1,439 research outputs found

    Work-related risk factors for workplace bullying : The moderating effect of laissez-faire leadership

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    Workplace bullying has been described as repeated and systematic exposure to negative social acts over time, which the target has difficulties defending against (Einarsen et al., 2020). Previous research has established that bullying in the workplace is related to a wide range of negative outcomes, and bullying has been classified as a more crippling and devastating problem for employees than all other work-related stress put together (Hauge et al., 2010; Wilson, 1991). Yet, the field still lacks systematic and thorough knowledge of the mechanisms that may explain how situational antecedents are related to the occurrence and development of the workplace bullying process. Drawing on the work environment hypothesis, studies have shown that bullying seems to thrive in demanding workplaces where employees experience organizational constraints and contradictory expectations and demands. Furthermore, leadership practices are expected to have a significant impact on the presence of stress at work. For example, poor and destructive leadership has been identified as a root cause of subordinate stress (Kelloway et al., 2005; Skogstad et al., 2014), and may, as such, act as a strong stressor in its own right. However, leaders may also impact the level of stress at work indirectly, either by influencing the opportunities employees have to cope with those stressors present, or by either aggravating or alleviating the stressors already present in the work environment. The main aim of this PhD-project has been to improve our understanding of the phenomenon of workplace bullying, by investigating some mechanisms and conditions which allow bullying to flourish and escalate. The present thesis is comprised of three scientific papers, all of which employ self-report questionnaire data. The overreaching research question in all three papers was whether laissez-faire leadership can act as a moderator in the relationship between various prevailing workplace stressors and subsequent experiences of negative acts and workplace bullying. Moreover, Paper 2 examines the role of the inter-relationship between two prevailing role stressors in the development of workplace bullying, by testing the mediating effect of role conflicts in the relationship between role ambiguity and subsequent exposure to bullying behaviours. In addition, Papers 2 and 3 also investigated the potential buffering effect of transformational leadership, a constructive form of leadership that is in stark contrast to laissez-faire leadership. In paper 1, the main objective was to investigate the prospective relationship between co-worker conflict at time 1 and individuals who self-reported as new victims of bullying two years later, and whether this relationship was exacerbated by the individuals’ reports of laissez-faire leadership behaviour enacted by their immediate supervisor. Results from a logistic regression analysis on a representative sample of Norwegian workers (N = 1772) showed a significant positive relationship between conflict with co-workers and subsequent new victims of workplace bullying. Furthermore, the results showed that this relationship was only present for employees who reported high (vs. low) levels of laissez-faire leadership behaviour from their immediate supervisor. Paper 2 had two main objectives. First, we aimed to investigate the mechanisms through which role stressors lead to workplace bullying, by testing the hypothesis that the impact of role ambiguity on employees’ exposure to negative acts is mediated through their experiences of increased levels of role conflicts. Second, we tested whether laissez-faire leadership exacerbated, while transformational leadership attenuated, this relationship. In this study, we employed a national probability sample of 1,164 Norwegian workers, with three measurements across a 12-month period. The results supported our hypotheses, in that the relationship between employees’ role ambiguity and subsequent exposure to bullying behaviours was mediated by an increase in employees’ experience of role conflicts. Moreover, we found that laissez-faire leadership exacerbated, while transformational leadership attenuated, the indirect relationship between role ambiguity and subsequent exposure to bullying behaviours through role conflicts. Finally, the objective of Paper 3 was to test whether it is possible to detect these mechanisms even on a daily basis. Accordingly, this study investigated the day-to-day relationship between employees’ work pressure and their exposure to bullying-related negative acts and tested the hypotheses that even daily levels of laissez-faire leadership exacerbated while daily levels of transformational leadership attenuated this relationship. Using data from a sample of 61 naval cadets, who completed a daily diary questionnaire on 36 consecutive days (N = 1509 daily observations), we tested the day-to-day relationships between work pressure and exposure to bullying-related negative acts, and the moderating effects of daily transformational and laissez-faire leadership. The results of multilevel analyses showed a positive relationship between daily work pressure and daily exposure to bullying-related negative acts, and a positive moderating effect of daily laissez-faire leadership behaviour. More specifically, our analyses showed that the positive relationship between daily work pressure and daily exposure to bullying-related negative acts was only present on days when the subordinates reported higher levels of laissez-faire behaviour from their immediate leader. Finally, we did not find support for a moderating effect of daily transformational leadership behaviour. Taken together, these findings yield support to the theoretical notion of the work environment hypothesis, in that situational stressors represent prevailing risk factors for individuals to be exposed to negative acts and bullying in the workplace (Einarsen et al., 1994; Leymann, 1996). Moreover, our findings support the theoretical assumption that laissez-faire leadership is an important facilitator in the development of workplace bullying. Indeed, our results indicate that laissez-faire leadership may be of greater consequence in exacerbating the bullying process than transformational leadership is in attenuating the negative consequences of workplace stressors. If leaders neglect their inherent responsibility to adequately address employees’ experiences of stressful situations and ongoing interpersonal conflicts that merit attention, the risk of workplace bullying is likely to increase. Furthermore, our results show the same trends across samples and research designs, thereby strengthening the robustness of our findings. Finally, the results from Paper 2 improve our understanding of the inter-relationship between role ambiguity and role conflict in relation to bullying, by supporting the hypothesis that employees’ experience of role conflicts mediates the role ambiguity-bullying relationship. This finding indicates that role conflicts may be the more proximal, while role ambiguity may be a more distal antecedent of workplace bullying.Doktorgradsavhandlin

    UMSL Bulletin 2023-2024

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    The 2023-2024 Bulletin and Course Catalog for the University of Missouri St. Louis.https://irl.umsl.edu/bulletin/1088/thumbnail.jp

    Climate Change and Critical Agrarian Studies

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    Climate change is perhaps the greatest threat to humanity today and plays out as a cruel engine of myriad forms of injustice, violence and destruction. The effects of climate change from human-made emissions of greenhouse gases are devastating and accelerating; yet are uncertain and uneven both in terms of geography and socio-economic impacts. Emerging from the dynamics of capitalism since the industrial revolution — as well as industrialisation under state-led socialism — the consequences of climate change are especially profound for the countryside and its inhabitants. The book interrogates the narratives and strategies that frame climate change and examines the institutionalised responses in agrarian settings, highlighting what exclusions and inclusions result. It explores how different people — in relation to class and other co-constituted axes of social difference such as gender, race, ethnicity, age and occupation — are affected by climate change, as well as the climate adaptation and mitigation responses being implemented in rural areas. The book in turn explores how climate change – and the responses to it - affect processes of social differentiation, trajectories of accumulation and in turn agrarian politics. Finally, the book examines what strategies are required to confront climate change, and the underlying political-economic dynamics that cause it, reflecting on what this means for agrarian struggles across the world. The 26 chapters in this volume explore how the relationship between capitalism and climate change plays out in the rural world and, in particular, the way agrarian struggles connect with the huge challenge of climate change. Through a huge variety of case studies alongside more conceptual chapters, the book makes the often-missing connection between climate change and critical agrarian studies. The book argues that making the connection between climate and agrarian justice is crucial

    Untying the Mother Tongue

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    Untying the Mother Tongue explores what it might mean today to speak of someone’s attachment to a particular, primary language. Traditional conceptions of mother tongue are often seen as an expression of the ideology of a European nation-state. Yet, current celebrations of multilingualism reflect the recent demands of global capitalism, raising other challenges. The contributions from international scholars on literature, philosophy, and culture, analyze and problematize the concept of ‘mother tongue’, rethinking affective and cognitive attachments to language while deconstructing its metaphysical, capitalist, and colonialist presuppositions

    Writing Facts: Interdisciplinary Discussions of a Key Concept in Modernity

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    "Fact" is one of the most crucial inventions of modern times. Susanne Knaller discusses the functions of this powerful notion in the arts and the sciences, its impact on aesthetic models and systems of knowledge. The practice of writing provides an effective procedure to realize and to understand facts. This concerns preparatory procedures, formal choices, models of argumentation, and narrative patterns. By considering "writing facts" and "writing facts", the volume shows why and how "facts" are a result of knowledge, rules, and norms as well as of description, argumentation, and narration. This approach allows new perspectives on »fact« and its impact on modernity

    Informationsströme in digitalen Kulturen

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    Wir sind umgeben von einer Vielzahl an Informationsströmen, die uns selbstverständlich erscheinen. Um diese digitalen Kulturen zu beschreiben, entwickeln medienwissenschaftliche Arbeiten Theorien einer Welt im Fluss. Dabei erliegen ihre Diagnosen oftmals einem Technikfetisch und vernachlässigen gesellschaftliche Strukturen. Mathias Denecke legt eine systematische Kritik dieser Theoriebildung vor. Dazu zeichnet er die Geschichte der Rede von strömenden Informationen in der Entwicklung digitaler Computer nach und diskutiert, wie der Begriff für Gegenwartsbeschreibungen produktiv gemacht werden kann

    Writing Together: Kollaboratives Schreiben mit Personen aus dem Feld

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    Kollaboratives Forschen quer zu hegemonialen Wissensordnungen gilt als wichtiger Baustein dekolonialer Wissenspraxis. Gemeinsame Schreibprozesse von Wissenschaftler*innen und ihren nicht-wissenschaftlichen Forschungspartner*innen sind allerdings selten und eine methodologische und forschungspraktische Reflexion fehlt. Die Beiträger*innen widmen sich diesen Lücken, indem sie erfolgreiche, aber auch gescheiterte Projekte kollaborativer Textproduktion zwischen Universität und Feld vorstellen und auf ihr Potenzial als transformative und dekoloniale Wissenspraxis befragen. So entsteht eine praktische Orientierungshilfe, die gleichzeitig die interdisziplinäre Diskussion anregt

    Ditransitives in germanic languages. Synchronic and diachronic aspects

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    This volume brings together twelve empirical studies on ditransitive constructions in Germanic languages and their varieties, past and present. Specifically, the volume includes contributions on a wide variety of Germanic languages, including English, Dutch, and German, but also Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian, as well as lesser-studied ones such as Faroese. While the first part of the volume focuses on diachronic aspects, the second part showcases a variety of synchronic aspects relating to ditransitive patterns. Methodologically, the volume covers both experimental and corpus-based studies. Questions addressed by the papers in the volume are, among others, issues like the cross-linguistic pervasiveness and cognitive reality of factors involved in the choice between different ditransitive constructions, or differences and similarities in the diachronic development of ditransitives. The volume’s broad scope and comparative perspective offers comprehensive insights into well-known phenomena and furthers our understanding of variation across languages of the same family

    Measuring the impact of COVID-19 on hospital care pathways

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    Care pathways in hospitals around the world reported significant disruption during the recent COVID-19 pandemic but measuring the actual impact is more problematic. Process mining can be useful for hospital management to measure the conformance of real-life care to what might be considered normal operations. In this study, we aim to demonstrate that process mining can be used to investigate process changes associated with complex disruptive events. We studied perturbations to accident and emergency (A &E) and maternity pathways in a UK public hospital during the COVID-19 pandemic. Co-incidentally the hospital had implemented a Command Centre approach for patient-flow management affording an opportunity to study both the planned improvement and the disruption due to the pandemic. Our study proposes and demonstrates a method for measuring and investigating the impact of such planned and unplanned disruptions affecting hospital care pathways. We found that during the pandemic, both A &E and maternity pathways had measurable reductions in the mean length of stay and a measurable drop in the percentage of pathways conforming to normative models. There were no distinctive patterns of monthly mean values of length of stay nor conformance throughout the phases of the installation of the hospital’s new Command Centre approach. Due to a deficit in the available A &E data, the findings for A &E pathways could not be interpreted
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