Accountability, organisational learning and risks to patient safety in England: conflict or compromise?

This article examines the current risk regulation regime, within the English National Health Service (NHS), by investigating the two, sometimes conflicting, approaches to risk embodied within the field of policies towards patient safety. The first approach focuses on promoting accountability and is built on legal principles surrounding negligence and competence. The second approach focuses on promoting learning from previous mistakes and near-misses, and is built on the development of a ‘safety culture’. Previous work has drawn attention to problems associated with risk-based regulation when faced with the dual imperatives of accountability and organisational learning. The article develops this by considering whether the NHS patient safety regime demonstrates the coexistence of two different risk regulation regimes, or merely one regime with contradictory elements. It uses the heuristic device of ‘institutional logics’ to examine the coexistence of and interrelationship between ‘organisational learning’ and ‘accountability’ logics driving risk regulation in health care.

An investigation into the antecedents of organisational citizenship behaviours

The recent marketing literature reflects a growing interest in organisational citizenship behaviours (OCBs). In particular, several recent studies have drawn attention to administrative mechanisms including leadership support to examine how OCBs are managed. The general premise is that explicit administrative mechanisms can be deployed by an organisation to influence employees’ OCBs. Previous research has shown that OCBs can be influenced by different mechanisms and employee responses. However, the tendency has been to examine OCBs as a unidimensional construct and to examine employee responses in isolation. The authors develop hypotheses about interdependences between administrative mechanisms, employee responses and OCBs. They also examine the effects of administrative mechanisms and employees responses on separate dimensions of OCBs. The results generally support the premise that OCBs can be influenced by selectively deploying administrative mechanisms. However, the effect of administrative mechanisms on OCBs is mediated by employee responses including oganisational commitment. These results have significant implications for managing customer-contract employees and further research in this field.

Determinants of sponsorship fit:a multilevel analysis

Sponsorship fit is frequently mentioned and empirically examined as a success factor of sponsorship. While sponsorship fit has been considered as a determinant of sponsorship success, little knowledge exists about the antecedents of sponsorship fit. In the present paper, individual and firm-level antecedents of sponsorship fit are examined in a single hierarchical linear model. Results show that sponsorship fit is influenced by the perception of benefits, the firm’s regional identification, sincerity, relatedness to the sponsored activity, and its dominance. On a partnership level, results show that contract length contributes to sponsorship fit while contract value is found to be unrelated.