Search results

During the last years, workplace fun has emerged as a potential indicator of a healthy workplace. Congruently, organisations have become interested in enhancing positive experiences at work, such as joy in the workplace. While such trends have resulted in a growing literature on fun in the workplace, humour and play, academics and practitioners are still uncertain as to the nature of fun and its antecedents. The purpose of this paper is to explore the concept of fun in the modern organisation and understand the underlying elements necessary for creating environments that valorise and promote fun.

The authors conducted semi-structured individual interviews with open-ended questions with 34 employed individuals from a variety of professions. The data were analysed using thematic analysis.

The analyses revealed organised fun as a distinct type of workplace fun that can have a significant impact through its social support function and psychological safety as the underlying element for promoting healthy positive fun interactions. The culture of the organisation and management attitudes towards fun emerged as key issues in promoting a fun workplace.

Organised fun emerged as a new type of workplace fun. The relational characteristic of fun and its function as a social support method are discussed. The study has delineated the contextual factors that should be addressed by researchers when studying workplace fun.

The purpose of the current study is to examine the relationship between emotional display rules/job focused labor, work‐family interference (WFI) and burnout among a sample of workers in a Dutch governmental organization.

The research is a cross‐sectional study of 174 workers from a Dutch governmental organization.

Emotional display rules and job‐focused labor were related to burnout and psychosomatic complaints. More specifically, the need to hide negative emotions and engage in surface acting was related to negative outcomes. In addition, WFI partially mediated the relationship between the hiding of negative emotion/surface acting and burnout/psychosomatic complaints.

The present study is cross‐sectional and thus the postulated relationships cannot be interpreted causally.

In terms of training and/or interventions, there is a need for the worksite to provide structured opportunities for employees to decompress from the emotional demanding aspects of their jobs.

Emotional labor has been rarely examined as an antecedent of WFI. In addition, while emotional labor has been studied with individuals in the service sector, it has been rarely examined among individuals whose jobs are highly ceremonial in nature.

Quality of care and health professional burnout are important issues in their own right, however, relatively few studies have examined both. The purpose of this paper is to explore quality of care and health professional burnout in hospital settings.

The paper is a narrative literature review of quality of care and health professional burnout in hospital settings published in peer-reviewed journals between January 2000 and March 2013. Papers were identified via a search of PsychInfo, PubMed, Embase and CINNAHL electronic databases. In total, 30 papers which measured and/or discussed both quality of care and health professional burnout were identified.

The paper provides insight into the key health workforce-planning issues, specifically staffing levels and workloads, which impact upon health professional burnout and quality of care. The evidence from the review literature suggests that health professionals face heavier and increasingly complex workloads, even when staffing levels and/or patient-staff ratios remain unchanged.

The narrative literature review suggests that weak retention rates, high turnover, heavy workloads, low staffing levels and/or staffing shortages conspire to create a difficult working environment for health professionals, one in which they may struggle to provide high-quality care and which may also contribute to health professional burnout. The review demonstrates that health workforce planning concerns, such as these, impact on health professional burnout and on the ability of health professionals to deliver quality care. The review also demonstrates that most of the published papers published between 2000 and 2013 addressing health professional burnout and quality of care were nursing focused.

Health care organizations and hospitals in particular are highly resistant to change. The reasons for this are rooted in professional role behaviors, hierarchical structures and the influence of hidden curricula that inform organizational culture. Action research (AR) has been identified as a promising bottom-up approach that has the potential to address the significant barriers to change. However, to date no systematic review of the field in health care exists. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A systematic review of the literature was conducted. Studies were reviewed with regard to the four stages of AR; problem identification, planning, implementation and evaluation.

Only 19 studies were identified that fit the inclusion criteria. Results revealed significant heterogeneity with regard to theoretical background, methodology employed and evaluation methods used.

Only studies published and written in the English language were included.

The field of AR interventions would benefit from a theoretical framework that has the ability to guide the methodology and evaluation processes.

This is the first systematic review of AR in hospitals.

To date, relatively little evidence has been published as to what represents an effective and efficient way to improve quality of care and safety in hospitals. In addition, the initiatives that do exist are rarely designed or developed with regard to the individual and organisational factors that determine the success or failure of such initiatives. One of the challenges in linking organisational culture to quality of care is to identify the focal point at which a deficient hospital culture and inadequate organisational resources are most evident. The accumulated evidence suggests that such a point is physician burnout. This paper sets out to examine this issue.

The paper reviews the existing literature on organisational culture, burnout and quality of care in the healthcare sector. A new conceptual approach as to how organisational culture and quality of care can be more effectively linked through the physician experience of burnout is proposed.

Recommendations are provided with regard to how future research can approach quality of care from a bottom‐up organisational change perspective. In addition, the need to widen the debate beyond US and North European experiences is discussed.

The present paper represents an attempt to link organisational culture, job burnout and quality of care in a more meaningful way. A conceptual model has been provided as a way to frame and evaluate future research.

The emotionally taxing nature of health‐care work has been increasingly recognized. In parallel, the field of work and family has been searching for more specific antecedents of both work interference with family (WFI) and family interference with work (FWI). The current study aims to examine the relationship between surface acting and hiding negative emotions with WFI and FWI among Greek health‐care professionals.

The research is a cross‐sectional study of 180 Greek doctors and 84 nurses using self‐report measures.

Results indicated that, for doctors, surface acting at work was positively related to WFI and, for nurses, surface acting at home was positively related to FWI.

The respondents were sampled on a convenience basis and the non‐random procedure may have introduced unmeasured selection effects. The present study is cross‐sectional and thus the postulated relationships cannot be interpreted causally.

Emotional management training and opportunities for emotional decompression for Greek health‐care professionals should be explored. In terms of medical education, the need to train students to understand and cope with emotional demands is an important first step. This research highlights the need for communication‐skills training courses facilitating emotional awareness and emotional management.

These findings position emotional labour as an important antecedent of both WFI and FWI.

OUR publication date precludes more than the beginning of our study on the Library Association Conference which, from the point of view of numbers, has been one of the largest. We shall continue in our next issue such comment upon it as the importance of the subjects under discussion would seem to warrant.

Researchers of the history of women teachers have included fiction, as well as memoirs and history, as an important part of that testimony. The aim of this article is to examine the novel, Anne of Avonlea (1925) by Lucy Maude Montgomery as both a source of information about the working life of a woman teacher and, due to the immense popularity of the book, as a shaper of how women understand and enact teaching. Anne is a young teacher in her first posting consisting of a rural Canadian one‐ teacher school. She struggles to resist using corporal punishment in favour of winning her students respect, stimulating their minds and finding a ‘genius’. However, the local community, fellow teachers and her students have different notions of how teachers should behave. Her beliefs are further undermined when in a fit of anger she succumbs to beating one her students. Her reflections on what drove her actions are realistic and contain warnings for contemporary teachers to appreciate the often fragile hold they have on their espoused educational philosophy. Another danger revealed is the unconscious leaking of the shadow side of the psyche in the necessary close but dangerous relationships between students and teacher thereby providing a complex view of what motivates young women to teach and how they approach their work.

This paper aims to evaluate the use of community visioning in Montgomery, Alabama and Chattanooga, Tennessee, as each municipality seeks to become a globally competitive 21st century smart city while also fostering participatory and inclusive planning processes.

This research is qualitative, drawing upon discourse analysis of relevant mass media and public documents to map the consultation process and identify the key themes and challenges arising in the two visioning projects.

Montgomery and Chattanooga are committed to using participatory visioning to generate inclusive pathways to smart city status by 2040. Each used the local utility company as the key platform to enable a smart city because of each company’s inclusive demographic reach and historical status. The two cities are at different stages of the smart city trajectory and each faces ongoing challenges in ensuring that the benefits of smart city development reach beyond elites to include communities across racial and economic lines. To date, the planning process in each city is more accurately classified as a responsive community visioning rather than participatory.

This is a pilot assessment of community visioning in Montgomery and Chattanooga. Implementation of each vision is ongoing and further research is needed to illuminate how each city meets ongoing challenges and opportunities, particularly in light of the Covid-19 pandemic and its flow-on economic and social shocks.

The value of this work lies in the comparison of community visioning across two mid-sized and diverse American cities in the Southern region that must compete with larger and more established technology-hubs in both the USA and globally for investment, amenities and human capital.

In October 2008, in the midst of a financial crisis, Anthony Keating, investment manager at the Boston private bank Billingsley, Blaylock, and Montgomery, was searching for an investment strategy to recommend to his high-net-worth clients. Traditional investments in the equity markets were being decimated, and Keating’s clients would be looking to him for ideas. Inspired by the success of Paulson and Co., Keating began to explore the possibility of entering a trade that would profit as homeowners defaulted on their mortgages. The more Keating learned about the trade, the more he realized that he needed to know about mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps. The case provides instructors with a chance to introduce these financial instruments, while at the same time providing lessons applicable to students interested in value investing or real estate finance.

After reading and analyzing the case, students will be able to:

• Explain how home mortgages are securitized into financial instruments that are traded in public markets

• Describe how credit default swaps can be used to speculate on the value of an underlying financial instrument

• Identify potential mispricing across related financial instruments

• Understand the potential risks and rewards of various financial investment strategies that look to capitalize on defaults on subprime mortgages

Explain how home mortgages are securitized into financial instruments that are traded in public markets

Describe how credit default swaps can be used to speculate on the value of an underlying financial instrument

Identify potential mispricing across related financial instruments

Understand the potential risks and rewards of various financial investment strategies that look to capitalize on defaults on subprime mortgages