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This paper aims to examine the personal and organisational factors that affected public sector managers' participation in leadership training programmes and their ability to transfer learning to their workplace.

In‐depth interviews were conducted with five Canadian and five Northern Irish managers who participated in one‐day leadership training programmes.

The uncertain environment throughout the public sector was the greatest inhibitor to training participation and transfer. However, other training characteristics and training design features were also noted (e.g. motivation, trainer influence).

Public sector organisations must take concrete steps to address current environmental challenges to fully benefit from leadership training programmes. The paper highlights pre‐, during, and post‐training strategies that can be implemented.

The findings illustrate that leaders in both public sector jurisdictions face similar issues and these have been exacerbated by the current turbulent climate. The authors suggest that to maximise return on training investment the public sector must create an environment supportive of training participation and transfer and suggest recommendations to help organisations in the future. These findings were facilitated by the use of qualitative training evaluation methods, not traditionally used in training transfer research.

This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting‐edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

According to modern‐day cynics (or maybe they are just realists) involved in teaching and coaching, a huge chunk of what we learn at management training programs does not follow us far beyond the training center door, and a further large proportion of what is remembered is not applied to the job.

The paper provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world's leading organizations.

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy‐to digest format.

To explore human resource (HR) practitioner perspectives of the effectiveness, challenges, and aspirations of the performance management (PM) system to inform future directions for PM design and success.

Interviews with 53 HR practitioners from a cross-section of organisations operating in the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand.

Practitioner's discussed the criticality of effective conversations across all elements of the PM system. Using an interpretive approach, and through a lens of social exchange theory (SET), we used their voice to develop a conversations-based PM model. This model centres on effective performance conversations through the design and implementation of the PM system. It includes four enablers and five environmental elements. The enablers (aligned goals, frequent feedback, skills development, and formality) depend on skilled interactions and conversations, and the organisational environmental elements (design, development function, buy-in, culture, and linkage to other systems) are enhanced when effective conversations take place.

Practitioners can use the conversations model to help shape the way they design and implement PM systems, that place emphasis on upskilling participants to engage in both formal and informal honest conversations to build competency in the enablers and assess organisational readiness in terms of the environmental elements.

By listening to the under-utilised voice of the HR practitioner, and through a lens of SET, we developed a PM model which emphasises reciprocity and relationship building as key tenets of the PM system. While past research recognises the importance of effective conversations for PM implementation, it has largely silent been about the role of conversations in system design. Our model centres these conversations, presenting enablers and environmental elements to facilitate their core position within effective PM.

In this study the authors examine whether bridge employees tend to hold non-standard jobs, and if so, whether non-standard job choice is deliberate. Moreover, the authors examine whether fulfillment of employment expectations affects the personal and work attitudes of bridge employees.

The authors' research and hypotheses are supported and developed through psychological contract theory. The authors collected data from 195 bridge employees, employed in a variety of jobs, through an online survey. Hypotheses were tested using hierarchical multiple regression.

This study suggests that some bridge employees may engage in non-standard employment deliberately. Moreover, we show that fulfillment of perceived obligation by employers (psychological contract) is associated with personal and work attitudes (life satisfaction, job satisfaction, affective commitment, normative commitment and intentions to stay) of bridge employees.

While this study supports psychological contract theory as an important framework for understanding bridge employment, sample size, cross-sectional data and a lack of diversity in the sample limit causality, generalizability and data robustness. Future research should strive to replicate and extend the current findings.

The present study underlines the importance of designing jobs to meet the expectations of bridge employees. Also, it highlights the preference of bridge employees to engage in non-standard employment.

The authors extend bridge employment research by empirically examining the relationship between unmet employment expectations and the personal and work attitudes of bridge employees.

This paper aims to assess the effectiveness of verbal self‐guidance (VSG) and self‐management on youth employability. It seeks to access the joint effectiveness of these interventions, grounded in social cognitive and goal setting theories, for youth job seekers.

The studies used experimental designs involving participants enrolled in an undergraduate business cooperative degree program. Survey data assessing self‐efficacy and anxiety were collected pre and post‐training. Interview performance was also assessed in each study.

In study 1, it was found that students trained in self‐management and verbal self‐guidance (SMVSG) improved interview performance and reduced anxiety. In study 2, it was found that self‐efficacy and job search effort were higher in the SMVSG group relative to VSG alone.

For study 1, the only measure of employment was a mock interview. For study 2, a limitation was that approximately 25 per cent of participants failed to either complete the post‐training survey or attend the interview.

Overall the studies describe a relatively simple and low cost training intervention, and associated performance measures, that can continue to be used by practitioners and scholars with future groups of youth job seekers.

The paper shows that these studies further support the effectiveness of VSG‐based interventions for employability. The paper also shows the value of augmenting VSG training with self‐management training in the context of youth employability. Furthermore, this research also considered anxiety, a key variable in successful employment that has often been omitted in the literature.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how maternity doctors deal with anxieties generated through their interactions with patients.

The authors juxtapose two critical stories, collected as part of a large mixed method field study of leadership and patient care in three UK hospitals. The study of “organizational stories” is particularly relevant in health care settings that are liable to unleash strong emotions and fantasies, stories have a great advantage of offering an outlet for unconscious emotions and fantasies. The authors collected stories (n=48) from different stakeholders, and after extensive discussions and analysis, it was decided to focus this article on two stories told by two different doctors. These stories sum up not only the storytellers' own personal experiences but also reveal something more profound and general about the nature of doctors' anxieties and the means used to contain them. By restricting the discussion to two narratives, many variations are left outside our remit; the benefit, however, is that the nuances contained in these stories can be looked at in far greater detail.

The principal cause of doctors' anxiety in this study was a constant balancing between an objectifying “I‐it” and a communicative “I‐Thou” relations with their patients and the organization. If the doctors were unable to deliver what in their personal scale would have been good or even satisfactory patient care, anxiety levels started rising. The coping with and managing of anxiety was mainly done through controlling of relations with patients and colleagues.

The paper offers insights into situations that prompt diverse challenging emotions.