Inclusion climate: A multilevel investigation of its antecedents and consequences

This study investigates the antecedents and consequences of organization‐level inclusion climate. A national sample of human resource decision‐makers from 100 organizations described their firms' formal diversity management programs; 3,229 employees reported their perceptions of, and reactions to, their employers' diversity management. Multilevel analyses demonstrate that identity‐conscious programs (programs that target specific identity groups) generate an inclusion climate. Moreover, the analyses provide evidence of multilevel mediation: In organizations with an inclusion climate, individual employees perceive the organization as fulfilling its diversity management obligations and respond with higher levels of affective commitment. This study represents an important step toward understanding how a shared perception of organizational inclusiveness develops and how inclusion climate facilitates the achievement of diversity management objectives. The findings also shed light on the important role of identity‐conscious programs in promoting organizational commitment within a diverse workforce.     

Discrete forecast horizons for two-product variants of the dynamic lot-size problem

Motivated by the recent success of integer programming based procedures for computing discrete forecast horizons, we consider two-product variants of the classical dynamic lot-size model. In the first variant, we impose a warehouse capacity constraint on the total ending inventory of the two products in any period. In the second variant, the two products have both individual and joint setup costs for production. To our knowledge, there are no known procedures for computing forecast horizons for these variants.Under the assumption that future demands are discrete, we characterize forecast horizons for these two variants as feasibility/optimality questions in 0–1 mixed integer programs. A detailed computational study establishes the effectiveness of our approach and enables us to gain valuable insights into the behavior of minimal forecast horizons.     

Can We Still be Friends? The Role of Exit Conversations in Facilitating Post‐Exit Relationships

Organizations might benefit from maintaining relationships with former employees, who could be rehired later or encouraged to refer job applicants and customers. We integrate the management literature on voluntary resignations and the communication literature on relationship dissolution to explore how conversations between an exiting employee and his or her manager facilitate (or constrain) post‐exit relationships. Employees who had recently resigned from full‐time jobs described their exit experiences in semistructured interviews with the research team. The results suggest two dominant patterns. When employees exited for external reasons (e.g., to pursue a program of study), they engaged in very direct communication strategies, elicited positive responses from their managers, and left with high interest in a post‐exit relationship. But when employees exited for internal reasons (problems within the employment relationship), they engaged in multiple exit cycles and moved from indirect communication strategies toward increasingly direct ones. Managerial responses to these strategies failed to capitalize on opportunities to nurture post‐exit relationships and sometimes generated a “vendetta effect” among exiting employees. The results suggest that managers might benefit from training in how to conduct effective exit conversations, particularly with employees who are leaving for internal reasons. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Within trial cost-utility analysis of disease management program for patients hospitalized with atrial fibrillation: results from the SAFETY trial

Abstract

Background: The potential impact of disease management to optimize quality of care, health outcomes, and total healthcare costs across a range of cardiac disease states is unknown.

Methods: A trial-based cost-utility analysis was conducted alongside a randomized controlled trial of 335 patients with chronic, non-valvular AF (without heart failure; the SAFETY Trial) discharged to home from three tertiary referral hospitals in Australia. A home-based disease management intervention (the SAFETY intervention) that involved community-based AF care including home visits was compared to routine primary healthcare and hospital outpatient follow-up (standard management). Bootstrapped incremental cost-utility ratios were computed based on quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs) and total healthcare costs. Cost-effectiveness acceptability curves were constructed to explore the probability of the SAFETY intervention being cost-effective. Sub-group analyses were performed based on age and sex to determine differential cost-effectiveness.

Results: During median follow-up of 1.75?years, the SAFETY intervention was associated with a non-statistically significant increase in QALYs (0.02 per person) and lower total healthcare costs (–$4,375 per person). Although each of these findings were not statistically significant, the SAFETY intervention was found to be dominant (more effective and cost saving) in 58.8% of the bootstrapped iterations and cost-effective (more effective and gains in QALYs achieved at or below $50,000 per QALY gained) in 61.5% of the iterations. Males and those aged less than 78?years achieved greater gains in QALYs and savings in healthcare costs. The estimated value of perfect information in Australia (the monetized value of removing uncertainty in the cost-effectiveness results) was A$51 million, thus demonstrating the high potential gain from further research.

Conclusions: Compared with standard management, the SAFETY intervention is potentially a dominant strategy for those with chronic, non-valvular AF. However, there would be substantial value in reducing the uncertainty in these estimates from further research.

Trial registration: Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry identifier: ACTRN12610000221055.