Understanding consumers' purchase intentions toward natural‐claimed products: A qualitative research in personal care products

In recent years there is a trend of consuming natural products for a sustainable and healthier life. Therefore, firms began aligning their strategy with sustainability by communication strategies that they produce natural products, which are better for health as well as the environmental sustainability. However, sometimes these claims may be deceptive. The purpose of this paper is to understand the consumers' purchasing intentions toward products claiming naturalness in their advertising and packaging strategies. This research also examined greenwashing perceptions and their potential roles in purchasing intentions. In‐depth face‐to‐face interviews carried out with 20 Turkish women regarding personal care products (local brand and international brand). The findings of the interviews revealed eight themes (perceived greenwashing, perceived green image, price perception, environmental concern, green trust, skepticism, perceived risk, and purchase intention). This study contributes to predict a framework from consumer viewpoint for identifying the themes related to greenwashing.     

Trust me,I'm your boss: Trust and power in supervisor–supervisee communication

This study examined employees' perceptions of trust, power and mentoring in manager–employee relationships in a variety of sectors, including health care, education, hospitality and retail. The main theoretical frameworks used were communication accommodation theory and social identity theory, in examining the manager–employee relationships from an in-group/out-group perspective. Computer-aided content analyses revealed a number of emergent communication and relationship themes that impact upon the level of ‘in-groupness’ and therefore trust in supervisor–supervisee relationships. While it may be illusory to believe that any organization can enjoy complete trust among its workforce, it is clear that certain communication characteristics can result in greater trust in manager–employee relationships, even within the context of organizational constraints. It is argued that the results of the study could be used to inform human resource management academics of key aspects of managerial communication that should be further researched, and also provide insights into the main communication skills that managers should focus upon to improve trust in the workplace.     

The influence of authentic leadership behaviors on trust and work outcomes of health care staff

A key element of a healthy work environment is trust: trust between staff and their leaders. Authentic leadership is proposed as the core of effective leadership needed to build trust because of its clear focus on the positive role modeling of honesty, integrity, and high ethical standards in the development of leader‐follower relationships. A model linking authentic leadership behaviors with trust in management, perceptions of supportive groups and work outcomes (including voice or speaking‐up behavior, self‐rated job performance, and burnout) using secondary analysis procedures was examined. The hypothesized model was tested using structural equation modeling in two samples of health care employees from a western Canadian cancer care agency: clinical care providers including nurses, pharmacists, physicians, and other professionals (N = 147) and nonclinical employees including administrative, support, and research staff (N = 188). Findings suggest that supportive leader behavior and trust in management are necessary for staff to be willing to voice concerns and offer suggestions to improve the workplace and patient care.     

When unfairness matters most: supervisory violations of electronic monitoring practices

This study examined the effects of different sources of monitoring information, quality of treatment and quality of decision‐making manipulations on perceptions of fairness and satisfaction with monitoring. Drawing on Blader and Tyler's four‐component model of fairness, participants were asked to rate their perceptions of fairness, satisfaction and intentions to comply with electronic performance‐monitoring policies that originated from formal organisational policies or from their direct supervisors. Results indicated that procedural justice violations originating from the supervisor (vs. formal organisational policy) led to lower perceptions of fairness and satisfaction with monitoring. Furthermore, the effect of procedural justice violations on compliance with monitoring was mediated by perceptions of fairness and satisfaction with monitoring. The present research has theoretical and practical implications for the design, implementation and communication of organisational electronic monitoring practices.     

Research into employee trust: epistemological foundations and paradigmatic boundaries

This article explores the epistemological roots and paradigmatic boundaries of research into employee trust, a growing field in human resource management. Drawing on Burrell and Morgan's well‐known sociological paradigms and their epistemological foundations, we identify the dominant approaches to employee trust research to examine its strengths and limitations. Our review of the literature on employee trust revealed that the majority of the most cited papers were written from a psychological perspective, characterised by positivistic methodologies, variance theory explanations and quantitative data collection methods. We also found that most of the studies can be located in the functionalist paradigm, and while accepting that functionalism and psychological positivism have their merits, we argue that research in these traditions sometimes constrains our understanding of employee trust in their organisations. We conclude that trust researchers would benefit from a better understanding of the ontological, epistemological and axiological assumptions underlying of HRM research and should embrace greater epistemic reflexivity.     

Young African Americans: a new generation of giving behaviour

It has been suggested that younger generations of African Americans may be the group whose giving behaviour has altered most in recent times. Primary research to establish whether this is indeed the case was conducted through focus groups to identify deviation from the extant research on giving motivations. The ages of the participants were 26–32. The theoretical foundation for this research was drawn from historical literature on African American philanthropy, relevant models of giving behaviours and contemporary research in the field. The research concludes that the notion of uplifting one's race remains a powerful motive for giving. Copyright © 2001 Henry Stewart Publications     

Federal Health Care Leadership Skills Required in the 21st Century

The purpose of the current study was to identify and describe the skills required of future health care leaders in the U.S. Department of Defense, Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Department of Health and Human Services. The identified skills should also be relevant to leaders of nonfederal agencies or nonmedical disciplines, such as education, human services, and similar public sector‐oriented disciplines, where the leaders are challenged to engage with a multitude of local, state, federal, and not‐for‐profit entities. The study employed a focus group methodology during a 2‐day leadership summit. The participants were 47 senior health care leaders representing various federal agencies and the private sector. During facilitator‐guided sessions, six focus groups consisting of seven or eight randomly selected participants identified 165 skills that are required of leaders. Subsequent to the summit, content analysis was used to group the skills into 12 overarching skill sets. The 12 skill sets were the ability to build partnerships, develop trust, thrive in complex and ambiguous environments, listen actively, think with agility, create conditions for success, assert aspirational future‐based leadership, develop present moment awareness, create an interagency learning network, develop network leadership, develop network goal setting, and maintain resilience. It appeared that only the first six skills were noted in the literature. Further research is recommended to validate the findings including further investigation into the leadership competencies that are most effective at driving health and non health outcomes in communities.     

Partnership and the development of trust in British workplaces

This article examines the alleged links between ‘partnership’ forms of managing workplace relationships in Britain and the development of intra‐organisational ‘trust’. The potential for mutually complementary linkages between the two are clear, in theory at least. Partnership should produce, nurture and enhance levels of interpersonal trust inside organisations, while trust legitimates and helps reinforce an organisation's ‘partnership’. Qualitative evidence drawn from the self‐reports of key participants in three unionised partnership organisations provides some support for the claimed linkages. But it also highlights weaknesses, discrepancies and pitfalls inherent in the process of pursuing trust through partnership. These offer insights into the process for managers, trade union officials, employee representatives and policy‐makers, as well as suggesting avenues for future research using trust as a theoretical framework.     

Too hot to handle? Trust and human resource practitioners' implementation of anti‐bullying policy

In this article, we examine the dynamics of trust in the triadic relationship between HR, employees and managers when dealing with allegations of workplace bullying. Previous research has shown employees to be dissatisfied with HR practitioners' responses to complaints of workplace bullying, and we explore the novel angle of the HR practitioners' perspective through semistructured interviews. Paralleling extant employee accounts, the findings suggest that HR practitioners rarely judge situations as bullying where a manager is accused. Trust between employee, manager and HR practitioner is essential for the successful resolution of bullying claims, yet this study suggests multiple directions of distrust. By virtue of their role alignment and previous experiences of handling bullying, HR practitioners were found to prioritise their relationships with managers, automatically distrusting employees' bullying claims. Despite also distrusting managers to effectively deliver HRM practices, it appears that bullying complaints are ‘too hot to handle’ for HR practitioners given the risks to their relationships with managers.     

Examining the role of leadership,trust for school culture and policy

Quality of life relies on also the quality of working context and the group dynamic. Culture of schools, trust and leadership facilitate quality in fostering strategic policies in establishing policy and development. The aim of the research study is to examine the role of leadership, trust for school culture in regard to the perceptions of inspectors. As this research stands on qualitative nature, experiences, perceptions of research participants shape the current understanding to give insights on the role of leadership, trust. In addition, establishing school culture is a part of quality to set policy in terms of development, inspection is a moderation of encapsulating the nature of school culture. Interview was employed to gain understanding and experiences of inspectors in relation to leadership, trust for the school culture. Mission, vision of schools, principles of schools, loyalty to schools, policies, objectives of practices in schools, social interaction in schools. Thematic analysis through laddering was done that five themes were established in examining leadership, trust in the school culture. It is important that employees in the training organization act in a joint view on implementing educational objectives. This is achieved by developing positive attitudes in people and by being able to act constructively with each other. The research results revealed that the inspectors who are currently working at the Ministry of National Education have their views on the mission, vision and leadership of schools and what they think about school culture trust in schools.

     

Blending service provider–client project teams to achieve client trust: Implications for project team trust,cohesion, and performance

The objective of the present research is to examine the effectiveness of “teaming with the client,” using blended service provider–client teams as an organizational strategy for achieving effective co‐production engagements. The results show that having a blended team creates a more trusting relationship between the project manager and client. The client's trust results in greater team trust, team cohesion, and team performance. However, the research also demonstrates an important limitation to the use of blended teams. In blended teams, when the client does not trust the project manager, significant problems arise for the team itself as compared to non‐blended teams.     

Effects of Care Leave and Family Social Policy: Spotlight on the United States

Consistent with Pope Francis's efforts to eradicate social exclusion, most countries in the world have already adopted care leave policies in an effort to reduce the conflict between being an employee and being a caregiver. Care leave policies allow workers time off for family or for self‐care. Historically, care leave policies such as maternity leave are viewed as an employee benefit akin to short‐term disability leave, providing job‐protected time off for new mothers. This study reviews the literature of the short‐ and long‐run economic and societal effects of care leave policies globally, with a specific focus on care leave policies in the United States. Care leave produces positive labor market and health outcomes, including increases in leave taking, improvement in replacement wages, improvements to profitability and employee morale, increases in female workforce participation and continuity, increases in birth weight, and decreases in infant mortality. Despite positive effects, labor market inequalities such as decreases in female labor market participation rates, gender wage gaps, and occupational segregation are often promoted by care leave policies. The conflicted findings in care leave research muddle the anticipated effects of paid care leave but allow room for alternative policy recommendations.     

Alternative approaches to decreasing maternal anemia: identifying the need for social marketing strategies to promote iron-folic acid supplementation in the Peruvian highlands

• Anemia is the most common health condition affecting women during pregnancy, and leads to adverse health outcomes of both the mother and infant. Despite national fortification and supplementation programs in Peru, 21% of women of reproductive age are anemic. Adherence to iron-folic acid (IFA) supplements in this vulnerable population is low and influenced by side effects of the tablets, such as nausea and vomiting, caused by the generic formula of the tablets. The trust within a patient–provider relationship and the provider's competency at effective counseling increases women's adherence, whereas late entry into prenatal care and government regulations limit early initiation of IFA supplementation. It is important for partners to support women during supplementation and participate in their prenatal care. Social marketing strategies targeting the product, price, place, promotion, and policy of IFA supplements should decrease barriers to women's ability to obtain IFA tablets and adhere to the supplementation regimen and reduce iron deficiency maternal anemia. Public health practitioners implementing supplementation programs should consider different behavioral influences at the intrapersonal, interpersonal, and community levels that affect adherence.

Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Trust,individualism and job characteristics as predictors of employee preference for teamwork

Employee resistance has long been recognized as a key constraint on the success of organizational change initiatives. However, it is only recently that employee attitudes towards working in teams has been specifically investigated as a factor influencing team effectiveness. Using data from 218 employees in 40 self-managing work teams, we examined the relationship between trust, individualism, job characteristics and team members' attitudes towards teamwork. Providing a partial test of Mayer et al.'s (1995) relational model of trust, the results indicate that the two situational forms of trust (trust in co-workers and trust in management) were stronger predictors of an employee's preference for teamwork than propensity to trust. Trust in co-workers was found to partially mediate the relationship between a person's propensity to trust strangers and their preference for working in a team. The importance of considering the dispositional variables of propensity to trust and individualism as factors that influence an employee's preference for teamwork, as well as their trust in management, trust in co-workers and their opportunity for skill utilization are discussed.     

Women in grassroots leadership: Barriers and biases experienced in a membership organization dominated by men

Among governing boards traditionally dominated by men, the presence of women is becoming more common. However, these women may face prejudices and discrimination that prevent them from feeling and ultimately being successful. This qualitative study focused on the experiences of women who participated in a grassroots organization's leadership training program. Interviewees revealed that they believed gender‐related obstacles were preventing them from being effective leaders. Four significant themes emerged: persisting stereotypes and bias, separation and isolation, desire for change, and potential for added value. In response, the authors recommend organizations and practitioners engage in more intentional and complete implementation of path‐goal theory throughout the leadership development process.     

Sexual harassment training: Recommendations to address gaps between the practitioner and research literatures

Sexual harassment training is a common human resource activity, and the practitioner literature is replete with advice about how to implement it. Little research, however, has specifically explored what makes sexual harassment training effective. This paper uses what we know from general training research and theory and sexual harassment research to assess the extent to which the practitioner literature is making relevant and reasonable recommendations for sexual harassment training. We identify practitioner‐research gaps in the literature, including areas that academic research and theory suggest are important for training effectiveness but where the practitioner literature falls short. The practitioner literature may be silent, offer incomplete advice, make recommendations that do not directly link to research findings, or present recommendations that are inconsistent with research findings. We recommend that these gaps be bridged and we provide specific suggestions for how human resource managers can improve the quality of the sexual harassment training they provide. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Trust‐based decisions in commission–agency relationships

In commission–agency case, an agent has an incentive to increase the recommended order quantity (ROQ) to maximize the expected profit. This study refers to a retailer's degree of dependence on the agent's ROQ as “trust.” We aim to formulate the agent and the retailer's decisions with trust‐based optimization models. To conduct the study, we first build the demand prediction and income model of the retailer and the agent with a trust‐updating model. Furthermore, we investigate the facts of the retailer's trust value by some experimental studies. Some managerial insights are thereby given and helpful to practice.     

What drives organic food consumption in Lebanon?

To increase the sparse knowledge about what drives organic food consumers in developing markets, Lebanese consumers' reasons and motives for buying organic food are studied in the framework of means‐end chain theory. A sample of N = 180 Lebanese consumers was interviewed in several retail outlets using a hard laddering questionnaire. The data were subjected to frequency analysis, cluster analysis, and structural equation modelling. Hierarchal value maps constructed from the laddering interviews revealed that “quality of life,” “pleasure,” and “peace of mind” are the main values driving organic food consumption in Lebanon. Frequent organic consumers displayed higher concern for their family's health and for the environment, whereas occasional organic consumers cared more about their own pleasure and were more likely to perceive organic food as a traditional and nostalgic product. Structural equation modelling revealed that “care for nature” and “care for children's health” significantly affect consumers' (self‐reported) purchasing behaviour. The found means‐end chains are a useful basis for marketing campaigns for organic food products in the Lebanese market. One focus of marketing campaigns should be raising consumers' awareness on the environmental benefits of organic production and the fact that it does not allow the use of harmful chemical products.     

Leadership competency inventory: A systematic process of developing and validating a leadership competency scale

This article reports psychometric evaluation of the Penn State Leadership Competency Inventory (LCI). The 32‐item LCI was validated on a sample of 323 managers in the health care industry. Preliminary validity and reliability evidence of the LCI was established through exploratory factor analysis (EFA), item‐total correlations, Cronbach's alpha coefficients, and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The four‐factor leadership competency scale, comprising supervisory and managerial competencies, organizational leadership, personal mastery, and resource leadership, accounted for 58% of variance. According to CFA results, the model fit of the four latent factors of the LCI was confirmed to be appropriate. Cross‐validation with other populations is needed to confirm the factor structure. Limitations and further research recommendations are discussed.