the pregnant employee, creating favorable impressions of the ally, as well as holding the transgressor accountable.

This study demonstrates that the type of allyship intervention critically redirects the attentional focus of observers to certain aspects of a discrimination episode and relevant schemas which can generate support or backlash toward targets, transgressors and allies, thereby advancing or obstructing equity and inclusion in organizations.

Despite the extent of working from home (WFH) during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, research exploring its positive or negative effects is exceptionally scarce. Unlike the traditional positive view of WFH, the authors hypothesize that WFH during the COVID-19 pandemic has triggered work–life imbalance and work–family conflict (WFC) for employees. Furthermore, the authors suggest that work–life imbalance and WFC elicit burnout in employees.

Using a time-lagged design, the authors collected data in three waves during the peak of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic to test the authors' hypotheses.

Overall, the authors found good support for the proposed hypotheses. WFH had a significant positive relationship with burnout. WFH was negatively related to work–life balance (WLB) and positively related to WFC. Both WLB and WFC mediated the effects of WFH on burnout.

This is one of the earliest studies to explore the harmful effects of involuntary WFH and identify the channels through which these effects are transmitted. The practical implications can help managers deal with the adverse effects of WFH during and after the COVID-19 crisis.

The authors' results significantly contribute to the research on WFH and burnout and present important implications for practice and future research.

Female smallholder farmers in low-income countries face barriers to accessing capital and commodity markets. While agricultural cooperatives provide services that contribute to the income and productivity of small-scale producers, evidence of cooperatives' social and economic empowerment of female smallholders remains limited. We apply Sen's capability approach to female entrepreneurs' socioeconomic empowerment to examine whether women's participation in a coffee and microfinance cooperative from rural western Uganda benefits their social and economic position within their household. First, we study the relationship between women's cooperative participation and their household coffee sales and savings. Second, we investigate the link between women's cooperative participation and their intra-household decision-making and whether the inclusion of the husband in his wife's cooperative strengthens or lowers women's decision-making power.

We carry out a case study of a hybrid coffee and microfinance cooperative that promotes social innovation through the integration and empowerment of female smallholders in rural Uganda. Using a cross-sectional survey of 411 married female cooperative members from 26 randomly selected self-help groups of Bukonzo Joint Cooperative and 196 female non-members from the identical area, employing propensity score matching, this paper investigates the benefits of women's participation in a coffee and microfinance cooperative in the Rwenzori Mountains of western Uganda. We present and discuss the results of our case study within an extensive literature on the role of institutions in collective action for women's empowerment.

Our findings provide new empirical evidence on female smallholders' participation in mixed cooperatives. Our results indicate that women's participation in microfinance-producer cooperatives appears to be a conditional blessing: even though membership is linked to increased women's intra-household decision-making and raised household savings and income from coffee sales, a wife with a husband in the same cooperative self-help group is associated with diminished women's household decision-making power.

The focus of this study is on female coffee smallholders in an agricultural cooperative in rural western Uganda. In particular, we focus on a case study of one major coffee cooperative. Our cross-sectional survey does not allow us to infer causal interpretations. Also, the survey does not include variables that allow us to measure other dimensions of women's empowerment beyond decision-making over household expenditures and women's financial performance related to savings and income from coffee cultivation.

Our empirical results indicate that female smallholders' cooperative membership is associated with higher incomes and coffee sales. However, husband co-participation in their wives' cooperative group diminishes wives' decision-making, which suggests that including husbands and other family members in the same cooperative group may not be perceived as an attractive route to empowerment for female smallholders. For these reasons, an intervention that encourages the cooperation of both spouses and that is sensitive to context-specific gender inequalities, may be more successful at stimulating social change toward household gender equality than interventions that focus on women's autonomous spheres only.

While the literature thus far has focused on microfinance's potential for women's empowerment, evidence on agricultural cooperatives' affecting women's social and economic position is limited. First, our findings provide novel empirical evidence on the empowering effects of women's participation in a self-help group-based coffee cooperative in rural Uganda. Second, our data allows us to explore the role of husbands' participation in their wives' cooperative and SGH. We embed our hypotheses and empirical results in a rich discussion of female entrepreneurship, microfinance and cooperative literature.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the challenges of implementing accountable artificial intelligence (AI) systems in India, focusing on the need for algorithms to justify their decisions, especially in subjective and complex scenarios. By analyzing various government projects, documented biases and conducting empirical case studies and experiments, the study highlights the limitations of AI in recognizing the nuances of India’s unique social landscape. It aims to underscore the importance of integrating political philosophy to ensure that AI systems are held accountable within India’s sociopolitical context, urging policymakers to develop frameworks for responsible AI decision-making.

The research adopts a mixed-methods approach to address the five research questions. It begins with an extensive literature review, focusing on AI’s transformative potential, algorithmic bias and accountability in the Indian context. Data is collected from 15 AI use cases in health care, education and public safety, 13 government automated decision tools and five bias cases, including facial recognition and caste-based discrimination. Additionally, ten case studies and three experiments on ChatGPT are analyzed. Content analysis is used to interpret and categorize the data, identifying patterns and themes. Specific case studies and experiments on autocompletion in search engines further support the findings.

The study revealed significant limitations in current AI systems when applied to India’s complex socio-cultural landscape. Analyzing 15 AI applications and 13 government projects, the research identified multiple instances of algorithmic bias. Experiments with Google’s autocomplete and ChatGPT showed that these systems often reinforce social stereotypes and struggle with nuanced, subjective situations. The findings emphasize the accountability gap in AI-driven decisions, highlighting the need for rigorous oversight, particularly in welfare projects where errors could lead to severe consequences. The study recommends developing regulatory frameworks, improving AI design and raising public awareness to address these challenges.

In the context of complex societies like India, a pressing concern arises: who should assume responsibility for the repercussions stemming from algorithmic failures to comprehend subjective complexities? To this end, there exist no serious scholarly works toward which present paper tries to shed new insights. It draws upon insights from the corpus of political philosophy literature, encompassing both classical and contemporary notions of responsibility, and seeks to establish connections between these concepts and the unique sociopolitical structure of India. The work is unique in the focus of the paper and is original in the direction projected.