Taking the leadership role:Understanding leadership across team and organizational boundaries in view of the changing employment relationship

Contemporary knowledge workers cooperate more and more in multiple, temporary, and often virtual teams with peers within and across organizational boundaries. The growing involvement of multiple actors inside and outside organizations has severe implications for how the employment relationship is managed. In the current article it is argued that leadership is becoming not only increasingly distributed but also diffuse. Leadership is no longer "what those in leadership positions do," but refers to a process by which one or more actors stimulate themselves and each other in order to pursue values, goals, and objectives. Whoever takes on a leadership role, needs to understand the way actors can be motivated and energized to address future needs and requirements in organizations. Building on insights from human resource management, leadership, and organizational behavior literature, how multiple actors are stimulated to take on their leadership roles in order to foster salient outcomes for multiple parties is explored in the current article

The impact of work-related values and work control on the career satisfaction of female freelancers

Using the job demands-resources theory incorporating a job-crafting perspective to develop a set of hypotheses, this study contributes to the self-employment and freelancing literature by examining whether female freelancers use their agency to mobilize their personal resources (i.e. work-related values) to craft their work resources (i.e. work–control indicators: work autonomy and time-spatial flexibility) to achieve more career satisfaction. Our structural partial least squares model (N = 203) shows that the work-related value ‘intrinsically rewarding work’ prompts two motivational processes that affect career satisfaction: one running directly to ‘career satisfaction’ and one through ‘work autonomy’. Although the value ‘work–life balance’ is positively associated with greater ‘time-spatial flexibility’, this does not affect career satisfaction. Moreover, we find negative associations between the value ‘financial security’, on the one hand, and the two work resources, on the other hand. Hence, the value financial security is negatively related to work autonomy towards career satisfaction. We conclude that female freelancers’ multiple, oftentimes blended values compete with one another, implying that achieving meaningful work, work–life balance and financial independence simultaneously is difficult in female freelancers’ careers. We discuss the study’s implications for future research and advocate labour–market stakeholders (e.g. freelancers, freelancers’ networks, career coaches, temporary work agencies, unions, local and national governments, educational institutions and public and private organizations) to partner in developing value-based career strategies and policies that account for less linear career paths in increasingly flexible and individualized markets and truly support (female) workers developing portfolios that better match with their multiple work-related values on a long-term basis

Emergent behaviour in the energy transition

Mitigating the adverse effects of climate change requires us, globally, to speed up the energy transition: to decarbonise energy supply while maintaining the security of supply and the affordability of energy services. This is an unprecedented challenge. The energy transition seems to have moved into a phase of scaling up: technologies are becoming competitive; more and more of the public will have to be involved in the energy transition in the coming years.In this report, we outline the opportunities that come from studying so-called ‘emergent behaviour’ in the energy transition. Emergent behaviour are trends or patterns observed on the aggregated/system level that are not a simple sum of the individual actions. What drives behaviour is hard to anticipate, but understanding it is crucial for a successful energy transition – to avoid lock-in and delays. As such, this report outlines what the concepts emergence and complexity theory can entail for the energy transition, what approaches there are to study this, and how to translate this into action. We focus on how we may be able to anticipate how such behaviour (i.e., opinions, choices and using) of larger societal groups may promote or hamper progress in the energy transition. And, at the end of the day, how to affect those processes to scale up a fair, inclusive energy transition robustly.Based on literature and interviews, we provide five perspectives: 1) behaviour in the energy transition, 2) the transformation of large systems, 3) emergent behaviour and marketing, 4), modelling emergent behaviour, and 5) intervening to shape complex systems.There are substantial opportunities to better develop, study and integrate concepts from complex systems and energy systems research and modelling into decision-making processes for the energy transition. We present a research agenda including a concrete action plan for the following research challenges: behavioural theory and modelling of the energy transition, 2) anticipating emergent behaviour to scale up the energy transition, 3) developing transition narratives, and 4) embracing key/change agents and emergent leadership. The action items vary between quick wins and fundamental research ideas that may, together, help us to better shape the energy transition.As requested by Netherlands Enterprise Agency (Rijksdienst voor Ondernemend Nederland, RVO) Project number: TSE7210003 In cooperation with Topsector Energie (TSE), Program System Integration (MMIP13)Energy & Industr

Adapting to a new workplace: Generational differences in work needs and values

Working paper 200

Inclusive governance in social enterprises in the Netherlands - A case study

An element that policymakers and academics often believe to be constitutive in the governance of a social enterprise is the use of inclusive and responsible decision-making processes. This entails the involvement of various categories of stakeholders. In this paper, a case study is used to explore how a work integration social enterprise based in the Netherlands, AutiTalent BV, has organized its governance. The Netherlands has not developed legislation specifically dealing with social enterprises, in contrast to many other EU Member States (16 out of 28), and it does not require, although it allows for, the establishment of inclusive governance. By examining how (national Dutch) law affects the governance of a work-integration-oriented social enterprise, the authors aim to contribute to emerging theory on participatory and inclusive governance of social enterprises – as a legal concept but also as an organizational concept – shaped by (tailor-made and/or ordinary) law. The case study reveals that the investigated work integration social enterprise has not set up formal inclusive governance, suggesting that a social enterprise may not be stimulated by legislation which allows but not requires the participation of stakeholders in decision making. At the same time, informal direct communication channels exist between the people who influence the decision-making processes and people from various stakeholder categories

Dialogues in Sustainable HRM: Examining and Positioning Intended and Continuous Dialogue in Sustainable HRM Using a Complexity Thinking Approach

In the emerging sustainable Human Resource Management (HRM) literature, advocating to ‘rehumanize’ and pluralize HRM, dialogue is put forward as a silver bullet to cope with paradoxical tensions and pluralist workforces. This conceptual paper aims to add to the sustainable HRM literature by examining the position and application of dialogue within sustainable HRM, using ideas and concepts from dialogue literature and complexity thinking. We applied core concepts of complexity thinking (i.e., self-organization, nonlinearity, attractors, and emergence) to deepen our understanding of the positioning of dialogue, the position of power, and the emergence of intended and unintended outcomes. Moreover, through the distinction between intentional and continuous dialogue, the intentional, dynamic, and emergent nature of dialogue was explored. Connecting, sensing, grasping, and influencing the local patterning of continuous dialogue is important for positioning dialogue within sustainable HRM, and intentional dialogical practices can support this. More specifically, based on our literature review, we present a conceptual model that furthers our understanding of (1) conceptualizations of dialogue as both intended and continuous; (2) the role of power in dialogue; (3) how stability and novelty emerge from dialogue. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of the developed perspectives on dialogue for future research as well as management practices.</jats:p