Work/Family Balance: HRM Policy and Practice in Australia

An employee's inability to balance work and family responsibilities has resulted in an increase in stress related illnesses. Historically, research into the nexus between work and family has primarily focused on the work/family conflict relationship, predominately investigating the impact of this conflict on parents, usually mothers. To date research has not sufficiently examined the human resource management practices that enable all parents to achieve a balance between their work and family lives. This paper explores the relationship between contemporary family friendly HRM policies and employed parents perceptions of work/family enhancement, work/family satisfaction, propensity to turnover, and work/family conflict. Self-report questionnaire data from 326 men and women is analysed and discussed to enable organisations to consider the use of family friendly policies and thus create a convergence between the well-being of employees and the effectiveness of the organisation.

Employability and job status as moderators of the effects of job insecurity on work outcomes

Despite greater use of temporary employment contracts, little is known about how employees react to job length uncertainty. Individual careers within the safety of one or two primary organisations are no longer the norm. This study investigates the effects of job insecurity and employment status (temporary/permanent) on work outcomes. Three hundred and ninety-one employees (122 temporary and 269 permanent) in low to medium level non-academic positions from two Australian universities completed a survey. The results show that a belief that comparable employment is easily available did not alleviate the negative effects of job insecurity. Work attitudes for temporaries and permanents though were differentially influenced by employee perceptions of their own employability.

The Impact of Internal Market Orientation on Staff Service Behaviours

The impact of service direction, service training and staff behaviours on perceptions of service delivery are examined. The impact of managerial behaviour in the form of internal market orientation (IMO) on the attitudes of frontline staff towards the firm and its consequent influence on their customer oriented behaviours is also examined. Frontline service staff working in the consumer transport industry were surveyed to provide subjective data about the constructs of interest in this study, and the data were analysed using structural equations modelling employing partial least squares estimation. The data indicate significant relationships between internal market orientation (IMO), the attitudes of the employees to the firm and their consequent behaviour towards customers. Customer orientation, service direction and service training are all identified as antecedents to high levels of service delivery. The study contributes to marketing theory by providing quantitative evidence to support assumptions that internal marketing has an impact on services success. For marketing practitioners, the research findings offer additional information about the management, training and motivation of service staff towards service excellence.

Capabilities : describing what services can do

The ability of agents and services to automatically locate and interact with unknown partners is a goal for both the semantic web and web services. This, \serendipitous interoperability", is hindered by the lack of an explicit means of describing what services (or agents) are able to do, that is, their capabilities. At present, informal descriptions of what services can do are found in \documentation" elements; or they are somehow encoded in operation names and signatures. We show, by ref- erence to existing service examples, how ambiguous and imprecise capa- bility descriptions hamper the attainment of automated interoperability goals in the open, global web environment. In this paper we propose a structured, machine readable description of capabilities, which may help to increase the recall and precision of service discovery mechanisms. Our capability description draws on previous work in capability and process modeling and allows the incorporation of external classi¯cation schemes. The capability description is presented as a conceptual meta model. The model supports conceptual queries and can be used as an extension to the DAML-S Service Pro¯le.