‘Let’s Be Human’ – on the Politics of the Inanimate

To Romantics the principle of life, its mystery and power, propelled a desire to ‘see into the life of things’ as William Wondsworth articulated it. This article examines how the relationship between life and non-life, the animate and the inanimate, humans and things, took on a new inflection in Romanticism, which differed in radical ways from the pragmatic and economic relationship between persons and things in the 18th century. In Romanticism, the threshold between living and dead matter came to linger between divinity and monstrosity. In Denmark, Hans Christian Andersen had few rivals when it came to articulating associations between humans and things. This article narrows the scope of Andersen’s vivifications to one specific subset: marionettes, dolls and automatons, asking how his surrogates operated vis-à-vis Heinrich von Kleist’s, E. T. A. Hoffman’s and Mary Shelley’s. Each of these authors drew on the hyper-mimetic relationship that dolls, marionettes and automatons have to humans: Kleist used marionettes to examine consciousness through unconsciousness; Hoffmann used automatons to articulate the uncanny; and Shelley used agolem-like monster to ponder the ethics of man’s quests for generative powers. Andersen, in contrast, used dolls, marionettes and automatons in order to speak about social beings.

The Romantic Fairy Tale and Surrealism: Marvelous Non-Sense and Dark Apprehensions

Romanticism and surrealism shared a fascination with the fairy tale. Yet each was beholden to specific historical moments and particular aesthetic demands. What they wanted were not the same. This article considers  how the romantic fairy tale nevertheless functions as a ‘seed’ for surrealists. Contagions, commonalities, and contrasts between the two movements are briefly outlined. A selection of fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen is used to demonstrate how a host of visual reinterpretations including lithographs, photo-collages, and video art by twentieth-century surrealists like Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst, and twenty-first-century avant-garde artists like Åsa Sjöström, have reinterpreted the latent possibilities of non-sense in the fairy tale: the marvelous, the absurd, and the dream-like. The article demonstrates that by evoking the dark-romantic sides of Andersen’s works these avant-garde reconceptualizations in visual media predominantly point to shock, violence, war, and ecological disasters

Having Two Bosses; Considering the Relationships between LMX, Satisfaction with HR Practices, and Organizational Commitment

The current study went beyond previous research on leader-member exchange (LMX) by examining employees who are supervised by more than one boss. Using data from 122 PhDs from a Dutch university, the current study had three research objectives. First, to examine the effects of PhDs' LMX with both their promoter and their assistant promoter on affective organizational commitment (AOC). Second, to examine the mediating role of satisfaction with HR practices in the two LMX - AOC relationships. Since the promoter as the higher level boss has more influence on different HR practices the third objective was to examine whether the LMX - AOC relationship is stronger for the promoter than for the assistant promoter. The results showed that both promoter LMX and LMX assistant promoter were positively related to PhDs’ AOC, and both relationships were fully mediated by PhDs’ satisfaction with HR practices. As expected, these effects were significantly stronger for the promoter than for the assistant promoter

Organisational citizens or reciprocal relationships? An empirical comparison

Purpose:\ud This paper aims at contributing to the debate on organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB) by developing a theory‐driven measure of cooperative behaviour within organisations, called organisational solidarity (OS).\ud \ud Design/methodology/approach:\ud Data are gathered through a survey among 674 employees from nine organisations. Scales are constructed using the multiple group method. OLS regression is used to test the hypotheses.\ud \ud Findings:\ud The data analyses show that reciprocity is an important mechanism to bring about cooperation within organisations. Based on this, a distinction is made between horizontal and vertical OS.\ud \ud Research limitations/implications:\ud The major shortcoming of this research is that some of the results may be influenced by same source bias. The research implies that cooperative types of employee behaviour – such as OCB – depend on the behaviour of others. Furthermore, these kinds of behaviour can be divided into a horizontal and a vertical dimension.\ud \ud Practical implications:\ud The findings suggest that supervisors can play a facilitating role in creating and sustaining cooperative behaviour of employees.\ud \ud Originality/value:\ud This paper contributes to the literature on OCB by examining how this kind of behaviour is affected by the behaviour of supervisors and co‐workers. Secondly, whereas other articles focus on either horizontal or vertical dimensions of cooperative behaviour, this paper focuses on both dimensions simultaneously

The HRM Process Approach: The Influence of Employees’ Attribution to Explain the HRM‐Performance Relationship

In an experimental study and a field study, we studied whether high‐commitment human resource management (HC‐HRM) is more effective when employees can make sense of HRM (attribute HRM to management). In the experimental study (n = 354), employees’ HC‐HRM perceptions were evoked by a management case, and their attributions were manipulated with an information pattern based on the three dimensions of the covariation principle of the attribution theory: distinctiveness, consistency, and consensus. As expected, the results showed that the effect of HC‐HRM on affective organizational commitment was stronger when employees understood HRM as was intended by management. This experimental finding was confirmed in a cross‐level field study (n = 639 employees within 42 organizations): the relationship between HC‐HRM, on one hand, and affective organizational commitment and innovative behavior, on the other hand, was stronger under the condition that employees could make sense of HRM. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc

Mood and the evaluation of leaders

Research on the evaluation of leaders has shown that evaluation ratings are prone to several biases. The present study deals with one possible bias, namely, the relationship between mood and the perception or evaluation of a leader. The affect-as-information framework, which indicates that mood influences the response to certain kinds of questions, constitutes the theoretical background of the study. In the study, we ask students to indicate their mood, then to read a description of a leader (either transformational or transactional) and finally to evaluate the leader with respect to different leadership styles. The results indicate that mood is related to the perception of management-by-exception passive, but not others, e.g., transformational leadership. Reasons for these outcomes are discussed and implications for future research and organizational practice presented