What's in it for us? A case study research about micro sense making processes through the eyes of front line employees, during culture change implementation

Abstract How employees make sense of change is a very complex process. Recently, academics have neglected to research sense making activities in a micro culture implementation context, through the eyes of front line employees. In contrast to a macro view, a micro perspective limits researchers to only look at an individual, departmental or group level. By doing so, we can zoom in on the details of sense making processes that employees use in their daily work life. A macro (organisational) view is based on the notion that there is a general integrated culture that can be found in all organisational units and departments. It is assumed that culture can be researched by using the entire organisation as one single research entity. This thesis challenges this assumption. In case of planned change it is usually the management community who are in charge of the change intervention. Because of their formal hierarchical position, they have the power to abort or initiate change programs. It is perhaps therefore that researchers tend to be focused on the management community rather than on lower level organisational members, such as front line employees. Apart from the micro view, scholars also neglected to research culture change implementation through the eyes of front line employees. This thesis is an attempt to fill these two gaps that currently exists in academic change management publications. The main research question is therefore: From a micro point of view how do front-line employees make sense of the impact of culture change, during the implementation phase? This thesis starts with a literature review which exposes the two main gaps. The most important outcome of this review is that only 2% of the research articles dealt with culture implementation, through the eyes of front line employees. A conceptual research model is built on the integrated sense making theory of Weber and Manning (2001) and the micro variables of Raelin and Cataldo (2011). These theories emphasize elements of sense making in a daily working context. It is likely that front line employees can identify themselves with research elements such as tasks, skills practices, involvement and behaviour. Front line employees were selected, because as lower level organisational members they are usually the change recipients. They are further away from the change initiating scene (usually the management of an organisation) and form a potential sense making ‘hotspot’ that could provide new academic insights. In order to carry out the primary research, two case organisations were selected in the leisure industry. A participative case study research method was chosen. This meant that the researcher worked in the concerning departments of the case organisations. The goal was to observe and interview front line employees, while they were performing their jobs. The most important advantage of this approach is that the researcher temporarily becomes one with the organisation and is therefore able to acquire both formal and informal narratives that front line employees use during sense making activities. It was found that front line employees make sense of organisational change by using a practical approach. They make sense of the change program by carrying out new tasks, developing new skills and sharing best practices. The most noticeable conclusion was that sense making activities predominantly take place at an individual level in relation to change acceptance. Organisational members tend to create a mental equation in order to weigh the advantages against the disadvantages. They evaluate whether the concerning change program is beneficial to them or not. For future research a sense making scheme model is suggested that is based on two methods: an introspection and an action method.

Shift Scheduling in Services When Employees Have Limited Availability: An L. P. Approach

This paper compares two linear programming (LP) models for shift scheduling in services where homogeneously-skilled employees are available at limited times. Although both models are based on set covering approaches, one explicitly matches employees to shifts, while the other imposes this matching implicitly. Each model is used in three forms—one with complete, another with very limited meal break placement flexibility, and a third without meal breaks—to provide initial schedules to a completion/improvement heuristic. The term completion/improvement heuristic is used to describe a construction/ improvement heuristic operating on a starting schedule. On 80 test problems varying widely in scheduling flexibility, employee staffing requirements, and employee availability characteristics, all six LP-based procedures generated lower cost schedules than a comparison from-scratch construction/improvement heuristic. This heuristic, which perpetually maintains an explicit matching of employees to shifts, consists of three phases which add, drop, and modify shifts. In terms of schedule cost, schedule generation time, and model size, the procedures based on the implicit model performed better, as a group, than those based on the explicit model. The LP model with complete break placement flexibility and implicitly matching employees to shifts generated schedules costing 6.7% less than those developed by the from-scratch heuristic.

Shining Examples of Service When the Lights Went Out: Hotel Employees and Service Recovery during the Blackout of 2003

The electrical outage in the summer of 2003 that interrupted power to thousands of hotels wrought a variety of facilities failures and service-process problems. Fortunately, strong service-recovery efforts from hotel employees mitigated the worst of the blackout’s effects. Using survey data from hotel managers who experienced the blackout, this study highlights those employee actions that most contributed to immediate service recovery; however, the study also reveals limited organizational learning or efforts to failsafe hospitality service from the eventuality of future power failures.

Report on the Iowa Public Employees’ Retirement System for the year ended June 30, 2015

Report on the Iowa Public Employees’ Retirement System for the year ended June 30, 2015

An exploratory study of the relationship between psychosocial hazard and ambulatory physiological response in higher education employees.

Purpose: as exposure to psychosocial hazard at work represents a substantial risk factor for employee health in many modern occupations, being able to accurately assess how employees cope with their working environment is crucial. As the workplace is generally accepted as being a dynamic environment consideration should be given to the interaction between employees and the acute environmental characteristics of their workplace. The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of both acute demand and chronic work-related psychosocial hazard upon employees through ambulatory assessment of heart rate variability and blood pressure. Design: a within-subjects repeated measures design was used to investigate the relationship between exposure to work-related psychosocial hazard and ambulatory heart rate variability and blood pressure in a cohort of higher education employees. Additionally the effect of acute variation in perceived work-related demand was investigated. Results: two dimensions of the Management Standards were found to demonstrate an association with heart rate variability; more hazardous levels of “demand” and “relationships” were associated with decreased SDNN. Significant changes in blood pressure and indices of heart rate variability were observed with increased acute demand.

Report on its study of municipal public employees labor relations law /

Mode of access: Internet.

Attitudes of Future Tourism Sector Employees Towards Organise Accessible Tourism

The aim of this paper is to show a theoretical approach to the evolution of concepts perceiving disability, taking into account the medical, social, and geographical models, as the basis for the development of principles concerning the organisation of accessible tourism for people with disabilities (PwD). The main research objective was to identify the current attitudes of future, potential employees in the tourism (tourism and recreation students at the time of the study) towards accessible tourism. The study was based on surveys performed in May 2013 at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (UAM, Poland) and the State University in Irkutsk (ИГУ, Russia), a total sample of 216 people. The main section of the survey contained four questions regarding issues such as: optimal ways to organise tourism products for people with a disability; attitudes towards spending leisure time together with people with a disability; and specific requirements concerning the introduction of various types of improvements in tourism products aimed at people with a disability. In both cases, the results revealed that future tourism employees hold attitudes which are prevailingly open and positive towards the needs of tourists with disabilities. However, the hypothesis that the main factor influencing a reluctance to enter into contact with PwD is a lack of experience in this area, resulting in insufficient knowledge of what conditions the behaviour of PwD was also confirmed. This is a highly significant conclusion which should consider if mandatory educational programmes in the field of tourism and recreation studies are to be improved.

Biomechanical constraints remain major risk factors for low back pain. Results from a prospective cohort study in French male employees

International audience

Work stress, smoking status and smoking intensity: an observational study of 46 190 employees

Study objective: To examine the relationship between work stress, as indicated by the job strain model and the effort-reward imbalance model, and smoking. Setting: Ten municipalities and 21 hospitals in Finland. Design and Participants: Binary logistic regression models for the prevalence of smoking were related to survey responses of 37 309 female and 8881 male Finnish public sector employees aged 17-65. Separate multinomial logistic regression models were calculated for smoking intensity for 8130 smokers. In addition, binary logistic regression models for ex-smoking were fitted among 16 277 former and current smokers. In all analyses, adjustments were made for age, basic education, occupational status, type of employment and marital status. Main results: Respondents with high effort-reward imbalance or lower rewards were more likely to be smokers. Among smokers, an increased likelihood of higher intensity of smoking was associated with higher job strain and higher effort-reward imbalance and their components such as low job control and low rewards. Smoking intensity was also higher in active jobs in women, in passive jobs and among employees with low effort expenditure. Among former and current smokers, high job strain, high effort-reward imbalance and high job demands were associated with a higher likelihood of being a current smoker. Lower effort was associated with a higher likelihood of ex-smoking. Conclusions: This evidence suggests an association between work stress and smoking and implies that smoking cessation programs may benefit from the taking into account the modification of stressful features of work environment. Key words: effort-reward imbalance; job strain; smoking. Abbreviations: OR, odds ratio; CI, confidence interval; SES, socioeconomic status

Tackling health inequalities in primary care: an exploration of GPs’ experience at the frontline

In Scotland, life expectancy and health outcomes are strongly tied to socioeconomic status. Specifically, socioeconomically deprived areas suffer disproportionately from high levels of premature multimorbidity and mortality. To tackle these inequalities in health, challenges in the most deprived areas must be addressed. One avenue that merits attention is the potential role of general medical practitioners (GPs) in helping to address health inequalities, particularly due to their long-term presence in deprived communities, their role in improving patient and population health, and their potential advocacy role on behalf of their patients. GPs can be seen as what Lipsky calls ‘street-level bureaucrats’ due to their considerable autonomy in the decisions they make surrounding individual patient needs, yet practising under the bureaucratic structure of the NHS. While previous research has examined the applicability of Lipsky’s framework to the role of GPs, there has been very little research exploring how GPs negotiate between the multiple identities in their work, how GPs ‘socially construct’ their patients, how GPs view their potential role as ‘advocate’, and what this means in terms of the contribution of GPs to addressing existing inequalities in health. Using semi-structured interviews, this study explored the experience and views of 24 GPs working in some of Scotland’s most deprived practices to understand how they might combat this growing health divide via the mitigation (and potential prevention) of existing health inequalities. Participants were selected based on several criteria including practice deprivation level and their individual involvement in the Deep End project, which is an informal network comprising the 100 most deprived general practices in Scotland. The research focused on understanding GPs’ perceptions of their work including its broader implications, within their practice, the communities within which they practise, and the health system as a whole. The concept of street-level bureaucracy proved to be useful in understanding GPs’ frontline work and how they negotiate dilemmas. However, this research demonstrated the need to look beyond Lipsky’s framework in order to understand how GPs reconcile their multiple identities, including advocate and manager. As a result, the term ‘street-level professional’ is offered to capture more fully the multiple identities which GPs inhabit and to explain how GPs’ elite status positions them to engage in political and policy advocacy. This study also provides evidence that GPs’ social constructions of patients are linked not only to how GPs conceptualise the causes of health inequalities, but also to how they view their role in tackling them. In line with this, the interviews established that many GPs felt they could make a difference through advocacy efforts at individual, community and policy/political levels. Furthermore, the study draws attention to the importance of practitioner-led groups—such as the Deep End project—in supporting GPs’ efforts and providing a platform for their advocacy. Within this study, a range of GPs’ views have been explored based on the sample. While it is unclear how common these views are amongst GPs in general, the study revealed that there is considerable scope for ‘political GPs’ who choose to exercise discretion in their communities and beyond. Consequently, GPs working in deprived areas should be encouraged to use their professional status and political clout not only to strengthen local communities, but also to advocate for policy change that might potentially affect the degree of disadvantage of their patients, and levels of social and health inequalities more generally.

Effort-reward imbalance at work and the co-occurrence of lifestyle risk factors: cross-sectional survey in a sample of 36,127 public sector employees

Background In occupational life, a mismatch between high expenditure of effort and receiving few rewards may promote the co-occurrence of lifestyle risk factors, however, there is insufficient evidence to support or refute this hypothesis. The aim of this study is to examine the extent to which the dimensions of the Effort-Reward Imbalance (ERI) model – effort, rewards and ERI – are associated with the co-occurrence of lifestyle risk factors. Methods Based on data from the Finnish Public Sector Study, cross-sectional analyses were performed for 28,894 women and 7233 men. ERI was conceptualized as a ratio of effort and rewards. To control for individual differences in response styles, such as a personal disposition to answer negatively to questionnaires, occupational and organizational -level ecological ERI scores were constructed in addition to individual-level ERI scores. Risk factors included current smoking, heavy drinking, body mass index ≥25 kg/m2, and physical inactivity. Multinomial logistic regression models were used to estimate the likelihood of having one risk factor, two risk factors, and three or four risk factors. The associations between ERI and single risk factors were explored using binary logistic regression models. Results After adjustment for age, socioeconomic position, marital status, and type of job contract, women and men with high ecological ERI were 40% more likely to have simultaneously ≥3 lifestyle risk factors (vs. 0 risk factors) compared with their counterparts with low ERI. When examined separately, both low ecological effort and low ecological rewards were also associated with an elevated prevalence of risk factor co-occurrence. The results obtained with the individual-level scores were in the same direction. The associations of ecological ERI with single risk factors were generally less marked than the associations with the co-occurrence of risk factors. Conclusion This study suggests that a high ratio of occupational efforts relative to rewards may be associated with an elevated risk of having multiple lifestyle risk factors. However, an unexpected association between low effort and a higher likelihood of risk factor co-occurrence as well as the absence of data on overcommitment (and thereby a lack of full test of the ERI model) warrant caution in regard to the extent to which the entire ERI model is supported by our evidence.

Affecting Factors of Public Employees’ Ganizational Commitment

Purpose – The aim of this chapter is to shed some light on the antecedents of organizational commitment, the mediating role of job engagement and job satisfaction as determinants of organizational commitment within the public sector environment, and the effects that national cultural values may have on these relationships. Approach – This paper presents a review of the works that, from both theoretical and empirical points of view, explore the affecting factors of public employees’ organizational commitment in an international setting. Findings – A comprehensive model has been developed, detailing the expectations on the influence that these factors might have on public employees’ level of commitment, either as mediators or moderators. Research limitations/implications – The main limitation is the paper’s theoretical nature; the subsequent implication is a future empirical research that may prove or disprove these theoretical findings. In addition, there are some other possible mediating factors and antecedents which may be of interest for future researchers. Originality/value – This comprehensive review of the extant literature may provide academics and public managers with a deeper comprehension of how organizational commitment might be achieved, and why some practices may or may not be transferrable from one country to another.

Psychological Ownership of Employees as a Mediator in the Justice - Affective Commitment Relationship

Numerous scholars have accumulated evidence on the positive effects that employees' organizational justice perceptions exert on work-related outcomes such as affective commitment. However, research still lacks understanding of the underlying mechanisms connecting the two constructs. In this article we aim to narrow this gap by examining the concept of psychological ownership as a possible mediator between organizational justice perceptions and affective commitment. Investigating a sample of 619 employees, we find distributive justice to be positively related to psychological ownership, and observe psychological ownership as a full mediator of the distributive justice and affective commitment relationship. These insights offer a new explanation in understanding the justice-commitment connection, contributing to both organizational justice and psychological ownership literature and opening up ways for promising future research

Recreational drug use within the employees of the mariculture and seafood industry in South Australia

A study of recreational drug use among workers in the Port Lincoln mariculture and seafood industries was conducted by self report questionnaire. High rates of cannabis and alcohol use were revealed during the shore based fish farming season. The occupational health and safety implications of these findings in one of Australia's most dangerous industries are significant. Further research could inform the development of industry specific harm minimisation policies.