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Explores worker flexibility, through learning, union strategies, and resistance to learning. Issues of flexibility, learning, and quality are subject of much debate, negotiation, and conflict in the Canadian pulp and paper industry. A key bargaining issue for management has been to harness flexibility among the manual craft workers, to improve labour productivity. Within this context, workplace learning is not neutral or independent of day‐to‐day union‐management relations: it is a contested issue. Learning new skills is viewed as a threat to job control and security and presents a paradox: learning new trade skills enhances individual workers’ flexibility and employability but collectively weakens the union through job losses. Data were collected from pulp mills in British Columbia between 1996 and 1999. Survey and qualitative data provides evidence that workers’ resistance to learning is part of the contested arena of productivity and job control.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of line managers (LMs) in managing talent and emotional labour (EL) in the Scottish hospitality industry.

Data were generated from manager and HR practitioner interviews and a roundtable discussion with ten invited participants. In addition to obtaining an overview of approaches taken to managing talent and emotion, the authors also explored any challenges in implementing talent management (TM) in the industry and used an adapted model to rank the perceived importance of decisional, interpersonal, informational and developmental roles undertaken by front-LMs.

TM is seen as being of strategic importance, with structured and planned approaches in many of the organizations. Within these, LMs are given a great deal of responsibility. This requires organizations to provide time, resources and support to managers. It was evident that a caring and supportive culture is required. Highly significant differences are found on managing emotion. Although all managers highlighted that EL is important in the hospitality industry and managing it is challenging, most participants had an equivocal understanding of the concept and managers indicated that they had received no formal training to help manage emotion in the workplace.

The scale of the paper is limited and restricted to the Scottish hospitality industry. Extending the research to other parts of the UK would be useful.

It is apparent that TM has to be linked to business strategy, with incentives and rewards for LMs. In addition, more formal training in the concepts of EL and emotional intelligence should be provided for senior and LMs. Also, good communication skills and support from top management for TM is important.

Previous research and commentary on TM mainly centres on relevant HR practices and policies. This paper focuses on the connection between managing talent and EL and identifies development behaviours as key factor affecting the performance of front-line employees.

Explores leader‐follower dynamics within a context of a learning organization. Examines the influence of leaders’ behaviours on their followers’ learning in an energy company based in western Canada. Using survey data gathered from 400 full‐time employees the researchers assessed Senge’s proposition in The Fifth Discipline (1990) that leadership behaviour, conceptualized in terms of three roles: steward, designer and teacher, facilitated informal learning. Using a learning questionnaire to measure supportive leadership practices for learning in the workplace, it is argued that the results revealed the presence of all three roles in the case study. Of the three, the “designer” role was the weakest at 57 percent agreement from respondents followed by 63 percent for “steward” and 67 percent for “teacher”. Significant differences in the level of agreement were found within duration of employment and occupational group. The data will encourage organizational leaders to reflect critically upon their activities if they are committed to the strategy of developing their intangible assets: people.

In war it would sometimes happen that a fierce artillery attack seemed to have destroyed the enemy's entire defensive system, whereas in fact it had only destroyed the outer perimeter; and at the moment of their advance and attack the assailants would find themselves confronted by a line of defence which was still effective. (Gramsci)

The purpose of this paper is to consider a challenge to an occupational jurisdiction in the British police. Historically, street cops have defended the importance of operational credibility as a way of sustaining the value of experience, and inhibiting attempts to introduce external leaders. This has generated a particular form of policing and leadership that is deemed by the British Government as inadequate to face the problems of the next decade.

The project used the High Potential Development Scheme of the British police to assess the value of operational credibility and the possibilities of radical cultural change. Data are drawn from participants on the program, from those who failed to get onto the program, and from officers who have risen through the ranks without access to a fast-track scheme.

Most organizational changes fail in their own terms, often because of cultural resistance. However, if we change our metaphors of culture from natural to human constructions it may be possible to focus on the key point of the culture: the lodestone that glues it together. Operational credibility may be such a cultural lodestone and undermining it offers the opportunity for rapid and radical change.

The scheme itself has had limited numbers and the research was limited to a small proportion of the different categories outlined above.

If we change our metaphors for culture and cultural change – from natural to constructed metaphors – (icebergs and webs to buildings), it may be possible to consider a much more radical approach to organizational change.

Most assessments of cultural change focus on those charged with enacting the change and explain failure through recourse to natural metaphors of change. This paper challenges the convention that cultural change can only ever be achieved, if at all, through years of effort.

While the extant literature has mainly examined either organisational justice or performance appraisal on employee attitudes, studies assessing the effect of performance appraisal justice (PAJ) on employee work attitudes are very limited. Hence, this study aims to investigate the effects of PAJ on employee work attitudes (job satisfaction and employee commitment) using empirical insights from health-care workers in Ghana.

The study collected data from 302 workers in six selected health-care institutions and used multiple regression and bootstrapping mediation methods for the analyses.

This study found that interpersonal and procedural PAJ has significant positive effects on job satisfaction, but distributive PAJ showed an insignificant positive outcome. Then, while distributive and procedural PAJ has significant positive effects on employee commitment, interpersonal PAJ was insignificant. Moreover, job satisfaction significantly mediated the relationship between employee commitment and the three dimensions of PAJ.

This implies that PAJ can trigger positive employee work attitudes such as job satisfaction and commitment to facilitate the realisation of positive health-care outcomes if fairness and justice are effectively integrated into performance appraisal practices in health-care institutions.

The study contributes to extending organisation and human resource theories in the context of health-care services by applying the organisational justice theory to understand the job attitudes of workers in the health-care sector and institutions: a highly under-research context with respect to the topic.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that abductive reasoning is a typical but usually unrecognised process used by HRD scholars and practitioners alike.

This is a conceptual paper that explores recent criticism of traditional views of theory‐building, based on the privileging of scientific theorising, which has led to a relevance gap between scholars and practitioners. The work of Charles Sanders Peirce and the varieties of an abductive reasoning process are considered.

Abductive reasoning, which precedes induction and deduction, provide a potential connection with HRD practitioners who face difficult problems. Two types of abductive reasoning are explored – existential and analogic. Both offer possibilities for theorising with HRD practitioners. A range of methods for allowing abduction to become more evident with practitioners are presented. The authors consider how abduction can be used in engaged and participative research strategies.

While this is a conceptual paper, it does suggest implications for engagement and participation in theorising with HRD practitioners.

Abductive reasoning adds to the repertoire of HRD scholars and practitioners.

The paper elucidates the value of abductive reasoning and points to how it can become an integral element of theory building in HRD.

The debate about corporate purpose is a recurring one that has re-emerged today. What should be the guiding principles of business: the pursuit of profit or a contribution to public interest? We trace key elements in this debate in Britain and America, from the interwar years, when John Maynard Keynes and Adolf Berle made important contributions, to the 1970s, when events ushered in a return to laissez-faire and the rise to dominance of the shareholder primacy model of corporate governance and purpose, to today. Both the earlier and the current debates are centered around whether we see business institutions as strictly private entities, transacting with their suppliers, workers, and customers on terms agreed with or imposed upon these groups, or as part of society at large and therefore expected to contribute to what society deems to be its interests. Whether current developments will ultimately produce a shift in corporate purpose akin to the one that followed the Second World War remains to be seen. But the parallels to the interwar debates, and the uncertain economic, political, and social environments in which they took place, are striking. Our objective is to see what might be learned from the past to inform the current direction of thought concerning capitalism and corporate purpose.