Teamwork in Modern Organizations: Implications for Technology Education

Characteristics of teamwork in modern organizations and workplaces are examined, in order to extrapolate the means for imparting teamwork skills within technology education. Goals and tasks for the team, team composition, team-player styles, phases of team development, communication and interpersonal skills, decision making, leadership, and evaluation of team performance are discussed. Teamwork skills are acquired gradually as a result of experience. Mere provision of a joint task to a group of people does not produce teamwork spontaneously. In order to promote teamwork, technological tasks at school need to include considerable degrees of freedom and decision-making by pupils. When the teacher becomes a facilitator of the process, instead of being primarily a source of knowledge and a decision-maker, team members can determine the assignment of roles in the group by themselves. Evaluation of teamwork in technology education is an integral part of alternative assessment.     

Give Them Something to Smile About: A Marketing Strategy for Recruiting and Retaining Volunteers

Using a marketing perspective, this study investigates whether the issue of “fun at work” would appeal to volunteers as a part of an effort to enhance recruitment and retention. Specifically, we examined volunteers' attitudes toward fun, their perceptions of what kinds of activities are fun and what are not, and the relative importance of workplace fun in what they perceive as an ideal volunteer position. In general, we found that volunteers had positive attitudes towards fun and experiencing fun at work was associated with higher job satisfaction and lower turnover intentions. Although “a fun workplace” was ranked relatively low in importance relative to other reasons why they volunteer, creating such an environment could enhance retention. Some age and gender differences were found in the perceptions of whether certain activities are fun or not. The implications of these results and directions for future research are discussed.     

国外精神型领导研究前沿探析

精神型领导理论是目前国内外学术界领导研究领域的一个前沿主题。它反映了在当前企业组织结构加速变革的情境下,组织寻求通过内在激励员工使其获得体验和发挥自我以实现个体、群体或组织绩效方面的不断提升。本文分别从概念界定、维度结构以及模型分析三个方面对国外精神型领导的相关文献进行了归纳总结,并对目前该领域研究的局限进行了分析,明确了未来研究的方向。     

Perceptions of Workplace Spirituality among Professionals and Executives

As a new century begins, it is becoming increasingly clear that workers are experiencing a fundamental change of business world values, a change of paradigms as radical as the Age of Information. Corporate America and its employees are responding to a call for a deeper sense of purpose, a more significant sense of faith, and a renewed commitment to spirituality. This paper reports research that focuses on the relationship among the 3 key stakeholders in this new emphasis on spirituality: individual, organization, and work unit. Significant correlations were found to exist among 3 factors of spirituality and among 11 variables that were submeasures of the factors.     

Auditors gone wild: The “other” problem in public accounting

Following the scandals involving Enron, WorldCom, and Qwest Communications, the accounting profession has spent the past several years trying to get back on track. While Sarbanes-Oxley may improve the decision-making of audit professionals, and help prevent future large-scale catastrophes that hurt stockholders and bring down firms, there is another problem in public accounting that few consider and nobody has proposed to solve: deviant workplace behavior. Previous research describes deviant workplace behavior as the voluntary behavior of organizational members that violates significant organizational norms and, in so doing, threatens the well being of the organization and/or its members. Building from recent work in various business literatures, this is the first research since the passage of Sarbanes-Oxley to examine workplace deviance at Big 4 accounting firms. Taking a cross-disciplinary, collaborative approach, the authors endeavor to explain why workplace deviance has infiltrated accounting firms and how it is undermining their effectiveness and derailing their long-term prospects for success. After describing its genesis and effects, the authors prescribe several managerial strategies for preventing deviance and minimizing its effects on a firm.     

“The Worse You Behave, The More You Seem, to be Rewarded”: Bullying in Nursing as Organizational Corruption

This paper reports findings from the first, qualitative stage of a national sequential, mixed method study of bullying in the Australian nursing workplace. Twenty-six nurses who had experience of workplace bullying were recruited from two Australian public sector health care organizations. Examining the narrative data from the viewpoint of bullying being a corrupt activity we present an alternative perspective on group acts of bullying. By exploring bullying as corrupt behaviour, this paper challenges the assumption that bullying can be principally considered a series of isolated events stemming from interpersonal conflict, organizational pressures, or poor work design. Corruption in organizations has not previously been linked with or compared to bullying. In revealing the manner in which actors can engage in corrupt conduct that includes bullying, the findings from our study offer important implications for the management of workplace bullying as a serious and corrupt activity.     

职场精神力的研究进展与展望

自20世纪90年代后,管理学者对职场精神力的研究逐渐涌现。职场精神力是员工在认同了工作、团体以及组织的价值意义后,进而超越自我并与之产生一种互联感的内心体验。近年来很多西方学者辨析和测量了职场精神力的概念,对其形成原因与作用效应进行了探究与检验。不少研究证实了个体职场精神力对个体及组织所带来的积极意义。然而该研究领域也存在大量问题悬而未决,在中国文化背景下的本土研究更是阙如。鉴于此,文章对职场精神力的研究进展进行了回顾,对未来研究进行了展望并提出了研究建议。     

企业慈善行为测量及其对员工职场精神力的影响

针对现有企业慈善行为测量单一化、短期化与外部化的局限以及从内部员工视角研究慈善战略价值的欠缺,开展了两个关联研究。在研究一中,采用归纳法开发并检验了一份包含内外部慈善的日常性企业慈善行为量表。结果显示,企业慈善行为具有一阶双因素结构,由外部慈善行为与内部慈善行为因素构成。该量表信效度较好,可用于实证研究。在研究二中,检验了企业慈善行为对员工职场精神力的影响,结果显示内外部慈善均对员工职场精神力有积极作用,其中内部慈善行为作用更强。员工的"与组织价值观一致"相对"团体感"和"工作意义"被企业慈善行为解释的程度最高,表明企业慈善行为受到了员工高度的价值认同。     

Diversity and business performance: 50 years of research

This study has carried out a review of the literature appearing on diversity in the last 50 years. Research findings from this period reveal it is impossible to assume there is a pure and simple relationship between diversity and performance without considering a series of variables that affect this relationship. In this study, emphasis has been placed on the analysis of results arrived at through empirical investigation on the relation between the most studied dimensions of diversity and performance. The results presented are part of a more extensive research.     

Deviant behavior in retail,when sales associates “Go Bad”! Examining the relationship between the work–family interface,job stress,and salesperson deviance

The unique role of retail sales associates combined with retailers desire to establish relational selling, make associates vulnerable to work–family conflict (WFC). Unfortunately, research examining how retail sales associates cope with a WFC is limited. This research investigates relationships between WFC, job stress, and three dimensions of salesperson deviance: organizational, interpersonal, and frontline. Findings indicate that WFC has a significant direct effect on all three deviant behaviors, as well as job stress. Interestingly, the relationship between job stress and deviant behavior is not significant. This finding adds to the debate regarding job stress as a mediator between WFC and deviant behavior or outcome variable.