Matti Meriläinen, Kristi Kõiv and Anu Honkanen
The purpose of this paper is to examine relationships between perceived bullying, work engagement and work performance among Estonian academics. Specifically, it details what…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine relationships between perceived bullying, work engagement and work performance among Estonian academics. Specifically, it details what forms of bullying affect work engagement and performance. Moreover, the study explores the relationship between engagement and performance among bullied academics.
Design/methodology/approach
A total of 864 faculty members from nine Estonian universities participated in an e-mail survey in Spring 2014. Bullying was measured using the Negative Acts Questionnaire-Revised (NAQ-R22), and work engagement was assessed using the nine-item Utrecht Work Engagement Scale. Respondents’ perceived performance and productivity were measured on a ten-point rating scale. Structural equation modelling was used to analyse the relationship between bullying, engagement and performance.
Findings
Perceived bullying – especially “professional understating” – decreased work engagement and work performance among Estonian academics. The decrease in performance preceded the decrease in engagement or vice versa. The decrease in engagement was followed by lowered performance.
Research limitations/implications
A longitudinal study is needed to prove the specific one-way effect of (decreased) performance (because of perceived bullying) on engagement.
Practical implications
Preventing bullying and further increasing engagement and performance among Estonian academics requires getting out of policy of professional understating.
Social implications
The authors need to determine why Estonian academics experience professional understating, which includes being ordered to perform tasks below one’s level of competence and having key areas of responsibility removed or replaced with more trivial or unpleasant tasks.
Originality/value
The present results prove that it is possible to differentiate between specific forms of bullying in a specific context and further reveal those factors specifically that affect work performance and work engagement. Among Estonian academics – revealed in this study – “professional understating” seems to be such a factor.
Details
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Harri Luomala, Maijastiina Jokitalo, Hannu Karhu, Hanna-Leena Hietaranta-Luoma, Anu Hopia and Sanna Hietamäki
This study aims to explore how certain consumer characteristics (dieting status, health motives and food values) together with products carrying ambivalent health and taste cues…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to explore how certain consumer characteristics (dieting status, health motives and food values) together with products carrying ambivalent health and taste cues (light foods, convenience foods, “functional candies”) shape whether and why health and taste attributes are perceived as inclusive (“healthy is tasty” and “unhealthy is untasty”) or exclusive (“healthy is untasty” and “unhealthy is tasty”).
Design/methodology/approach
A qualitative methodology not yet applied in examining consumers’ healthiness and tastiness perceptions of food was employed. It included gathering three separate data sets through both personal and group interviews (N = 40).
Findings
Consumers’ dieting status, health motives and food values shape the perception of inclusivity and exclusivity of health and taste of light, convenience and candy products. Second, there are multiple sources for these perceptions including product type, ingredients, level of processing and marketing cues. These factors interact to produce a unique consumer understanding of the relationship between health and taste for each single food product.
Practical implications
To ensure optimal consumer response, food companies and health educators need to understand how different target groups form their inclusive/exclusive perceptions of health and taste for various foods.
Originality/value
The majority of pre-existing food consumption research supports imply that a good taste and a high degree of healthiness are incompatible with each other. The findings challenge this view. It appears that it is the “unhealthy is untasty” and “healthy is tasty” perceptions that predominate in certain consumer groups. A novel conceptual framework for understanding the ambivalence of health and taste perceptions in food consumption is offered.
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Peter Nugus, Joanne Travaglia, Maureen MacGinley, Deborah Colliver, Maud Mazaniello-Chezol, Fernanda Claudio and Lerona Dana Lewis
Researchers often debate health service structure. Understanding of the practical implications of this debate is often limited by researchers' neglect to integrate participants'…
Abstract
Purpose
Researchers often debate health service structure. Understanding of the practical implications of this debate is often limited by researchers' neglect to integrate participants' views on structural options with discourses those views represent. As a case study, this paper aims to discern the extent to which and how conceptual underpinnings of stakeholder views on women's health contextualize different positions in the debate over the ideal structure of health services.
Design/methodology/approach
The researchers chose a self-standing, comprehensive women's health service facing the prospect of being dispersed into “mainstream” health services. The researchers gathered perspectives of 53 professional and consumer stakeholders in ten focus groups and seven semi-structured interviews, analyzed through inductive thematic analysis.
Findings
“Women's marginalization” was the core theme of the debate over structure. The authors found clear patterns between views on the function of women's health services, women's health needs, ideal client group, ideal health service structure and particular feminist discourses. The desire to re-organize services into separate mainstream units reflected a liberal feminist discourse, conceiving marginalization as explicit demonstration of its effects, such as domestic abuse. The desire to maintain a comprehensive women's health service variously reflected post-structural feminism's emphasis on plurality of identities, and a radical feminist discourse, holding that womanhood itself constituted a category of marginalization – that is, merely being at risk of unmet health needs.
Originality/value
As a contribution to health organizational theory, the paper shows that the discernment of discursive underpinnings of particular stakeholder views can clarify options for the structure of health services.