Search results

The purpose of this paper is to present how Mersey Care NHS Trust introduced a unique integrated leadership development and employee wellbeing programme from UK business psychologists, Robertson Cooper, to help it prepare for Foundation Trust equivalent (FTe) status. A priority for the Trust was to ensure that staff felt involved and supported throughout the restructure and felt good about coming to work and engaged by their roles.

Robertson Cooper designed a programme to integrate management and leadership development with work to assess and improve levels of employee engagement and wellbeing. It used its employee survey ASSET to measure the levels of psychological wellbeing, engagement and productivity of employees in Mersey Care NHS Trust and assess the impact of the change.

Using the results, individual employee action plans were designed to improve wellbeing and engagement, and inform managers about how to address staff priorities and become more effective leaders. Of the senior managers and clinicians who completed the evaluation, 83 percent agreed that the content of the development centres met their expectations.

The paper describes a concrete example of how Mersey Care NHS Trust is improving employee engagement by focusing on wellbeing.

Soon after the Lehman crisis, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) surprised its critics with a reconsideration of its research and advice on fiscal policy. The paper traces the influence that the Fund’s senior management and research elite has had on the recalibration of the IMF’s doctrine on fiscal policy. The findings suggest that overall there has been some selective incorporation of unorthodox ideas in the Fund’s fiscal doctrine, while the strong thesis that austerity has expansionary effects has been rejected. Indeed, the Fund’s new orthodoxy is concerned with the recessionary effects of fiscal consolidation and, more recently, endorses calls for a more progressive adjustment of the costs of fiscal sustainability. These changes notwithstanding, the IMF’s adaptive incremental transformation on fiscal policy issues falls short of a paradigm shift and is best conceived of as an important recalibration of the precrisis status quo.

The purpose of this paper is to propose how to minimize the risks of implementing business process reengineering (BPR) by measuring readiness. For this purpose, the paper proposes an assessment approach for readiness in BPR efforts based on the critical success and failure factors.

A relevant literature review, which investigates success and failure indicators in BPR efforts is carried out and a new categorized list of indicators are proposed. This is a base for conducting a survey to measure the BPR readiness, which has been run in two companies and compared based on a diamond model.

In this research, readiness indicators are determined based on critical success and failure factors. The readiness indicators include six categories. The first five categories, egalitarian leadership, collaborative working environment, top management commitment, supportive management, and use of information technology are positive indicators. The sixth category, resistance to change has a negative role. This paper reports survey results indicating BPR readiness in two Iranian companies. After comparing the position of the two cases, the paper offers several guidelines for amplifying the success points and decreasing failure points and hence, increasing the rate of success.

High‐failure rate of BPR has been introduced as a main barrier in reengineering processes. In addition, it makes a fear, which in turn can be a failure factor. This paper tries to fill the gap in the literature on decreasing risk in BPR projects by introducing a BPR readiness assessment approach. In addition, the proposed questionnaire is generic and can be utilized in a facilitated manner.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the understudied antecedents of moral reasoning and cognitive processes that ultimately shape the ethical consumption. The theory of planned behavior (TPB) and the socio-intuitionist model are integrated. Holistic, inferential, and affective dimensions of intuition are identified as critical antecedents of environmental concerns that then influence the ethical consumption.

Structural equation modeling is used to analyze intuitive judgments and ethical concerns in 256 US undergraduates. The New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) is used to measure ethical concerns and the ecologically conscious consumer behavior (ECCB) instrument is used to measure ethical consumption.

The results indicate that inferential intuition, but not affective intuition, significantly predicts the ethical concerns (NEP), which in turn significantly influence all five dimensions of ethical consumption behavior (ECCB).

Managers and marketing strategists should focus on non-rational influences such as moral intuition to effectively promote ethical and responsible consumption.

The TPB and the intuitionist theory are integrated to reveal empirically how intuitive judgments may affect consumer attitudes and to provide new insights regarding the ethical consumption.

The purpose of this study is to explore the empirical literature on the resilience of firefighters related to potentially traumatic events (PTE). This paper identifies how resilience is defined in this particular research field, reveals trends in applied research methods and examines the main topics addressed in previous research.

Web of Science, PsycARTICLES and Google Scholar databases were searched, as well as a secondary manual screening of the reference lists of all the selected studies and Dutch academic journals. Based on this review, 54 empirical articles were included in the current paper.

Firstly, this paper revealed that there is no consensus in how to define the concept of resilience in this specific research area. A second observation was that most of the selected studies used a quantitative, cross-sectional research design. Finally, the 54 empirical studies provided insights on six topics: the role of the organization, demographic factors, personal characteristics, coping strategies, social support and the reactions of firefighters in the aftermath of PTE. Comparing the empirical results was challenged by the different interpretations and denominations of the concept of resilience and the myriad of measurement techniques applied across the selected articles.

This literature review discovered some promising avenues for future research regarding resilience of firefighters. Moreover, it demonstrated that studying resilience is particularly interesting as the identification of supporting factors leads to a better understanding of how to enhance the well-being, job satisfaction and job performance of firefighters.

This study aims to address how to facilitate more community members making purchases in social commerce communities. The research is expected to shed new light on the underlying process by which individuals’ social networks influence their purchases in social commerce communities.

An online survey and secondary archive data are presented to confirm all the hypotheses.

Community members’ out-degree ties show a positive effect on their attachment to other members, as well as to the community. Community members’ attachment to the community has a positive influence on their purchases made in the e-commerce modules of social commerce communities and mediates the effect of their attachment to community members. The study establishes a theoretical framework to reveal how community members’ social networks influence their purchases in social commerce communities.

The findings of this study provide new insights for managers and designers of new social commerce communities to inspire them to achieve their goal of keeping consumers making purchases in the e-commerce modules of social commerce communities.

Firstly, this study draws on attachment theory to explain why community members make purchases in a social commerce community. Then, the study enriches the research on social network ties and attachment theory by initially integrating the social network perspective with attachment theory to examine the effects of social network ties on different types of attachment.

The purpose of this paper is to review the prosecution by US authorities of Zhongxing Telecommunication Equipment (ZTE) Corporation for its violation of sanctions against the sale of systems to Iran and North Korea; the violation of the plea agreement; and, following presidential intervention, the imposition of a further fine and restructuring of its management.

An analysis of the materials used in court proceedings and speeches by officials in the case against ZTE

The US president intervened in a quasi-judicial matter in which a foreign firm had violated US sanctions that he had supported to lessen the penalties it faced. The firm had also violated its plea agreement. This personal intervention weakened enforcement of US sanctions on human rights and weapons of mass destruction (WMD). However, it revealed the excessive reliance of Chinese manufacturers on US-domiciled suppliers of semiconductors and software.

Neither was access to Chinese documents possible nor would it have been practicable to interview managers at ZTE.

Enforcement of US sanctions on the sale of telecommunications equipment have now been moved from strict enforcement on matters of human rights and WMD into political, trade and even personal negotiations with the US president.

A first analysis of a telecommunications sanctions case.

Organizations invest in information security (IS) technology to be more competitive; however, implementing IS measures creates environmental conditions, such as overload uncertainty, and complexity, which can cause employees technostress, eventually resulting in poor security performance. This study seeks to contribute to the intersection of research on regulatory focus (promotion and prevention) as a type of individual personality traits, technostress, and IS.

A survey questionnaire was developed, collecting 346 responses from various organizations, which were analyzed using the structural equation model approach with AMOS 22.0 to test the proposed hypotheses.

The results indicate support for both the direct and moderating effects of security technostress inhibitors. Moreover, a negative relationship exists between promotion-focused employees and facilitators of security technostress, which negatively affects strains (organizational commitment and compliance intention).

Organizations should develop various programs and establish a highly IS-aware environment to strengthen employees' behavior regarding IS. Furthermore, organizations should consider employees' focus types when engaging in efforts to minimize security technostress, as lowering technostress results in positive outcomes.

IS management at the organizational level is directly related to employees' compliance with security rather than being a technical issue. Using the transaction theory perspective, this study seeks to enhance current research on employees' behavior, particularly focusing on the effect of individuals' personality types on IS. Moreover, this study theorizes the role of security technostress inhibitors for understanding employees' IS behaviors.

With the increasingly cultural and linguistic diversity in education, teaching multicultural education for pre-service teachers becomes an important part of teacher education. In this collaborative self-study study, we examine how we construct our identities and how social interactions of multicultural education classrooms shape our identities. Our study draws on Lave and Wenger’s (1991) “identity as learners” concept, Akkerman and Bakker’s (2011) “boundary crossing learning” theory, Harré & Lagenhove’s (1999) positioning theory, and positionality concept. We found three themes that describe our identities and they reflect our embodiment of our positionality, our positions, our challenge confrontation, and our teaching improvement. We argue for the need of tracing the professional trajectories of multicultural education novice teacher educators and the important roles that our positionality plays in our identity formation. Our study has implications for professional support for multicultural education novice teacher educators and offers suggestions for further self-study research about multicultural education novice teacher educator identity formation.