The power of personality at work: Core self‐evaluations and earnings in the United Kingdom

Organisations are increasingly taking an interest in personality as certain traits purportedly predict desirable attitudes and behaviours. We examine the relationship between one increasingly popular construct—core self‐evaluations (CSEs)—and earnings. We argue that if high levels of CSEs really are valuable traits, then high CSE individuals should be observed to earn more than those with moderate or low levels of CSEs. Using the nationally representative British Household Panel Survey, we find little evidence that individuals with very high CSEs earn more than those with only moderate levels. However, we do find the existence of a pay penalty for individuals very low in CSEs. Similar patterns emerge for the Big Five model of traits. Although the exact mechanisms remain unclear, our findings imply that organisations should play a greater role in the career development of employees scoring lowly in “desirable” traits—especially in a context of increasing career fluidity.     

Women at work: a case study of the insurance industry

This article reports the results of a survey of women employed in the Australian insurance industry. Three main issues are discussed: attitudes to work, experience at work and the role of the trade union in the workplace.     

Partnership at work and worker participation: an NHS case study

This article considers issues of workplace union strategy in a study of a National Health Service hospital trust in which the focus of the investigation is the ‘employee voice’ gains, or losses, arising from partnership and worker participation. The impact of government policy on local management and, in turn, employees’ opportunities to participate in organisational decision making is therefore the main theme explored in this analysis.     

Goodbye Germany! The influence of personality and cognitive factors on the intention to work abroad

The demand for internationally mobile employees is increasing with globalization. Being able to assess an employee's intention to work abroad already at the stage of hiring becomes an important criteria for employee selection. Cognitions specified by the theory of planned behavior (TPB) were examined as mediators of the relationship between individuals' personality traits and the intention to work abroad. Utilizing a sample of 518 German business students, mediation analysis suggests that the cognitive constructs contained within the TPB fully mediate the relationships between the personality traits of openness to experience and extraversions and the intention to work abroad.     

Revolutionizing the workplace: A case study of the future of work program at Capital One

Today's workplace designs are being revolutionized due to the changing nature of work and worker profiles, the impact of technology, and the need for organizational efficiency and flexibility. Our case study of the Future of Work (FOW) program at Capital One highlights how thoughtful segmentation of work styles, supportive HR policy, customized workplace design, and the optimal use of technology can enhance knowledge work. FOW results show clear success in terms of increased employee satisfaction leading to improved organizational performance along with better real estate asset utilization and flexibility. To assist HR leaders and planners, we suggest a practical model that shows the impact of workplace design requirements on employee behavior and ultimately on organizational outcomes. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Perceptions of stress at work

This article reviews previous research on the scale of perceived stress at work and describes results from the 'Bristol Stress and Health at Work' study (Smith et al, 2000a, 2000b). This study had three main aims: first, to determine the scale of perceived stress at work in a random population sample; secondly, to distinguish the effects of stress at work from those of stress in life as a whole; and, finally, to determine whether objective measures of health status and performance efficiency were related to reports of stress at work. These objectives were investigated by conducting an epidemiological survey of 17,000 randomly selected people from the Bristol electoral register, a follow‐up survey 12 months later and detailed investigation of a cohort from the original sample. The results revealed that approximately 20 per cent of the sample reported very high or extremely high levels of stress at work. This effect was reliable over time, related to potentially stressful working conditions and associated with impaired physical and mental health. The effects of stress at work could not be attributed to life stress or negative affectivity. The cohort study also suggested that high levels of stress at work may influence physiology and mental performance. The prevalence rate obtained in this study suggests that five million workers in the UK may have very high levels of stress at work.     

Problems with partnership at work: lessons from an Irish case study

This article uses a case study of a celebrated enterprise partnership in Ireland that broke down to get an insight into why such arrangements are hard to sustain. The argument of the article is that meaningful enterprise partnerships require trade unions and management to accept agency costs, which in practice involves management modifying their right to manage and unions accepting that issues normally addressed by the collective bargaining process may have to be delegated to the partnership arrangement. The evidence of the case study is that neither management nor unions were prepared to incur such costs. The case study suggests that the following trinity – meaningful partnership, full-blown collective bargaining and management's right to manage is exceptionally difficult to operate at the same time.     

Innovation in work practices: a practice perspective

Dynamic capability theory argues that organizations' internal capabilities enable sustained competitive advantage. Innovations in work practices (commonly termed ‘high performance’, ‘high commitment’ or ‘high involvement’ practices) are an important source of these internal capabilities but research evidence shows low levels of penetration. Using a practice perspective, case study analysis of 7 establishments in the aerospace sector identifies three themes that are under-attended to in current research on innovations in work practices: industry and production context; distributed nature of management activity, and social embeddedness. Implications for future research are discussed.     

工程建设领域廉政监督工作的思考与实践

工程建设项目由于其投资大、环节多、周期长、范围广,腐败问题也比较复杂。清醒认识和把握该领域腐败的特征和原因,对于重大工程建设项目反腐倡廉工作有着事半功倍的效果。文章通过对近年来工程建设领域重大典型腐败案件的梳理和分析,从工程项目建设领域腐败问题的主要特征、原因剖析以及对策思考三个方面进行分析,探索工程建设领域廉政监督工作的方法,对该领域反腐倡廉工作提供有效参考。     

Embedding employee involvement and participation at work

Most quantitative studies analysing the nature and impact of employee involvement and participation (EIP) have used data that differentiate between its absence and presence. However, the application of EIP practices varies substantially, and impact may depend on how embedded EIP is at workplace level. Developing the concept of ‘embeddedness’ as a combination of measures of the breadth and depth of EIP practices, we use WERS98 to examine the impact of EIP on employee perceptions. Our results show support for propositions that greater breadth and depth of EIP practices are associated with higher levels of organisational commitment and job satisfaction.     

Play at work,learning and innovation

ABSTRACT

Suggesting a virtuous triangle constituting public service innovation of new governances, innovation and learning, the paper examines how and why a particular mode of learning occurs: that of play. Having identified an absence of research literature on play as a catalyst for new ideas in public services, the paper argues that the diversified nature of public services and disciplinary intermixing offers fertile ground for playing with new service ideas. Our conception of play avoids functional interpretations, such as Amabile or individualizing the results of play and instead draws upon Vygotsky’s social learning theory to conceptualize play as a group activity from which new ideas emerge and suggest a new framework for understanding purposive play at work and the contribution it can make to public service innovation.     

Evolution of preferences and cross-country differences in time devoted to market work

I model the hypothesis that preferences evolve and permanent differences in individual attitudes towards work emerge between two countries characterized initially by identical preferences as a result of a period in which only one of the two countries is subject to regulations constraining labor supply, or as a by-product of different tax rates on labor income. Hence, the elimination of these regulations may not allow the economy thus deregulated to converge to the same hours of market work per person of the other economy, and the long-run differential in market work between economies subject to different tax rates is amplified.     

Preventing sexual harassment at work

This article is based on research undertaken on behalf of the European Commission into the nature, extent and consequences of sexual harassment at work. It discusses the definition, occurrence and repercussions of sexual harassment and develops the argument for a European Directive on the Prevention of Sexual Harassment at Work by considering the operation and limitations of existing legal provisions.     

The Japanese at work: illusions of the ideal

Five aspects of Japanese organisational practice are commonly cited as factors in the Japanese ‘economic miracle’. While these are often used to illustrate the human-centred philosophy of Japanese management, closer scrutiny reveals that these ‘ideal’ working practices are rooted in various culturally-dependent, coercive techniques which may be unsuitable for Britain.     

After the windfall: the New Deal at work

The New Deal for Young People – the government's flagship welfare to work initiative – was launched over a year ago. This article assesses the New Deal in terms of its long-run objectives, its short-term effects and how well it is operating on the ground. The conclusion is that although the New Deal has made an excellent start and helped cut youth employment, a gap exists between what some young people and some employers expect from the New Deal and what they experience.     

High performance work practice implementation and employee impressions of line manager leadership

Human resource management (HRM) research has documented the importance of high performance work practices (HPWPs) to organizations, and recent efforts have argued for increasing attention to the role of line manager implementation of HPWPs. To date, research in this area has focused largely on the organizational or employee implications of HPWP implementation, ignoring the process through which implementation affects outcomes. In this article, we use theory on impression formation to describe the perceptual process through which line manager implementation of HPWPs facilitates the formation of different employee impressions of manager leadership styles. We argue that this process is contingent upon employee attributions of implementation intent, which are influenced by the interaction of employee affective and attributional tendencies with line manager implementation style (i.e., political skill). Our conceptualization of this process contributes to HRM research by demonstrating the benefits of integrating it with leadership theory, as well as identifying the role of interpersonal perceptual processes in the effects of HPWPs.