The purpose of this paper is to investigate the circumstances under which empowering leadership fosters creative performance. Arguments were developed for a three-way interaction of empowering leadership, problem-solving demands and creative personality in this linkage. These arguments resulted in competing hypotheses from a fit and a compensation perspective. The results from a survey of 213 employees of a Flemish large industrial organization were used. We found that less creative employees in jobs with high problem-solving demands particularly benefit from empowering leadership. This paper adds to a more complex understanding of the effectiveness of empowering leadership by highlighting the relevance of the simultaneous interplay of contextual and personal factors.

The compassion of healthcare workers towards patients is widely recognized, but research suggests a dearth of compassion among co-workers. Indeed, workplace bullying and negative employee outcomes are over-represented in the healthcare sector (including burnout and substantial staff turnover). In this paper, we discuss the cultivation of compassion for healthcare workers, using the lens of positive organizational scholarship. Our concern is not only with the individual level compassion (i.e. between employees), we also consider how compassion can be cultivated systemically across healthcare institutions at the organizational level. More specifically, we present a proposed Noticing, Empathising, Assessing and Responding Mechanisms Model of Organizational Compassion as a tool for consciously cultivating workplace compassion in healthcare organizations.

The study analyses the broad sets of factors that influence the innovation adoption process in the environmental, organizational, top managers,’ innovation and user acceptance context. The innovation adoption process is presented as a sequence of stages, progressing from initiation through adoption decision to implementation of an innovation and it is considered at the organizational level. The Delphi survey conducted among 264 experts of a diverse professional and academic experience allowed examining the perceived significance of each factor for the various stages of the innovation adoption process. The results of the analysis show that the considered factors do not affect the innovation adoption process with the same strength but exert varying levels of influence on the subsequent stages. The study discusses the implications of these findings and suggests ideas for future research.

Employing self-determination theory, in this study, we explore how workplace ostracism (being ignored and excluded by others) affects newcomer’s voice behavior. Through an empirical study with 353 matched supervisor–subordinate pairs from a large high-technology company, we find that workplace ostracism has negative influence on newcomer’s both promotive and prohibitive voice through the mediating effect of psychological needs satisfaction. In addition, narcissism moderates the effects of ostracism on psychological needs satisfaction. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

This study has extended existing research on CEO power, pay structure, and firm performance, offering models based mainly on agency theory and managerial power theory, and testing hypotheses using data from 112 companies across a five-year span (2001–2005) in computer-related industry groups in the United States. The results indicated that power from executive directorship positively impacts a firm's return on assets and return on equity, and that CEO power from duality negatively impacts CEO long-term pay and total pay, while CEO power from tenure positively impacts CEO long-term pay and pay leverage, and composite power negatively impacts short-term pay. Evidence for CEO pay as a mediator between CEO power and firm performance revealed that CEO short-term pay positively impacts a firm's return on assets and international performance but negatively impacts its market value, regardless of which source of power is being controlled. CEO total pay positively impacts a firm's return on assets and international performance, with power from CEO duality, directorship, or composite power being controlled. Hence, and in general, CEO pay fails to significantly mediate the relationships between CEO power and firm performance. The contributions include a multiple-perspective study of CEO power, compensation, and firm performance to comprehensively discover each of their respective relationships. This study has further extended the debate over agency perspectives with stewardship perspectives to fill knowledge and theoretical gaps. Thus, evidence-based findings provide boards of directors with practical knowledge for sound governance with another avenue for future research in corporate governance.

The findings from the first, qualitative stage of a larger sequential mixed method study of bullying in the Australian nursing workplace are reported. Interviews with twenty-six nurses, recruited from two health care organizations, were analysed using the constant comparative method. Participants described informal organizational networks as the mechanism through which predatory, cooperative, and planned group bullying acts were promulgated. These predatory alliances enabled the co-option of legitimate organizational systems, the concealment of bullying, and the protection and promotion of perpetrators. By identifying the manner in which workplace bullying can be embedded within informal organizational networks, this research has important implications for further research in this field.

This paper proposes that the United Nation's sustainable development goals (SDGs) and associated targets form an effective framework for determining real-world research impact. Existing bibliometrics that assess the quality of academic work are usually quantitative and self-referential, reducing the focus on real-world issues. The same measurements are often adopted by funding bodies, pressuring researchers to increase compliance, and further reducing integrity and real-world impact. A series of world cafés were conducted, collecting data on how researchers, their institutions, and network organisations can contribute to, and measure research aligned with the SDGs and targets. The results showed that participants were generally positive towards using the SDGs and targets to measure impact and quality of academic research. Suggestions to assist greater adoption of the SDGs and targets as a measure of impact included: aligning governmental and institutional funding; changing key performance indicators; increasing cross-disciplinary work; aligning mission/vision statements; and legitimising SDG-focused projects at conferences.

During the past decade, a great deal of research has been carried out on the importance of employee engagement. In various studies, engagement is viewed as a positive state of mind of overwhelming satisfaction, which is characterized by feelings of vigour, dedication and absorption. In this article, ‘vigour’ refers to a state of mind in which individuals feel energetic, fit, strong and indefatigable. ‘Dedication’ refers to a state of mind in which individuals feel highly engaged by their work, which inspires them, and makes them feel proud and enthusiastic. ‘Absorption’ refers to a pleasant state of mind in which individuals are fully immersed in their work. This article provides an overview of a number of perspectives on leadership and discusses which leadership factors are likely to be the most effective in ensuring that employees remain engaged and productive. It also provides a conceptual model for further research on the relationship between leadership styles and work engagement.

Considerable research attention has been devoted to understanding the importance of knowledge creation in organisations over the last decade. Research suggests that leadership plays an important role in knowledge-creation processes. Nonetheless, there is an important omission in knowledge creation research; namely, what are the underlying processes that underpin the implications of leadership for knowledge creation? This article aims to develop a theoretical model of leadership and knowledge creation by drawing on two contrasting leadership perspectives; that is transformational leadership and leader–member exchange (LMX), and the research on open-mindedness norms. Specifically, we argue why transformational leadership is related to knowledge creation, and also theorise how open-mindedness norms and LMX quality serve as underlying mechanisms to underpin the effect of transformational leadership on knowledge creation. We conclude with a discussion of implications of the model for theory and practice, and also suggest potential avenues for future research.

We review the theoretical and empirical literature on the resource-based view in the context of family businesses using a framework of intangible resources. This approach allows us to structure the present research on value-adding resources in family firms into four clearly distinct groups – organizational culture, reputation, human capital and networks – and provides us with the opportunity to examine the interactions of these intangible resources. We use these relationships to offer a future research agenda that is focused on the creation of competitive advantage through the combination and recombination of these resources.

Using a sample of 72 European and 22 North American educational institutions, we examine the extent to which business schools in North America and Europe are driving educational programs and initiatives in corporate social responsibility and sustainability (CSRS). Drawing on several theoretical perspectives, such as institutional-comparative perspectives and resource dependence theory, the study indicates the increasing prominence of CSRS education in business schools on both continents. It does so through analysis of the extent to which business schools offer (a) dedicated CSRS programs, (b) CSRS tracks and majors, (c) compulsory CSRS classes or modules, and (d) optional CSRS modules across the range of taught programs. Contrary to some previous findings, religious affiliation, public/private status, and program size had only a negligible direct association with schools' commitment to CSRS education. However, business school prestige showed a statistically significant relationship. Finally, the study highlights how European respondents' perceptions concerning the primary drivers and constraints of CSRS initiatives differed from those in North America.

Contextualizing organizational behavior research means considering the influence of context and illuminating how context influences organizational behavior. In this article, we examine the field of organizational behavior against the criteria of contextualized research, finding it comes up short. We discuss the influences of context and contextual influences and identify ways to contextualize organizational behavior research. We provide examples of contextualized research and outline future directions for contextualized organizational behavior research. Lastly, we issue a call and urge scholars to take up the challenge of putting context back into their organizational behavior research and opening new research pathways and innovative theory for examining organization behavior.

This study uses Appreciative Inquiry (AI) as a lens for informing the process for building on employees' existing wellbeing within one Australian organisation, using the ‘discovery, dreaming, designing, and achieving destiny’ process. Using POSH as a theoretical framework, we worked with a large Not-For-Profit healthcare organisation as part of the ‘discovery’ phase to identify elements of what was positive, flourishing, and life-giving in the practices of their employees. During the ‘dreaming’ process, employees' wellbeing was identified as a strength. During the ‘designing’ phase, a training program was co-designed to build on employees' existing levels of wellbeing. This paper reports outcomes as part of the ‘achieving destiny component’ of the AI process. In particular, the outcomes show that employees' knowledge of, and ability to use positive emotions increased, which is a positive first step for increasing employees' wellbeing and organisational resilience.

This article synthesizes public and private sector accumulated research regarding the relationship between job security and employee work attitudes (i.e., job satisfaction and organizational commitment). The present meta-analysis of 37 studies (including 45 independent samples) shows that the medium-sized associations between job security and each work attitude variables (i.e., job satisfaction and organizational commitment) were found, with true score correlations (ρ) of .327 for job satisfaction, and .253 for organizational commitment. These results highlight the significance of job security at the workplace, in shaping and enhancing attitudes of employee and job security is worth retaining in some form in the public sector, contrary to the logic of at-will employment. This meta-analysis findings also call attention to several important considerations for developing effective public job security policy.

The attention for sustainable development (SD) is ever growing (Van Poeck, Vandenabeele, & Bruyninckx, 2009). Although the importance of SD integration in higher education (HE), both on strategic and operational level, is often stressed, actual measurements of this integration are less frequent. Therefore, a large scale assessment was set up to assess SD integration within 33 professionally and academically oriented programs of applied economics in a total of 22 Flemish HE institutions. The integration of SD in applied economics programs is crucial for society, among others because business students are our future managers (Ceulemans & De Prins, 2010). The interrelations between different SD integration strategies and the barriers to them were also studied in this research, leading us to a new concept, where two different dimensions of SD integration are combined. From the research we can conclude that an SD integration approach that combines horizontal and vertical integration with bottom-up and top-down seems to be the most beneficial for sustained SD integration efforts.

Faultline configurations in top management teams are of vital importance in predicting firm outcomes. Grounded in faultline theory, we hypothesise the positive effects of faultlines through the dual routes of coordination and information processing under conditions of various subgroup configuration types. Second-hand data from publicly traded Chinese information technology firms are used to test our hypotheses. The results demonstrate that TMT faultline strength is positively related to a firm’s short-term performance only when both the number and the balance of subgroups are high and is positively related to a firm’s innovation activities only when the number of subgroups is high and the balance of subgroups is low. This study contributes to faultline theory by enriching the connotation of faultlines with the configurational perspective and advancing the debate on the effects of team faultlines as we reveal the benefits of TMT faultlines.

Although organisations often implement team-based structures to improve performance, such restructuring does not automatically ameliorate poor performance. The study in this article explores the relationship between team members' negative mood and team processes (social cohesion, workload sharing, team conflict) to determine if negative mood has a detrimental effect on team performance via team processes. Two hundred and forty one participants completed surveys and were involved in an independently rated performance task that was completed over eight weeks. Negative mood was found to influence team processes and as a consequence, team performance. The results, however, were not uniformly negative. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

This study explored the relationship between work–family conflict and employee burnout, with a sample of 203 New Zealand government workers. Two types of conflict (work–family and family–work) were significant predictors of employee burnout. This supports the bi-directional nature of work–family conflict. In addition, the moderating effects of employee coping strategies were explored. Positive thinking coping had no significant effect on either work–family or family–work conflict and burnout. Direct action coping intensified the negative relationships for both work–family and family–work conflict, with employees coping through working harder suffering intensified burnout effects. In addition, resignation coping also intensified the family–work conflict and employee burnout relationship. The implications for employers and employees are discussed.

Does transformational leadership have a positive relationship to organizational culture and innovation propensity in business organizations of Pakistan? Transformational leadership has been associated with a variety of positive organizational outcomes in a number of studies. However, the outcomes of transformational leadership in Pakistan are still underexplored. The current study examined the specific relationship between transformational leadership, organizational culture, and innovation propensity among a sample of 523 organizational members in Pakistan. Our findings showed that transformational leadership is positively related to organizational culture and innovation propensity. Results also indicated that organizational culture mediates the relationship between transformational leadership and innovation propensity. Furthermore, ANOVA analyses identified differences in ratings of transformational leadership across employees' education level and company size. Also, correlation analyses found no relationship between employees' ratings of transformational leadership and employees' age and organizational tenure. Implications for practice and directions for future research are discussed.

Ambidexterity organization, which is defined as the ability of an organization to simultaneously pursues exploration and exploitation, has received attention by researchers who have examined its beneficial effect on organizational performance and success. This study attempted to examine the positive effect of ambidextrous organization culture (AOC), which is regarded as the core characteristic of ambidextrous organizations by using a multilevel model. Specifically, this study examined the effects of AOC on members’ job performance and the mediating role of psychological capital in the relationship between AOC and job performance. The results indicated that AOC had a significantly positive relationship with job performance even after controlling various organizational and individual variables. Moreover, we found that psychological capital fully mediated the relationship between AOC and members’ job performance. This study provides theoretical contributions by empirically examining the positive effect and mechanism of AOC. Furthermore, this study offers practical implications in how practitioners can manage their organizational culture, by helping shape the direction of organizational culture management.