Mental health recovery and occupational therapy in Australia and New Zealand

Every individual with mental illness has the right to be safe and cared for. Most people will receive the love and care from their families and friends, but they will also expect mental-health professionals, occupational therapists and the community to work together to provide the necessary services to support their recovery from mental illness. This article highlights the development of the recovery approach for people with mental illness in Australia and New Zealand. The implications of recovery concepts for occupational therapy, in the areas of individualized approach, participation of service users and carers, person-centred assessment and intervention, intersectoral links and mental-health promotion, are discussed. There are a number of key areas requiring further research and debate, notably the most effective means of implementing and evaluating recovery-focused interventions.

Subordinate-manager gender combination and perceived leadership style influence on emotions, self-esteem and organizational commitment

A theoretical model was developed to investigate the relationships among subordinate-manager gender combinations, perceived leadership style, experienced frustration and optimism, organization-based self-esteem and organizational commitment. The model was tested within the context of a probabilistic structural model, a discrete Bayesian network, using cross-sectional data from a global pharmaceutical company. The Bayesian network allowed forward inference to assess the relative influence of gender combination and leadership style on the emotions, self-esteem and commitment consequence variables. Further, diagnostics from backward inference were used to assess the relative influence of variables antecedent to organizational commitment. The results showed that gender combination was independent of leadership style and had a direct impact on subordinates' levels of frustration and optimism. Female manager-female subordinate had the largest probability of optimism, while male manager teamed with a male subordinate had the largest probability of frustration. Furthermore, having a female manager teamed up with a male subordinate resulted in the lowest possibility of frustration. However, the findings show that the gender issue is not simply female managers versus male managers, but is concerned with the interaction of the subordinate-manager gender combination and leadership style in a nonlinear manner. (C) 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Perceptions of organisational subculture and their significance for organisational commitment

This paper investigates the relationship between perceptions of organisational culture, organisational subculture, leadership style, and commitment. The impact of culture and leadership style on commitment has been previously noted, but there is a lack of detail regarding how different types of culture and leadership styles relate to commitment. The paper particularly addresses the notion of organisational subcultures and how the perception of those cultures relates to commitment, subculture being a neglected variable in the commitment literature. These issues were addressed in a survey of 258 nurses drawn from a range of hospital settings and wards within the Sydney metropolitan region. Results indicate that perceived organisational subculture has a strong relationship with commitment. Furthermore, the results identify the relative strength of specific types of leadership style and specific types of subculture with commitment. Both innovative and supportive subcultures have a clear positive relationship, while bureaucratic subcultures have a negative relationship. In terms of leadership style, a consideration style had a stronger relationship with commitment than a structuring style. Regression analysis was used to investigate the possible role of subculture as a mediator for the influence of leadership on commitment. Both direct and indirect effects of leadership on commitment were found. Implications for practice and for further research are discussed.

Introducing evidence-based family assessment and therapy in child and youth mental health services: Applying systemic principles to maintain, sustain and build capacity

The purpose of this article is to overview the context of the mental health service in which we work, and family therapy's status prior to and after the impact of changes wrought by the introduction of the National Mental Health Policy. We then explore some key issues that we think contribute to the persistence of the occlusion of family therapy in child psychiatric services; and the strategies that we developed and are continuing to develop to support change, finally, we describe the use of a family assessment instrument that we believe is central to our change strategy.