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The purpose of this paper is to describe how a group of International Baccalaureate (IB) Physics teachers exercise collective agency by initiating and facilitating their own collaboration using online tools across time zones and school contexts. The paper seeks to inform teacher communities, school leaders, policy and the growing body of literature about teacher agency.

This paper uses qualitative case study approach. Data were gathered from individual interviews, classroom observations and the group’s meeting agendas, notes and reflections.

Central to the group’s work is a norm of teaching “lock-step,” meaning they teach approximately the same lesson at approximately the same time. The norm enabled them to exercise collective agency over the curriculum and professional learning by establishing conditions for sharing knowledge and experiences and fostering accountability while still allowing for some individual adaptation.

An implication for teacher communities is that the norm of lock-step may be of benefit for improving curriculum (or other educational reforms) when the intention of the norm is to advance the collective (vs marching at the same pace). The study underscores the value of school leaders providing opportunities for teacher choice and voice in the design and facilitation of their learning communities.

The case of the IB Physics group contrasts decades of research showing that teachers cling to their autonomy. Group members were willing to give up a good deal of their individual autonomy for the benefits they derived from their collaboration.

This paper gives an overview of major issues in trust research, identifying common foundations and multiple constellations of organizational trust. In doing so, the paper also addresses important implications of theory development and empirical research. First, it provides a historical sketch of different approaches to understanding the phenomenon of trust, drawing upon various social science disciplines. Second, it discusses different levels of analysing trust in organizational settings. Third, it deals with important issues of operationalisation and measurement of organizational trust. Finally, it briefly summarises the contents of the five papers that follow this introductory paper in the special issue of JMP on “The micro‐foundations of organizational trust”.

The central aim of this study is to incorporate two core personality factors (neuroticism and extroversion) in the job demands‐resources (JD‐R) model.

It was hypothesized that neuroticism would be most strongly related to the health impairment process, and that extroversion would be most strongly related to the motivational process. The hypotheses were tested in a sample of 3,753 Australian academics, who filled out a questionnaire including job demands and resources, personality, health indicators, and commitment.

Results were generally in line with predictions. Structural equation modeling analyses showed that job demands predicted health impairment, while job resources predicted organizational commitment. Also, neuroticism predicted health impairment, both directly and indirectly through its effect on job demands, while extroversion predicted organizational commitment, both directly and indirectly through its effect on job resources.

These findings demonstrate the capacity of the JD‐R model to integrate work environment and individual perspectives within a single model of occupational wellbeing.

The study shows that working conditions are related to health and commitment, also after controlling for personality. This suggests that workplace interventions can be used to take care of employee wellbeing.

The paper contributes to the literature by integrating personality in the JD‐R model, and shows how an expanded model explains employee wellbeing.

Interpersonal trust is central to sustaining team effectiveness. Whilst leaders play the primary role in establishing and developing trust, little research has examined the specific leadership practices which engender trust toward team leaders. This study investigated the relationship between a set of leadership practices (transformational, transactional, and consultative) and members' trust in their leader, in research and development (R&D) teams. Usable questionnaires were completed by 83 team members drawn from 33 R&D project teams. Three factors together predicted 67 per cent of the variance in team members' trust towards leaders, namely: consulting team members when making decisions, communicating a collective vision, and sharing common values with the leader. Trust in the leader was also strongly associated with the leader's effectiveness. The implications of these findings for leadership development, team building and future research are discussed.

This chapter advances understanding of how professional expertise is enacted and created to accomplish routines in the context of technology-mediated work. Information and communication technologies broaden the participation of professionals with various specialist skills and expertise to accomplish work together, which is particularly salient in health care. Broadening participation, however, creates jurisdictional conflict among professionals. Thus, a key challenge of interprofessional work is the need to mutually adapt established professional routines and overcome jurisdictional conflict to perform interdependent routine tasks. The authors examine how professionals adapt established routines by analyzing the new interactions and interdependent actions required to accomplish technology-mediated geriatric consultation routines. The findings of this study show that professionals create new patterns of actions that are shaped by relational forms of professional expertise, namely selective and blending expertise. The findings and theoretical insights contribute to the literature on routine dynamics by highlighting the importance of relational expertise, and showing how it can transform and destabilize otherwise established professional routines.

Using a document analysis methodology, the study analyzes official policy documents produced by the centralized Israeli Ministry of Education and by the State Comptroller responsible for reviewing the Israeli government's policies and operations. Coordination is assessed using three lenses: coordination among policy plans initiated by different governmental ministries; coordination among policy plans initiated by the Ministry of Education; and coordination within policy plans, referring to the congruence among various components comprising a particular policy.

Following previous studies testifying to the significance of coordination for organizational effectiveness and to the contribution of centralized structures for coordination, the current study attempts to assess whether centralized complex educational systems exhibit coordination among their articulated policy plans.

In spite of the highly centralized nature of Israeli governance, coordination among policy plans articulated by different governmental ministries is limited. This also applies to the coordination found among various educational policy plans or among various components comprising particular policy plans articulated by the Ministry of Education.

While centralized structures produce administrative bottlenecks creating ideal grounds for coordination, it appears that the assumed connection between centralization and coordination may not be applicable to educational systems and that coordination among and within policy plans in complex systems is not a zero-sum game. Implications are further discussed.

The first purpose of this paper is to review the practical and theoretical distinctions between training and development in the organisational psychology and human resource development (HRD) literatures. Then the paper seeks to investigate how managers responsible for the training and development function conceptualise these activities in practice, the factors that guide their decision making, how they evaluate the outcomes and the extent to which they perceive a relationship between training and development.

Taking a critical realist perspective, 26 interviews were conducted with UK managers and analysed through thematic coding using template analysis.

Managers' conceptualisations of training and development vary. Formal training is prioritised due to a perceived more tangible demonstrable return on investment. Perceived success in training focuses on improvements to job‐related skills, whereas success outcomes for development are more varied and difficult to measure. Managers consider that training and development are more valuable when combined.

There is a need for further process‐driven research to understand the interrelationship between training and development and to develop methods that can be used by organisations to evaluate both. This necessitates going beyond methods currently in use and including both qualitative and quantitative measures.

Managers may take a more proactive and directive role in facilitating development than the literature suggests; consequently, their role needs to be considered more actively in HRD learning strategies.

This is one of the first qualitative studies to explore the conceptualisations of managers responsible for training and development, highlighting the inter‐relationship between training and development and the factors guiding decisions regarding these activities.

This paper's aim is to critically review the use of Delphi techniques in qualitative research for utilising “expert” opinions and to explore through a detailed example how Policy Delphi can be used by hospitality researchers as an alternative to the more widely used Normative Delphi.

The paper reflects on the research methodology of a project that explored organisational crisis signals detection using Policy Delphi with a criterion sample comprising 16 senior hotel executives involved in crisis management.

The main methodological concerns regarding Delphi are the definition of consensus, the expertise of the panel, its lack of scientific rigour, and – due to its lack of uniformity – reliability and validity of findings. Policy Delphi by default addresses the first since it does not seek consensus and can, through its design and execution, address the remaining concerns.

Carefully designed Policy Delphi can offer a powerful research tool for exploratory research in hospitality, particularly for development of policies and strategies within an organisation. Unlike Normative Delphi, it is not intended as a decision making tool, but rather as a tool to generate options and suggest alternative courses of action for consideration.

The paper presents a valuable research tool that has evaded the attention of many hospitality researchers offering an illustrative example of its use in exploratory research to deliver credible, transferable and confirmable findings.