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.     

利比亚危机下中国承包商的应对策略——不可抗力影响下的暂停、终止、索赔与没收保函风险防范

2011年2月,席卷阿拉伯世界的动乱在利比亚数个城市爆发,并迅速演变为政府和反政府力量之间的武装冲突。中国在利比亚至少有27个项目遭到袭击和抢劫。为此,中国政府在利比亚迅速而高效地组织了撤侨行动     

Estimating an origin–destination table for US imports of waterborne containerized freight

Containerized freight imports into the US are growing at an average of 10% per year. This traffic is concentrated at a small number of US seaports. It is therefore important to have an accurate understanding of the flow of containers from their origin country through these seaports to their final destination. This paper develops an optimization model to estimate route flows and a corresponding multi-modal origin–destination table for containers by synthesizing data on international trade and railcar movements with a gravity model for the demand of container traffic. This analysis provides insights into the balance of rail and truck inland transportation from each port.     

Expectations of Working Relationships in International Buyer–Seller Relationships: Development of a Relationship Continuum Scale

This study is an attempt to develop a scale to measure expectations of buyer–seller working relationships on a cross-cultural basis in the hospitality industry. The focus is on North American and Asian hotel salespeople. The scale development drew from previous research in guanxi relationships, purchasing, and selling strategies. While the results did not support a reliable unidimensional scale that could distinguish between transactional and collaborative working relationships, the methodology did create a framework for further scale development.     

Customer Preferences for Frontline Employee Traits: Homophily and Heterophily Effects

Although previous research has underscored the significance of the personality traits of frontline employees (FLEs) in employee service behaviors, knowledge about customer preferences for FLE personality traits is lacking. This study responds to this gap in the literature, empirically assessing customers’ preferences for FLE personality traits. The main research objective is to investigate whether and how these preferences vary with the customer's own personality. The study proposes and tests a conceptual framework that reconciles two opposing theoretical perspectives—homophily and heterophily. The existing research in interpersonal psychology has only given limited support to the heterophily effect, whereas it has consistently evidenced the homophily effect. Moderator analyses indicate these effects are largely invariant across customer and service characteristics. Notwithstanding this, post hoc tests show that the level of preferred FLE traits is positively related to the level of customer traits. Equity theory helps explain these seemingly conflicting results.     

Watching the FIFA World Cup 2010 in England: the sojourner perspective

Recent years have seen an emergence of a varied academic literature focused on the football fan, with a wealth of studies exploring issues such as hooliganism, fan behaviour and fan identification. No research, however, has documented the experiences and perspectives of the international sojourner, who follows the televised tournament far away from the home country. This paper offers a contribution to the literature on fandom by focusing on the experiences of becoming a temporary fan among a sample of nine international students in England during the period of the 2010 FIFA World Cup. It shows the importance of the tournament for students away from their home nation, acting as a point of celebration and as a means of bringing sojourners of the same nationality together to support their team. It reveals how the tournament offered escape from stress, became a focal point for social interaction, provided the opportunity for recreation of home, and for the reinforcement of feelings of national identity.     

The Development of Satellite Television in Western Europe

Within Western Europe there is growing interest in satellite television and some commentators suggest that its successful development could revolutionise television transmission and bring a new dimension to home entertainment during the next decade. This article describes the different ways in which satellite television services are being developed in Western Europe in general and in the United Kingdom in particular. Some of the problems surrounding these developments are also discussed.     

Challenges for land system science

While considerable progress has been made in understanding land use change, land system science continues to face a number of grand challenges. This paper discusses these challenges with a focus on empirical land system studies, land system modelling and the analysis of future visions of land system change. Contemporary landscapes are contingent outcomes of past and present patterns, processes and decisions. Thus, empirical analysis of past and present land-use change has an important role in providing insights into the socio-economic and ecological processes that shape land use transitions. This is especially important with respect to gradual versus rapid land system dynamics and in understanding changes in land use intensity. Combining the strengths of empirical analysis with multi-scale modelling will lead to new insights into the processes driving land system change. New modelling methods that combine complex systems thinking at a local level with macro-level economic analysis of the land system would reconcile the multi-scale dynamics currently encapsulated in bottom-up and top-down modelling approaches. Developments in land use futures analysis could focus on integrating explorative scenarios that reflect possible outcomes with normative visions that identify desired outcomes. Such an approach would benefit from the broad and in-depth involvement of stakeholders in order to link scientific findings to political and societal decision-making culminating in a set of key choices and consequences. Land system models have an important role in supporting future land use policy, but model outputs require scientific interpretation rather than being presented as predictions. The future of land system science is strongly dependent on the research community's capacity to bring together the elements of research discussed in the paper, via empirical data collection and analysis of observed processes, computer simulation across scale levels and futures analysis of alternative, normative visions through stakeholder engagement.     

Health effects on labour market exits and entries

This paper analyses the role of health on exits out of and entries into employment using data from the first twelve waves of the British Household Panel Survey (1991–2002). We use discrete-time duration models to estimate the effect of health on the hazard of becoming non-employed and on the hazard of becoming employed. The results show that general health, measured by a variable that captures health limitations and by a constructed latent health index, affects entries into and exits out of employment; the effects being higher for men than for women. The results are robust to different definitions of employment, and to the exclusion of older workers from the analysis.