The global COVID-19 pandemic made salient various paradoxical tensions, such as the trade-offs between individual freedom and collective safety, between short term and long-term consequences of adaptation to the new conditions, the power implications of sameness (COVID-19 was non-discriminatory in that all were affected in one way or another) and difference (yet not all were affected equally due to social differences), whereas most businesses became poorer under lockdown, others flourished; while significant numbers of workers were confined to home, some could not return home; some thrived while working from home as others were challenged by the erosion of barriers between their private and working lives. Rapid improvisational responding and learning at all levels of society presented itself as a naturally occurring research opportunity for improvisation scholars. This improvisation saw the arrival of a 'New Normal', eventually defined as 'learning to live with COVID-19'.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Health Policy Manag
December 2022
Healthcare innovations emerge and develop in institutionally dense selective environments. New projects and propositions in healthcare sectoral ecosystems can be understood as product-service compacts, that is, complex solutions that dynamically integrate tangible and intangible elements in close interaction with users' needs and the evolving regulatory context under uncertainty and ambiguity. We advance the concept of "strategic encounters" to encapsulate, capitalise and extend the contribution by Palm and Fischier's on the key enabling managerial factors for healthcare innovation implementation under conditions of imperfect foresight.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe uncover fundamental dimensions of the process through which organizations embed the practice of fraternity through embarking on an organizational journey in the direction of the common good. Building on the latest encyclical of Pope Francis, , about fraternal and social friendship, we offer insight into the understanding of what it means to become a fraternal organization and reflect on the key ethical and paradoxical challenges for organizations aiming at collectively contributing to the common good. We add to previous work by characterizing this journey as a process involving unique ethical challenges that emerge from the paradoxes associated with this process and how this might change the nature of the relationships between organizations and others within the organizational landscape.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy has had disastrous effects on the national economy. The hospitality sector has experienced a significant impact from the crisis: starting from March 2020 it has literally collapsed. Experts believe it will take three years for the sector to recover.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLong-term stewardship is usually represented as a stable condition and portrayed as a source of competitive advantage to firms (including family businesses) that use it as a mode of governance. Less is known about how organizations engage with stewardship as a . We embrace a process approach to report a case study about the unfolding of stewardship in a multi-business family group.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAs the work environment is increasing in competitiveness and stressfulness, more and more companies try to increase employee well-being. One option is allowing employees to bring their dogs to work, building on the considerable evidence that dogs have a positive influence on people's well-being. However, little is known about how a dog's presence influences the employees and the companies in offices.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMajor technological advances that are being introduced in the global mining industry have an impact on work and employee attitudes toward safety. The objective of this study was to analyze the impact of empowerment and technology on safety behavior. The research design was cross-sectional, and the sample was composed of 403 employees in mining companies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
October 2020
Although the first coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) wave has peaked with the second wave underway, the world is still struggling to manage potential systemic risks and unpredictability of the pandemic. A particular challenge is the "superspreading" of the virus, which starts abruptly, is difficult to predict, and can quickly escalate into medical and socio-economic emergencies that contribute to long-lasting crises challenging our current ways of life. In these uncertain times, organizations and societies worldwide are faced with the need to develop appropriate strategies and intervention portfolios that require fast understanding of the complex interdependencies in our world and rapid, flexible action to contain the spread of the virus as quickly as possible, thus preventing further disastrous consequences of the pandemic.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Psychological Capital Questionnaire (PCQ) is the most commonly used measure for assessing psychological capital in work settings. Although several studies confirmed its factorial validity, most validation studies only examined the four-factor structure preconized by Luthans, Youssef, and Avolio, not attending to empirical evidence on alternative factorial structures. The present study aimed to test the psychometric properties of the Portuguese version of the PCQ, by using two independent samples (NS1 = 542; NS2 = 115) of Portuguese employees.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe study shows how the perceptions of opportunities for learning and personal development predict five dimensions of affective well-being (AWB: pleasure, comfort, placidity, enthusiasm, and vigor), and how this relationship is moderated by the perceptions of work-family conciliation. A sample comprising 404 individuals was collected. The findings show the following: (1) both the perceptions of opportunities for learning and personal development and perceptions of work-family conciliation predict AWB, the happier individuals being those who have high perceptions on both variables; (2) both variables interact in predicting AWB, in such a way that perceptions of high opportunities for learning and personal development may not lead to higher AWB if work-family conciliation is low.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe authors show how the perceptions of spirit of camaraderie explain 5 dimensions of employees' affective well-being and how this relationship is moderated by the employees' need to belong. The sample comprised 296 individuals working in 78 organizations. The authors found the following: (a) Perceptions of spirit of camaraderie predict unique variance of all affective well-being dimensions; (b) the need to belong moderates the relationship between perceptions of spirit of camaraderie and affective well-being in such a way that employees with a strong need to belong are more sensitive or reactive to perceptions of spirit of camaraderie; (c) among those with low need to belong, the relationship between perceptions of spirit of camaraderie and affective well-being is not linear in such a way that a "surplus" of spirit of camaraderie can be detrimental to their affective well-being.
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