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The purpose of this paper is to examine whether management supports police officers adequately, or whether police have to rely on their individual attributes, specifically psychological capital (PsyCap), to cope with red tape and stress. Work outcomes/consequences examined were discretionary power, affective commitment and turnover intentions.

A cross-sectional design using a survey-based, self-report strategy was used to collect data from 588 police officers from USA, who are most engaged with the public. The data were analysed using AMOS and a structural model to undertake structural equation modelling.

Two significant paths were identified Path 1: management support to red tape to discretionary power to affective commitment and turnover intentions; and Path 2: supervisor relationships to PsyCap to stress to affective commitment and turnover intentions. Further, management support predicted PsyCap, red tape and police stressors. Red tape increased police stressors and turnover intentions.

The use of self-report surveys is a limitation, causing common methods bias. Using Harmon’s one-factor post hoc test, the authors were able to provide some assurance that common method bias was of no major concern.

As far as is known, this study is the first to examine, for police officers, how PsyCap impacts upon negative factors (stress and red tape) and enhances positive drivers for employees. Examining the impact of an individual attribute – PsyCap – provides an important piece of the organizational puzzle in explaining the commitment and turnover intentions of police officers. By examining the impact of both organizational and individual factors, there is now more knowledge about the antecedents of police outcomes.

Small to medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) continue to make a major contribution to the Australian economy. However, research into organisational processes within SMEs has been limited to date. This study aims to examine the links between communication processes and organisational effectiveness in SMEs.

This quantitative study uses social capital theory as a framework to investigate whether employees' level of satisfaction with organisational communication processes affects organisational outcomes within three high growth manufacturing SMEs in one area of Australia.

Results indicate that organisational communication processes does affect employees' levels of ambiguity regarding customers, job satisfaction and commitment to their firms.

While generalisability is limited because of the small number of SMEs participating in the study, the research indicates great potential for developing theoretical and practical insights into Australian SMEs that would assist industry and employees overall.

Implications for the growth strategies of SMEs, particularly in relation to the current skilled labour shortage, are discussed.

The paper contributes much needed theoretical development and research into SMEs.

This chapter uses the structural and relational dimension of social capital theory (SCT) as a lens for examining the impact of the supervisor–subordinate relationship on nurses' perceptions of the usefulness of their workplace networks, sociability, and affective commitment. A survey was used to collect data from 1,064 Australian nurses.

The findings suggest that nurses rely on very small workplace networks (typically only one other person) with which they have strong ties. Further, in over half of the cases, the supervisor (the Nurse Unit Manager (NUM)) holds the centric position. Moreover, for those nurses who did not include the NUM in their workplace network, their position appears even worse. For example, the usual reason given by nurses for not including the NUM was that the NUM was unavailable. This is a concern for health care management because the past two decades have delivered many changes to the nursing profession, including a reduction in the number of nursing positions and subsequent higher workloads. The consequences suggest that without effective workplace networks, nurses are working under conditions where solving problems is more difficult.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of organisational business acumen and social network structure on the earnings and labour precarity experienced by creative industry workers.

Results from a survey that collected data from a random sample of 289 creative workers are analysed using structural equation modelling. Mediating effects of social network structure are explored.

Results support the qualitative findings of Crombie and Hagoort (2010) who claim that organisational business acumen is a significant enabler for creative workers. Further, social network structure has a partial mediating effect in mitigating labour precarity.

This exploratory study is novel in its use of a quantitative approach to understand the relationship between labour and social network dynamics of the creative industries. For this reason, developed scales, while robust in exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, warrant further application and maturity.

The organisational business acumen of creative workers is found to mitigate labour precarity and increase perceived earnings.

The results from this study call for policy and management shifts, to focus attention on developing business proficiency of creative workers, in an effort to curb labour precarity in the creative industries, and enhance positive spillovers into other sectors.

The paper fills a gap in knowledge regarding the impact of organisational business acumen and social network structure on the pay and working conditions of people working in a sector that is dominated by self-employed and freelance arrangements.

The purpose of this paper is to compare the impact of the quality of employee enablers (in this case measured by the quality of the communication relationship between local government employees and supervisors) with the ideal “high quality social capital network” on the quality of outputs (such as employees' level of ambiguity in relation to customers and/or their level of productivity).

This research uses a concurrent nested mixed methods strategy – gaining the majority of the data from a cross‐sectional, survey‐based, self‐report strategy and supporting these findings with qualitative data.

The findings suggest that the quality of employee enablers did affect the quality of outputs and these conditions were ideal for achieving high quality service delivery. Employees experienced some level of dissatisfaction with communication frequency, mode, content and bi‐direction and this significantly contributed to their experiencing some level of ambiguity in relation to customers, ethical issues and their supervisors.

The sample is limited to local government employees that provided front‐line service to the public located within one state of Australia. Moreover, common methods bias is often cited as a problem of data obtained from self‐report surveys.

The implementation of NPM aimed to embed private sector practices within a public sector context so as to make the organisations more customer‐focused – however, the findings appear to be contrary to this aim.

The findings from this study provide another piece of evidence about the impact of recent reforms on the effectiveness of Australia's local government in providing the employee enablers to meet the needs of customers. As such, it provides a building‐block for further studies to review the impact of changes resulting from the implementation of NPM.