Nurul Ain Hidayah Abas, Mei-Hua Lin, Kathleen Otto, Izazol Idris and T. Ramayah
Academia is known for its high competitiveness, with prestige and diverse responsibilities and achievements being decisive determinants of success resulting in academic…
Abstract
Purpose
Academia is known for its high competitiveness, with prestige and diverse responsibilities and achievements being decisive determinants of success resulting in academic incivility. This paper extends Lazarus and Folkman's theory of stress by examining the moderating role of interpersonal justice (IJ) , as supervisory support, on academics' job satisfaction and depressivity.
Design/methodology/approach
The study recruited 185 academics from a public university in Malaysia to participate in a survey. Using the partial least squares- structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) analysis, academic incivility was negatively related to job satisfaction, whilst positively related to depressivity.
Findings
As hypothesized, it was found that the predicted detrimental effect of academic incivility on job satisfaction was buffered by perceiving high IJ from their immediate supervisors, i.e. deans or heads of department. An unanticipated finding was that there was a stronger relationship between academic incivility and depressivity for those academics who perceived high supervisory IJ.
Practical implications
Further, academic management can formulate and revise zero-incivility policies and promote awareness explaining the detrimental impacts of incivility, despite support systems in academia.
Originality/value
This study provides the first empirical evidence showing the differential impact of supervisory IJ on two conditions of incivility–well-being relationships. Work culture and various sources of incivility should be considered for future research.
Details
Keywords
The purpose of this paper is to critically analyze the discourses on migrant acculturation and migrants’ mobile phone communication, in order to examine the inclusiveness of…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to critically analyze the discourses on migrant acculturation and migrants’ mobile phone communication, in order to examine the inclusiveness of communication-acculturation research in the recent years.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper draws on from 102 qualitative interviews (48 Malayali, 26 Bangla, 17 Tamil and 11 Telugu) for a larger research project that investigated the role of mobile phones in migrant acculturation in Singapore. Respondents were selected using a combination of purposive and snowball sampling methods. The respondents had been in Singapore for varying amount of time: from one month to 19 years.
Findings
The analysis of the discourses on migrant acculturation and mobile phone communication revealed that labor migrants were excluded on the basis of their temporary status and apprehensions on work productivity. The mobile usage prohibitions that existed in work sites were hinged on similar discourses that stereotyped the labor migrants. The emancipatory metaphor that has been at the center of research on migrants’ mobile phone usage and acculturation needs to be replaced with a critical discourse perspective.
Research limitations/implications
The data were originally collected for a research project that approached the phenomena of acculturation and mobile phone appropriation from a positivist perspective, whereas this paper analyzed the data to critically examine the discourses that supported the premise of the project itself. Due to this, the findings presented in this paper have limited scope for generalization.
Originality/value
The paper critiques the research trends in migrant acculturation and mobile phone communication and suggests a possible alternative that goes beyond the “transcendental teleology” that underpins discourse and practice.