Learning to Be Employable Through Volunteering: A Qualitative Study on the Development of Employability Capital of Young People

Over the last decades, consistent research showed that voluntary work could be considered as a tool for professional development and concrete employment: volunteering could be either experienced as a desire to improve career opportunities or to acquire new skills. The study aimed to investigate voluntary work as a context of informal and non-formal workplace learning and vocational guidance, useful to develop skills and abilities, namely the capital of personal and social resources, that could promote future employability. Participants were 38 young volunteers who experienced the Universal Civil Service, a national Italian program addressed to young people aged up to 28 years, giving them both the opportunity to engage in social activities useful for the community and have the first contact with a working context. In line with the objectives of the study, participants were invited to describe their volunteering experience in a diary, highlighting if and to what extent this context contributed to enhancing their employability capital, namely the asset of skills, knowledge, and networks acquired, that they could transfer to a future professional domain. The narrative data collected were examined through diatextual analysis, a specific address of discourse analysis designed to catch the relationship between enunciators, text, and context of the talk. This qualitative analysis allowed us to investigate the meanings young people attributed to these activities. In light of these results, the paper contributed to investigate volunteers’ perceptions about the conditions that could best foster this specific kind of workplace informal and non-formal learning and at proposing a qualitative perspective on the analysis of the employability capital they developed

The meaning of the organization or the organization of meaning? Metaphors as sensemaking tools to understand organizational change management

Within the last decades, language and discourse have entered the conception of organizing, meant as a process of sense-making where discursively based interpretations define agents, purposes, and or-ganizations. The aim of the present paper was to connect sense-making theory with the study of me-taphor, being the latter one of the most valuable and multifaceted linguistic tools, useful to catch, de-scribe, and shape organizational identity. To this purpose, the focus of the investigation was on the sen-se-making processes used by employees to figure out their organization, analysing the metaphors they use when talking about it. Participants to the study were 115 employees working in a medium-sized company operating in the automotive sector and located in the south of Italy. At the time of data collec-tion, the company was experiencing a great change due to a recent process of commercial expansion. Consequently, employees were engaged in managing great transformations of the organization, both related to its cultural vision and to the tasks and working modalities. Therefore, in-depth individual interviews were used to collect discursive data about the way employees perceived this transformation. The study was intended as an action-research intervention aimed at collecting data to support the HR func-tion in dealing with these organizational changes. Practical implications for the development of work and organizational (W&O) psychology are also discussed

The good, the bad and the blend: The strategic role of the “middle leadership” in work-family/life dynamics during remote working

The ongoing epidemiological crisis has suddenly steered us towards a new futuristic work scenario in which most service sector employees work remotely, which could be a permanent reality for most service sector employees. This paper focuses on the strategic role that leadership could play in the radical change process that is taking place in work environments. Particular attention was paid to the role of ‘middle managers’ who perform an important function as a link between the strategic vision of top management and the workforce. In addition, special attention was paid to gender differences in work-life dynamics, which are particularly relevant in countries with traditional cultural identities. As this is a conceptual contribution, the most recent studies on this specific role of middle managers have been taken into account and embedded in the current scenario. Therefore, the main contribution in terms of originality was that the current review aimed to leverage such a legacy of knowledge and create a system of evidence-based practical implications for effectively supporting change in organizational culture through the identification of the most appropriate middle management leadership models for remote working that could prevent and/or limit any psychosocial risks (e.g., workaholism and technostress) and longer-term outcomes such as sustainable work-life interface

Developing a sustainable career through discourse: a qualitative study on a group of Italian project managers

Purpose: The current study makes two main contributions: one theoretical and one methodological. First, it investigated the theoretical prepositions of career sustainability perspective, which appears particularly suitable for examining project managers' careers' dynamics and patterns, featured by explicit and recursive interactions between individual, temporal and contextual factors. Second, the study aimed to adopt a qualitative approach to this topic as to allow a deeper understanding of individual narratives about careers, highlighting underexplored issues and peculiarities that future research could further examine through quantitative methodologies. Design/methodology/approach: Project managers' careers are still an under-researched topic, especially through qualitative methods. The study applied career sustainability theory to the realm of project management, moreover, adopting a socio-constructivist perspective. Participants were 50 Italian project managers who were involved through a narrative in-depth interview that focused on career and career success. Their answers were analyzed through thematic analysis of contents and diatextual analysis. Findings: Results showed that project managers' career could be a prototypical example of sustainable career, basically described in terms of four basic constitutive dimensions as follows: time frame, social space, agency and meaning. Implications for both future theoretical expansion of career sustainability theory and project managers' career management interventions were also discussed. Originality/value: The originality of the paper could be found in the effort to adopt a socio-constructivist perspective to investigate the topic of career sustainability taking the exemplary case of project managers' career

Human resource management practices perception and career success: The mediating roles of employability and extra-role behaviors

Over the last decades, growing interest has been devoted to employees’ perceptions of Human Resource Management Practices because of their positive influence on individual attitudes and behaviors as well as on organizational performance. Furthermore, assuming the mutual benefits coming from a people-based management of the human capital in organizations, both in terms of employees’ increased motivation, engagement and commitment, and consequently enhanced performance and competitive advantage, recent research in the field concentrated on the impact of HRM practices perceptions on some distinctive individual attitudes and behaviors driving the success of organizations especially in times of radical change like the present ones. Moving from these assumptions, the aim of the present study was to examine the relationship between HRM practices perception and objective career success, considering the mediating role played by employability and extra-role behaviors. Participants were 960 Italian employees who filled an online self-report questionnaire available through the web platform Google Forms. The questionnaire encompassed socio-demographic information and self-report scales assessing the study variables. Results showed that HRM practices perception was positively related to employability, objective career success, and extra-role behaviors. Implications for theory and practice, limitations, and future research directions were also discussed

From Conflict to Balance: Challenges for Dual-Earner Families Managing Technostress and Work Exhaustion in the Post-Pandemic Scenario

Within the last three years, the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak has contributed to changing many aspects of individual and collective life. Focusing on professional life, the forced shift to remote working modalities, the consequent blurring of work-family (WF) boundaries, and the difficulties for parents in childrearing have significantly impacted family routines. These challenges have been more evident for some specific vulnerable categories of workers, such as dual-earner parents. Accordingly, the WF literature investigated the antecedents and outcomes of WF dynamics, highlighting positive and negative aspects of digital opportunities that may affect WF variables and their consequences on workers' well-being. In view of the above, the present study aims to investigate the key role of WF conflict and WF balance in mediating the relationship between technostress and work exhaustion. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was used to examine direct and indirect relationships among technostress, WF conflict, WF balance, and work exhaustion. Respondents were 376 Italian workers, specifically dual-earner parents who have at least one child. Results and implications are discussed with specific reference to the organizational policies and interventions that could be developed to manage technostress and WF conflict, fostering individual and social adjustment to the new normal

What a difference a workplace makes. A scientometric analysis on the relationship between job crafting and healthy organizations' factors

Introduction: The transformations that have affected the labour market in recent years have required companies to adapt to fast changes and to keep the pace of global competition. Consequently, workers have been confronted with multiple challenging demands: they have been required to develop flexibility in their jobs and to work faster and better, often with evident costs in terms of performance and their workplace well-being. Given these evidence, as also shown by some of the most recent developments in the field of Positive Work and Organizational Psychology, healthy organizations are those organizations that could resist to these challenges, because they engage in creating an environment that can promote employees’ health and safety, maximising performance. Yet, healthy organizations support positive organizational behaviors through a coherent culture, a positive climate, and good practices. Healthy organizations might also create the conditions to encourage workers to perform job crafting behaviors, meant as proactive individual behaviours aimed at modifying job demands in order to adjust them to personal needs, motivations and talents, thus maximising well-being and performance. Objective: The aim of the study was to overview the state of the art of the debate about the relationship between job crafting and healthy organizations’ factors by performing a scientometric analysis of job crafting. Therefore, the study was aimed to emphasize performances of countries, journals and authors, highlighting the dominant perspectives on the topic. Method: The starting point of the analysis was data recovery from the Scopus database using the term “job crafting” as search criterion within the title, abstract or keywords of the documents retrieved. The analysis was carried out with two softwares, R and VOSviewer, in order to investigate the growth of interest on the topic over the years, the scientific production of countries, journals and authors, the social structure of collaborative network, and the network of keywords. Results: 375 documents about job crafting were retrieved, showing a growing number of publications in recent years, with a preponderance of productions and citations in USA and Netherlands (where the construct was proposed and validated). Cluster analysis performed on the most frequently used keywords showed three main groups, each of them theoretical linked to workplace health: stimulus factors; Job Demands-Resources Model; health dimensions. Discussion: The present bibliometric analysis showed an increasing scientific interest toward job crafting and the importance of specific papers (that opened the two main perspective about it) for the whole research line. Through the cluster analysis of keywords network, it was underlined the relevance of constructs that promote healthy organizations in the scientific production on job craftin

Workaholism and Technostress During the COVID-19 Emergency: The Crucial Role of the Leaders on Remote Working

Although remote working can involve positive outcomes both for employees and organizations, in the case of the sudden and forced remote working situation that came into place during the COVID-19 crisis there have also been reports of negative aspects, one of which is technostress. In this context of crisis, leadership is crucial in sustainably managing and supporting employees, especially employees with workaholic tendencies who are more prone to developing negative work and health outcomes. However, while research on the role of the positive aspects of leadership during crises does exist, the negative aspects of leadership during the COVID-19 crisis have not yet been studied. The present study aimed to explore the role of authoritarian leadership in a sample of 339 administrative university employees who worked either completely from home or from home and the workplace. The study examined the moderating effect of a manager on this relationship and the connections between workaholism and technostress through conditional process analysis. Results pointed out that high authoritarian leadership had an enhancing effect, whereas low authoritarian leadership had a protective effect on the relationship between workaholism and technostress, only in the group of complete remote workers. Thus, authoritarian leadership should be avoided and training leaders to be aware of its effect appears to be essential. Limitations, future directions for the study, and practical implications are also discussed

“Everything Will Be Fine”: A Study on the Relationship between Employees’ Perception of Sustainable HRM Practices and Positive Organizational Behavior during COVID19

Sustainable human resource management practices represent one of the main organizational strategy to survive and to prosper within the fast-moving current scenario. According to this view, sustainability is strictly linked to the consideration of the unique and distinctive value that each human resource means for organizations. The recent COVID19 pandemic is having a serious impact on organizations and on their employees, it is profoundly changing the working modalities, mainly introducing smart working practices that were showed to have significant consequences on workers’ wellbeing. This study aims to investigate employees’ perception of sustainable HRM in the frame of the COVID19 emergency, exploring if and to what extent perceptions of involvement and organizational support together with individual coping strategies associated with organizational change could influence positive organizational behaviors, namely organizational engagement and extra-role behavior. The research involved 549 participants who completed a self-report online questionnaire encompassing psycho-social measures of the abovementioned variables. Results confirmed the important role played by sustainable HRM practices both for the capitalization of human resources and of organizational performance in a time of great uncertainty and global crisis. Implications for theory and HRM practice development were also discussed