Uncertainty and Teachers’ Organizational Commitment in Egyptian Public Schools

Ranging from daily to strategic decisions, uncertainty is an integral part of the decision making process in all schools. Regardless of their experience, teachers are suffering from the lack of information and unpredictable future events that their schools face. Given the fact that Egypt has tried to use education as a mechanism for attaining economic soundness and organizational effectiveness, the present study explores the effect of the different types of uncertainty (strategic, structural, and job-related) on teachers’ organizational commitment approaches (affective, continuance, and normative).Upon collecting 150 out of 200 distributed questionnaire sets, the researchers used correlation and regression to test the hypotheses. The analysis of the collected data showed a negative correlation between uncertainty types (strategic, structural, and job-related) and two approaches of organizational commitment (affective and continuance). No relationship was found between uncertainty types and teachers’ normative commitment. Keywords: uncertainty; strategic uncertainty; structural uncertainty; job- related uncertainty; organizational commitment; Egyp

Consequences of socialism in employee's attitudes

This paper compares people from former socialist countries with those of non‐socialist countries according to their attitudes toward society, trade unions, work and the organisations they work for ‐ based on empirical data from 15 countries. Results indicate that intrinsic factors of job satisfaction in the traditional capitalist countries have a greater correlation with feelings toward the company and general job satisfaction than extrinsic factors. The opposite is true of former socialist countries. Countries with a socialist past have to deal with the satisfaction of needs at a lower level than traditional capitalist countries and this consequently influences attitudes and expectations toward society, trade unions, organisations and work. First Published Online: 14 Oct 201

Implementation of organizational changes in Estonian companies

Both the popular press and academic literature tend to consider organizational change as a step‐by‐step process leading to success. This paper examines the suitability of the theory that guides the implementation of change at company level for organizations in countries in transition. The author's surveys, conducted in 137 Estonian companies in 2001 and 121 in 2005, show that the main focus of Estonian managers has been on initiating change and much less attention paid to assessing the process of change and making modifications and consolidating improvements. A process model of change for countries in transition has been proposed. First published online: 14 Oct 201

Role of politics in public sector organizational change

In this paper we will address issues of organizational changes in public sector where the relevance of management has not diminished during the last two decades of the neo‐liberal market philosophy. Public sector organizations are susceptible to greater and more open accountability with politicians, pressure groups, taxpayers and voters all having an interest in the performance of it. In late 1990s Estonian government initiated reforms of health care system in the country. Estonian Hospital Master Plan (EHMP) 2015 was launched in 2000 which, within the others, was initiating the merge of seven Tallinn hospitals into North Estonian Regional Hospital (NERH). To evaluate efficacy of organizational changes during implementation of EHMP‐model into health care system in Estonia we utilized personal interviews of top and middle managers and annual reports of merged hospitals to benchmark these measures to earlier merged Univerity Hopsital and other EU hospitals. We conclude that even NERH was established and the reform‐initiated changes were mostly introduced by the deviation from first‐line governmental plans and introduction of new political directions in 2003 lead to new organizational changes and managerial efforts to gain the goals with, unfortunately, prolonged change process. First published online: 14 Oct 201

Impact of innovation climate on individual and organisational level factors in Asia and Europe

Organisation climate plays an important role for the innovation of an organisation. The purpose of this paper is to investigate connections between the innovation climate and individual and organisational level factors. Surveys were conducted among Japanese, Chinese, Estonian, Czech and Slovakian enterprises. Linear regression analysis was conducted. The results of an empirical study show that the innovation climate predicts differently some individual and organisational level factors in studied countries. Two innovation climate facets – commitment and freedom predict individual level factors– attitude toward the firm in all 5 countries. In two studied Asian countries, Japan and China, commitment predicts meaning of work and job satisfaction whereas in all three new European Union member states some links between facets of the innovation climate and individual meaning of work and job satisfaction were missing. Although individual job satisfaction and meaning of work in is still shaped by to some extent different mechanisms in studied countries, implications of the innovative climate for organisation are more similar, at least in industries that are influenced by rapid technological development and globalization