Project Risk Assessment and Corporate Behavior: Creating Knowledge for Sustainable Business

In a VUCA world (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous), organizations, in order to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage, must learn to mitigate risk and prioritize performance and innovation. In the last decade, as a way to respond to market demands, projects emerge as a way for organizations to implement their strategic objectives in order to respond to a need, opportunity, or threat in an efficient way. This e-book includes a collection of 11 papers that discuss theoretical approaches and case studies, focused on a combined effect between Project Risk Assessment and corporate behaviour in order to support the sustainability and business resilience in a competitive environment. The e-book will be of particular interest to entrepreneurs, researchers, and policymakers

Inside International Development Organisations: Socially Constructing Judgement in-the-Moment

This exploratory study aimed, first, to build new knowledge on how senior managers of international development organisations defined judgement and how they made sense of it in the context of their leadership roles and work environments. A secondary aim was to explore methodologies and methods, specifically unstructured interviews and observations, to be used in the PhD phase to study the social phenomenon of judgement. Using an ethnographic and reflexive approach, this study addressed the question: How do managers understand their use of judgement ‘in-the-moment’ in practice? Results from the two participating organisations suggest that there are diverse interpretations of the meaning of ‘judgement’; it is a socially constructed process; used in uncertain situations; and influenced by time and space. These findings contribute to our understanding of how judgement in-the-moment is perceived inside an understudied area: the everyday context of small international development organisations. Theoretically, this study complements the existing literature with a social constructionist perspective and draws linkages to judgement as a constitutive element of sensemaking. Methodologically, the reflexive approach taken builds awareness of examining the ‘multiple selves’ and how researchers influence their research and are influenced by it as subject and object. The validity, methodological issues, limitations and implications for future research are also discussed

Employing America's Veterans: Perspectives from Businesses

Employment is an important aspect of reintegration into civilian society for many transitioning service members. Despite general American goodwill and intent to support veterans, many companies must emphasize business-related reasons to hire veterans. Thus, any effort to improve veteran employment outcomes must consider employer perspectives and the institutions and processes in place to facilitate and incentivize the hiring of veterans.This report provides empirical data representing the experiences of 69 companies of varying size, location and industry. In this report, the authors discuss to what extent, and for what reasons, employers think it is good business to hire veterans. Additionally, from the experiences of those employers who hesitate or have concerns about hiring veterans, Harrell and Berglass also describe the challenges to veteran employment and make recommendations for policy changes to improve the employment situation of veterans

Employer Perspectives on EAL Employee Writing Problems

In academic disciplines, content rather than writing accuracy is usually emphasized (Hyland, 2013), leaving many English-as-an-additional-language (EAL) students unmotivated to improve writing accuracy. However, the workplace may demand accurate and clear writing. Thus, Ferris (2002, 2011) calls for research into employers’ perspectives on inaccurate and unclear writing of EAL employees to help raise academic faculty and EAL student consciousness. To respond to Ferris\u27 call, this study investigated: 1) employers’ expectations regarding writing accuracy of EAL employees, 2) EAL employees’ language problems in work-related writing, and 3) the impact of writing problems on EAL employees’ employment and career opportunities. The study employed qualitative interviews with ten Canadian employers for data collection and a grounded theory approach for data analysis. Results indicated that the participants generally maintained the same writing standards for EAL and native-English-speaking (NES) employees. The study showed a disconnect between the academic and professional worlds regarding EAL writing standards

Identifying wellbeing challenges and solutions in the police service using the World Café method

Police work presents risks to mental and physical health for officers and civilian staff. We report a project that involved police employees in identifying wellbeing challenges and potential solutions. We facilitated ‘World Café’ events in which approximately 180 officers and civilian staff participated. Qualitative data were collected and thematically analysed drawing upon the Job Demands-Resources model. We identified themes relating to workload, management practices, occupational health processes, and continuing mental health stigma. Our analyses suggest an environment in which resources are insufficient to meet demands. The resulting pressures may contribute to management behaviours that can impair subordinate wellbeing

Retention Strategies to Prepare and Maintain Talent for Future Leadership Roles

Retaining qualified talent is essential to organizational leaders\u27 ability to maintain a competitive advantage. The purpose of this multiple case study was to explore the retention strategies that financial managers used to prepare and maintain talent to assume future leadership roles. The conceptual framework that grounded this study was the transformational leadership theory. The research participants were financial managers from 5 financial services businesses located in the southern region of the United States with a minimum of 5 years of management experience and at least 3 direct reports. Data were collected from semistructured interviews, observations, and review of annual reports, websites, and talent-development strategies. To ensure data saturation, methodological triangulation was used. Data analysis using the modified van Kaam method enabled the identification of 4 themes: preparing, partnering, mentoring, and investing. The implications of this study for positive social change include the potential for leaders of financial businesses to increase awareness of the value of talent retention efforts across organizations, thereby improving profit margins

Employee Engagement and Marginalized Populations

Portland State University (PSU) is strongly focused on equity and inclusion as evidenced by its strategic priorities, active Office of Global Diversity and Inclusion (OGDI), and many employees and students who care about inclusion and social justice. There is, however, less focus on the employee experience. With nearly 4,000 staff, faculty, administrators, and student workers, PSU runs on the people passionate about serving its mission, but depending on the area of the university in which one is employed, experiences can range from supportive and trusting to micromanaging and disrespectful. This report examines the employee experience, or employee engagement, at PSU from multiple campus perspectives, and will focus on the experiences of those in members of marginalized populations (MPs). MPs are defined as those voices often or historically excluded from the mainstream or “privileged” aspects of PSU, Portland, and society in general, such as people with disabilities, women, people of color or ethnic minorities, members of the LGBTQ community, older employees, and political/religious minorities. The Gallup Q12 engagement survey was conducted in 2015 and 2016 with a subset of PSU employees that specifically broke participants up into five groups: gender, race/ethnicity, LGBTQ status, and years of service at PSU. The following report will discuss employee engagement in general, for public employees, and for marginalized populations; provide analysis of how PSU engagement is affected by MP status; examine the contributors and inhibitors of engagement at PSU; and provide recommendations for improving general PSU employee engagement, and particularly engagement among those marginalized groups

Is employee narcissism always toxic? – The role of narcissistic admiration, rivalry, and leaders’ implicit followership theories for employee voice

Organizational researchers are increasingly interested in investigating the influence of narcissism on the workplace. Drawing on self-determination theory and recent research that distinguishes two dimensions of narcissism and their different underlying motivational dynamics, we hypothesised that employee empowerment, and in turn voice, are differentially influenced by the two narcissism facets admiration and rivalry. In particular, we expected that employees’ narcissistic admiration is positively related to voice via empowerment, whereas rivalry is negatively related to voice via empowerment. Moreover, we investigated leaders’ implicit followership theories (IFTs) as moderator of the relationships between narcissistic rivalry and narcissistic admiration with empowerment. We argue that a leader’s positive IFTs buffer the negative effect of narcissistic rivalry and foster the positive effect of narcissistic admiration on empowerment, and in turn voice (i.e., first-stage moderated mediations). We found support for most of our predictions in a multi-wave field study using data from 268 leader-employee dyads. Theoretical and practical implications are explored

Organisational culture in internationally federated non-profit organisations : the importance of industry and governance

In the era of globalisation, organisations around the world have increasingly become stages of global diversity where multi-cultural workforces interact in teams on a daily basis. International organisations, in particular, are a characteristic display of cross-cultural interaction. The study of organisational culture in a multi-cultural organisational environment is receiving growing attention due to a pressing need to understand and manage the consequences of cross-cultural interaction and achieve better organisational outcomes. However, so far, studies in the area have focused on multinational for-profit organisations and neglected other industry and governance, missing opportunities for broader and richer understanding in the field. The present study covered a case of an internationally federated complex non-profit organisation and captured new insights, thereby contributing to theory and enriching the empirical evidence in the field of study. The results shed light on the importance of industry and governance, and provoked critical questions for further research. The unique features of non-profit and federated governance culture depicted the opportunities for cross-learning with other industries. The study highlighted the distinct formation of conventional cultural dimensions contributing to cultural cohesion and cushioning the federation against excessive fragmentation. The dimensions of institutional collectivism, in-group collectivism, power distance and uncertainty avoidance depicted interesting behaviours in the study context. These dimensions dominated behaviour and have rendered other dimensions subservient. Cultural behaviours, such as cultural-anchoring and power grouping, transpired as unique findings to the industry and governance, where consensus and fragmentation have played integrative and accommodative roles. Dominant dimensions determined direction and intensity in subservient dimensions irrespective of values espoused by leadership in the subservient dimensions. The line between organisational politics and the ingroup collectivism dimension was blurred, calling for further research in the field of organisational behaviour. Further research in the field could focus on shaping organisational cultural dimensions fit for diverse industry and governance contexts, identifying areas of cross-fertilisation of learning, investigating the significance of dominant versus subservient dimensions in the process of organisational cultural change, and broadening the knowledge base in the field by studying diverse organisational typologies.Graduate School of Business Leadership (SBL)D. B. L

Managing change in organisational environment

Twentieth century has set an unprecedented pace of change, which seems to be ever increasing. The changes are transforming every sphere of social life including business and organisational life. Globalisation has made organisational structures flatter but wider in reach. Advancements in information and communication technologies have made teams larger through vast and powerful information networks. These forces are triggering the reshaping and restructuring of every major industry worldwide nowadays. The main research aim of this study is to explore how organisational conflict is affected by change (and vice versa) in order to work out a set of recommendations which shall take form of practical intervention strategies for the improvement of organizational effectiveness by mitigating the dysfunctions of a conflict and adjusting employees' styles of handling interpersonal and intergroup conflict. Workplace conflict is an everyday reality. It is an inevitable result of human interaction in a competitive environment of the workplace. So, according to this assumption, conflict is not something vicious and destructive, but an intrinsic part of human interaction. Then, the conflict is not a problem in itself, the way it is managed is what defines whether the conflict is destructive or not