Professional status and norm violation in email collaboration

Purpose Status is a central aspect of teamwork relationships and successful collaboration in teams, both online and offline. Status group membership and status perception shape behavioural expectations and norm perceptions of what is appropriate, but despite their importance have been neglected in previous research. Status effects are of special interest in online collaboration, e.g. via email, where no immediate feedback or non-verbal/paraverbal communication and direct observation is possible. The purpose of this study is to address this gap in research. Design/methodology/approach An experimental scenario study with two different professional status groups (lecturers and students) tested status effects on causal attributions, intergroup bias and emotional and collaborative responses to perceived norm violations in emails. Findings Results overall showed three key findings: a “black-sheep-effect” with harsher negative attributions for same status members, more aggression and less cooperation towards lower status senders and stronger (negative) emotional reactions towards high status senders. Originality/value The findings are important for managing professional online communication because negative personal attributions, strong emotions and aggressive behaviours can increase team conflict, lead to mistakes and generally undermine performance

Making things happen : a model of proactive motivation

Being proactive is about making things happen, anticipating and preventing problems, and seizing opportunities. It involves self-initiated efforts to bring about change in the work environment and/or oneself to achieve a different future. The authors develop existing perspectives on this topic by identifying proactivity as a goal-driven process involving both the setting of a proactive goal (proactive goal generation) and striving to achieve that proactive goal (proactive goal striving). The authors identify a range of proactive goals that individuals can pursue in organizations. These vary on two dimensions: the future they aim to bring about (achieving a better personal fit within one’s work environment, improving the organization’s internal functioning, or enhancing the organization’s strategic fit with its environment) and whether the self or situation is being changed. The authors then identify “can do,” “reason to,” and “energized to” motivational states that prompt proactive goal generation and sustain goal striving. Can do motivation arises from perceptions of self-efficacy, control, and (low) cost. Reason to motivation relates to why someone is proactive, including reasons flowing from intrinsic, integrated, and identified motivation. Energized to motivation refers to activated positive affective states that prompt proactive goal processes. The authors suggest more distal antecedents, including individual differences (e.g., personality, values, knowledge and ability) as well as contextual variations in leadership, work design, and interpersonal climate, that influence the proactive motivational states and thereby boost or inhibit proactive goal processes. Finally, the authors summarize priorities for future researc

Participatory interventions in call centres

This chapter describes the issues involved in planning, running and evaluating participatory job redesign interventions in call centres. Two case studies are presented of participatory job redesign (using a scenarios planning tool) in call centres within the public and private sector. The main phases of the process are outlined from preparation, screening and action planning through to implementation and evaluation. The scenarios tool is used within two consecutive workshops where participants describe the current work scenario and then develop alternative future scenarios which are refined into a preferred scenario that can be implemented. The current and preferred scenarios are evaluated against job design criteria and outcomes with a view to highlighting problematic aspects of job design that can be improved. Action plans are then made for implementing the agreed suggestions for improvement. Follow-up meetings are scheduled to facilitate implementation and evaluation is conducted via an organisational survey. This process requires the active participation of employees working within the teams affected. The employees develop their own ideas for how to improve their jobs (informed by job design principles) and the final ideas that are implemented are the result of consensus between the employees, managers and the researchers facilitating the process. The findings from these case studies indicate that it is possible to conduct successful participative job redesign within call centres

Rail passengers' time use and utility assessment

This paper uses data from Great Britain's National Passenger Survey 2010 to examine the travel time use of rail passengers and their indicative assessment of the utility of that time use. The paper explores the impacts of individuals' sociodemographic characteristics, the activities undertaken, and the perceived difficulties that may be faced by the travelers on their assessment of travel time use utility. The study showed that only 13% of travelers considered their travel time to be wasted time. However, this result varied by journey purpose, traveling class (first or standard class), gender, and journey length. The study showed that the positive or negative appreciation by passengers of their journey time was a result not only of various combinations of onboard activity engagements, but also of the smoothness of the overall journey experience. The ability to work or study on the train most significantly increased individual appreciation of time use. However, a delay on an individual's train journey also had a major influence on the reduction of his or her perceived value of the travel time spent. Information and communication technology devices that enable travelers to watch film or video, play games, or check e-mails were more appreciated than those devices that provide access to music, podcasts, or social networking sites. The paper joins others in questioning the assumptions made in economic appraisals that travel time is unproductive. The paper concludes with a call for more substantive and targeted data collection efforts within travel behavior research devoted to further unraveling the phenomenon of the positive utility of travel

How ‘bad apples’ spoil the bunch: Faultlines, emotional levers and exclusion in the workplace

Just as a rotten apple makes other apples around it begin to decay, so too can people influence others within their vicinity, particularly in terms of destructive emotions and behaviors. Trevino and Youngblood (1990) adopted the term ‘bad apples’ to describe individuals who engage in unethical behaviors and who also influence others to behave in a similar manner. In this chapter, the ‘bad apple’ metaphor is adopted to describe the employee whose actions and interactions create and maintain destructive faultlines and unethical exclusion behaviors that negatively impact the emotional well-being and effective and ethical performance of the team. In particular, the chapter examines the way in which ‘bad apples’ use destructive emotion management skills through the manipulation of emotional levers of others, what motivates them to do so and the implications it may have on management