Apologies for any cross-posting.
A new issue of Human Relations is available online: Human Relations May 2015; Vol. 68, No. 5 - we hope you enjoy reading these articles.
The entire issue can be accessed online at: http://hum.sagepub.com/content/68/5?etoc
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MAY ISSUE ARTICLES
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Family interference and employee dissatisfaction: Do agreeable employees better cope with stress?
Smriti Anand, Prajya Vidyarthi, Satvir Singh, and Seungeui Ryu
Human Relations May 2015 vol. 68 no. 5 691–708; first published October 6, 2014 as doi: 10.1177/0018726714539714 http://hum.sagepub.com/content/68/5/691.abstract
Abstract
Extending work–family conflict research, we draw on role theory and conservation of resources theory to propose a moderated-mediation model of the relationship between family interference with work, job stress, agreeableness and employee attitudes. We examined the moderating effect of employee agreeableness on the relationship between family interference with work and job and life satisfaction mediated by job stress. Hypotheses were tested in a sample of 756 employees from 15 industries. Results showed a negative association between family interference with work and job satisfaction and life satisfaction through perceived job stress. Further, this mediated relationship was moderated by employee agreeableness, such that job stress and decrease in job and life satisfaction were perceived only by employees low in agreeableness.
Surface acting in service: A two-context examination of customer power and politeness
Jennifer L Wessel and Dirk D Steiner
Human Relations May 2015; 68(5): 709–730; first published October 6, 2014 as doi: 10.1177/0018726714540731
http://hum.sagepub.com/content/68/5/709?etoc
Abstract
To date, the role of employee perceptions of customers has largely been overlooked in the emotional labor literature, particularly in the area of customer power. In two studies, we first examined the relationships between perceptions of the customer (i.e. power and politeness), surface acting and job-related outcomes in a typical service context (a department store; Study 1) and then explored the generalizability of these findings to a health care service context (a nursing home; Study 2), in which customer–employee relationships, the emotional climate and customer behavior norms differ substantially. Survey results indicate that for department store employees, perceiving customers as having higher power was associated with more reported surface acting and that certain negative effects of surface acting were exacerbated by interacting with impolite customers. These results were not replicated in our sample of nursing home employees. Our research suggests that customer-related variables have an impact on surface acting strategies, both in terms of usage and its relationship to job-related outcomes in certain service contexts. Divergent findings across our two studies suggest that different service contexts may require different assumptions regarding surface acting, customer perceptions and outcomes.
The role of relational resources in the knowledge management capability and innovation of professional service firms
Na Fu
Human Relations May 2015; 68(5): 731–764; first published October 16, 2014 as doi: 10.1177/0018726714543479
http://hum.sagepub.com/content/68/5/731.short
Abstract
Adopting a relational perspective, this article investigates whether organizational relationship-building routines and relational coordination influence organizational knowledge management capability and ultimately innovation in professional service firms (PSFs). Using data collected from 120 accounting firms in Ireland, support is found for an inter-mediation model where both relational coordination and knowledge management capability intervene in the relationship between relational routines and innovation. Thus, a linkage model is supported whereby relational routines facilitate relational coordination, which enhances knowledge management capability, leading to innovation. This article provides evidence of the importance of relational routines and relational coordination in promoting a firm's knowledge management capability and in fostering innovation. Results highlight the value of relational resources in PSFs and suggest a novel and easy-to-implement approach for knowledge and innovation management.
Global ends, local means: Cross-national homogeneity in professional service firms
Crawford Spence, Claire Dambrin, Chris Carter, Javier Husillos, and Pablo Archel
Human Relations May 2015; 68(5): 765–788; first published October 16, 2014 as doi: 10.1177/0018726714541489
http://hum.sagepub.com/content/68/5/765.short
Abstract
An expanding institutionalist literature on professional service firms (PSFs) emphasizes that these are ridden by contradictions, paradoxes and conflicting logics. More specifically, literature looking at PSFs in a global context has highlighted how these contradictions prevent firms from becoming truly global in nature. What it takes to make partner in the Big 4 is at the core of such interrogations because partners belong to global firms yet are promoted at the national level. We undertake a cross-country comparison of partner promotion processes in Big 4 PSFs in Canada, France, Spain and the UK. Synthesizing existing institutionalist work with Bourdieusian theory, our results suggest that PSFs in different countries resemble each other very closely in terms of the requirements demanded of their partners. Although heterogeneity can be observed in the way in which different forms of capital are converted into each other, we show there is an overall homogeneity in that economic capital hurdles are the most significant, if not the sole, set of criteria upon which considerations of partnership admissions are based.
Smell organization: Bodies and corporeal porosity in office work
Kathleen Riach and Samantha Warren
Human Relations May 2015; 68(5): 789–809; first published October 9, 2014 as doi: 10.1177/0018726714545387
http://hum.sagepub.com/content/68/5/789.short
Abstract
This article contributes to a sensory equilibrium in studies of workplace life through a qualitative study of everyday smells in UK offices. Drawing on Csordas' (2008) phenomenology of intercorporeality, we develop the concept of corporeal porosity as a way of articulating the negotiation of bodily integrity in organizational experience. We explore the corporeal porosity of workplace life through smell-orientated interview and diary-based methods and our findings highlight the interdependence of shared, personal, local and cultural elementals when experiencing smell in office-based work. Our analysis explores three elements of bodily integrity: 'cultural permeability'; 'locating smell in-between'; and 'sensual signifiers'. This suggests that while the senses are part of the ephemeral, affective 'glue' that floats between and around working bodies, they also foreground the constantly active character of relationality in organizational life. Corporeal porosity, therefore, captures the entanglement of embodied traces and fragments – corporeal seeping and secretion that has hitherto taken a backseat in organizational studies of the body at work.
'Content to be sad' or 'runaway apprentice'? The psychological contract and career agency of young scientists in the entrepreneurial university
Alice Lam and André de Campos
Human Relations May 2015; 68(5): 811–841 first published November 5, 2014 as doi: 10.1177/0018726714545483
http://hum.sagepub.com/content/68/5/811.short
Abstract
This article examines employee agency in psychological contracts by exploring how young scientists proactively shape their careers in response to unmet expectations induced by academic entrepreneurialism. It uses the lens of social exchange to examine their relationships with the professors engaged in two types of activities: collaborative research characterized by diffuse/reciprocal exchange, and commercial ventures, by restricted/negotiated exchange. These two categories show how career agency varies in orientation, form and behavioural outcome depending on the relational context within which their psychological contracts evolve. Those involved in collaborative research experienced a relational psychological contract and responded to unfulfilled career promises by 'extended investment' in their current jobs. They use 'proxy agency' by enlisting the support of their professors. However, some become 'trapped' in perennial temporary employment and are 'content to be sad'. By contrast, those involved in research commercialization experienced a transactional contract and assert 'personal agency' by crafting their own entrepreneurial careers. They are 'runaways' who seek autonomy. The evidence is based on interviews with 24 doctoral/postdoctoral researchers and 16 professors from three leading UK universities. The article extends psychological contract theory by incorporating career agency and sheds new light on changing academic careers.
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PAPER OF THE YEAR 2014 – FREE TO ACCESS
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The Human Relations Paper of the Year Award is given to the paper that the Editorial Team considers best encapsulates broad readership appeal, sound methods, and whose theory advances our understanding of human relations at work. The editors looked at all the articles published in the 67th volume before arriving at a short list of nine articles for consideration for the 2014 Paper of the Year Award. These shortlisted papers covered a very wide variety of topics and methods. The editors read them all carefully before ranking them and total scores for each article revealed a clear winner:
NGOs management and the value of 'partnerships' for equality in international development: What's in a name?
Alessia Contu and Emanuela Girei
Human Relations 2014, 67 (2): 205–232
http://hum.sagepub.com/content/67/2/205.full.pdf+html
Warm congratulations to Alessia and Emanuela – we hope you enjoy reading their paper. The prize for each author includes an Award Certificate, a free one-year subscription to Human Relations and vouchers to spend on SAGE journals or books.
View previous Paper of the Year winners (free to access):
http://hum.sagepub.com/site/paper_of_the_year/winners.xhtml
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RECENT ONLINEFIRST PREVIEW ARTICLES
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Ship-shape: Materializing leadership in the British Royal Navy
Beverley Hawkins
Human Relations 0018726714563810, first published on April 16, 2015 as doi:10.1177/0018726714563810
http://hum.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/04/16/0018726714563810.abstract
Abstract
In this article, I contribute to posthumanist, actor-network influenced theories of leadership, drawing empirically on qualitative data collected at a Royal Navy shore establishment in Great Britain. I demonstrate how a fluid network of hybridized relationships between people and things affords shifting and multiple possibilities for making leadership matter. As configurations of actants evolve these affordances are altered, and the blackboxing processes hiding the material actants co-generating leadership effects are uncovered. A detailed explication of the politicized affordances within actor networks contributes to knowledge about how hybridized relationships co-enable possibilities for action that bring to life, reinforce and call into question the human-centred, gendered, colonialist web of assumptions and practices through which Royal Naval personnel understand and enact leadership.
What is critical appreciation? Insights from studying the critical turn in an appreciative inquiry
Rory J Ridley-Duff and Graham Duncan
Human Relations 0018726714561698, first published on April 8, 2015 as doi:10.1177/0018726714561698
http://hum.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/04/08/0018726714561698.abstract
Abstract
Appreciative inquiry was developed in the late 1980s as a process to encourage social innovation by involving people in discovering the 'best of what is'. Recent research has suggested that appreciative inquiry practitioners' focus on positivity is now inhibiting appreciative inquiry's focus on generative theory. This article responds by asking the question 'what is critical appreciation?', then seeks answers by studying the critical turn in a Big Lottery Research project. By tracking the narratives of research assistants as they describe the 'life worlds' and 'systems' in their community, we clarify the recursive processes that lead to deeper levels of appreciation. We contribute to the development of critical appreciative processes that start with a critical inquiry to deconstruct experience and then engage critical appreciative processes during the remainder of the appreciative inquiry cycle to construct new experiences. The initial critical inquiry establishes which system imperatives colonize the life world of participants whilst subsequent critical appreciative processes build participants' aspirations to design new social systems.
Sexual orientation discrimination in the United Kingdom's labour market: A field experiment
Nick Drydakis
Human Relations 0018726715569855, first published on April 8, 2015 as doi:10.1177/0018726715569855
http://hum.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/03/31/0018726715569855.abstract
Abstract
Deviations from heteronormativity affect labour market dynamics. Hierarchies of sexual orientation can result in job dismissals, wage discrimination and the failure to promote gay and lesbian individuals to top ranks. In this article, I report on a field experiment (144 job-seekers and their correspondence with 5549 firms) that tested the extent to which sexual orientation affects the labour market outcomes of gay and lesbian job-seekers in the United Kingdom. Their minority sexual orientations, as indicated by job-seekers' participation in gay and lesbian university student unions, negatively affected their workplace prospects. The probability of gay or lesbian applicants receiving an invitation for an interview was 5.0 percent (5.1%) lower than that for heterosexual male or female applicants. In addition, gay men and lesbians received invitations for interviews by firms that paid salaries that were 1.9 percent (1.2%) lower than those paid by firms that invited heterosexual male or female applicants for interviews. In addition, in male- or female-dominated occupations, gay men and lesbians received fewer invitations for interviews than their non-gay and non-lesbian counterparts. Furthermore, gay men and lesbians also received fewer invitations to interview for positions in which masculine or feminine personality traits were highlighted in job applications and at firms that did not provide written equal opportunity standards, suggesting that the level of discrimination depends partly on the personality traits that employers seek and on organization-level hiring policies. I conclude that heteronormative discourse continues to reproduce and negatively affect the labour market prospects of gay men and lesbians.
Casting the lean spell: The promotion, dilution and erosion of lean management in the NHS
Leo McCann, John S Hassard, Edward Granter and Paula J Hyde
Human Relations 0018726714561697, first published on April 8, 2015 as doi:10.1177/0018726714561697
http://hum.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/03/31/0018726714561697.abstract
Abstract
Lean thinking has recently re-emerged as a fashionable management philosophy, especially in public services. A prescriptive or mainstream literature suggests that lean is rapidly diffusing into public sector environments, providing a much-needed rethink of traditional ways of working and stimulating performance improvements. Our study of the introduction of lean in a large UK public sector hospital challenges this argument. Based on a three-year ethnographic study of how employees make sense of lean 'adoption', we describe a process in which lean ideas were initially championed, later diluted and ultimately eroded. While initially functioning as a 'mechanism of hope' (Brunsson, 2006) around which legitimacy could be generated for tackling longstanding work problems, over time both 'sellers' and 'buyers' of the concept mobilized lean in ambiguous ways, to the extent that the notion was rendered somewhat meaningless. Ultimately, our analysis rejects current prescriptive or managerialist discourses on lean while offering support for prior positions that would explain such management fashions in terms of the 'life cycle of a fad'.
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Managing Editor, Human Relations
Email: c.castle@tavinstitute.org
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