Loraleigh Keashly

Effects of high-involvement work systems on employee satisfaction and service costs in veterans healthcare.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Two strong imperatives for healthcare managers are reducing costs of service and attracting and retaining highly dedicated and competent patient care and support employees. Is there a trade‐off or are there organizational practices that can further both objectives at the same time? High‐involvement work systems (HIWS) represent a holistic work design that includes interrelated core features such as involvement, empowerment, development, trust, openness, teamwork, and performance‐based rewards. HIWS have been linked to higher productivity, quality, employee and customer satisfaction, and market and financial performance in Fortune 1000 firms. Apparently, few prior studies have looked at the impacts of this holistic design within the healthcare sector. This research found that HIWS were associated with both greater employee satisfaction and lower patient service costs in 146 Veterans Health Administration centers, indicating that such practices pay off in both humanistic and financial terms. This suggests that managers implementing HIWS will incur real expenses that are likely to be more than offset by more satisfied employees, less organizational turmoil, and lower service delivery costs, which, in this study, amounted to over

Towards a Contingency Approach to Third Party Intervention in Regional Conflict: A Cyprus Illustration

1.2 million in savings for an average VHA facility.

Aggression at the service delivery interface: Do you see what I see?

management strategies, particularly third party approaches. Effective interventions need to acknowledge and address the numerous issues and demands which fuel the conflict. Thus, the different constituencies involved, their demands and interests, the belief systems challenged, the perceptions held, the history of the relationships, and the fundamental needs to be met must be dealt with if a conflict is to be resolved.1 With such a large number of elements, it seems unreasonable to expect that a single intervention strategy could deal fully with all of them. It seems more useful to envision intervention in regional conflicts as a co-ordinated series of concurrent and consecutive strategies directed towards the long-term goal of resolving the conflict. A look at the history of some recent conflicts indicates that third

Workplace bullying: the case of teen workers

Aggression at the service delivery interface (the point of contact between service provider and service recipient) has become a focus of much recent research attention. However, much of what we know is based on cross-sectional survey data – which tells us little about the underlying dynamics within specific aggressive incidents. Further, these data are often collected from the perspective of the service provider alone. For this study, we focused on specific hostile interactions during the delivery of healthcare services and gathered data from the perspectives of service providers and service recipients. Drawing on interviews with US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) staff and US military veterans, we categorised and compared each partys attributions for the initiation of hostile (unpleasant) encounters. We found that staff and veterans had different perspectives on the nature of precipitating factors and that the initial attribution for the event was linked to differences in subsequent responding. These findings are discussed in terms of their insight into the temporal dynamics of aggressive events and their implications for the prevention and management of hostility at the service delivery interface.

Means, Motive, Opportunity, and Aggressive Workplace Behavior

Abstract Work is an important yet understudied life domain for adolescents that has important implications for their development and well-being. Work relationships, particularly with supervisors and coworkers, are critical influences on teens. To the extent these relationships are negative, as evidenced in workplace bullying, the impact on teens can be wide-ranging and enduring. In this article, research on workplace bullying and its effects is briefly summarized and used as a context for exploring adolescent experiences with bullying on the job, both in terms of their vulnerability to exposure and unique impacts. Implications of these findings for health professionals in the assessment and treatment of teens exposed to workplace bullying are discussed.

The Intergroup Conflict Simulation

Part 1. Introduction. M.S. Edwards, J. Greenberg, What is Insidious Workplace Behavior? Part 2. Forms of Insidious Workplace Behavior. J.H. Neuman, L. Keashly, Means, Motive Opportunity and Aggressive Workplace Behavior. M.A. Seabright, M.L. Ambrose, M. Schminke, Two Images of Workplace Sabotage. D.A. Jones, Getting Even for Interpersonal Mistreatment in the Workplace: Triggers of Revenge Motives and Behavior. C.M. Pearson, Research on Workplace Incivility and its Connection to Practice. C. Fitzgerald Boxer, T.E. Ford, Sexist Humor in the Workplace: A Case of Subtle Harassment. S.L. Glover, Lying to Bosses, Subordinates, Peers and the Outside World: Motivations and Consequences. Part 3. Methodological Issues. S.M. Jex, J.L. Burnfield Geimer, O. Clark, A.M. Guidroz, J.E. Yugo, Challenges and Recommendations in the Measurement of Workplace Incivility. P.E. Spector, O.B. Rodopman, Methodological Issues in Studying Insidious Workplace Behavior. Part 4. Integration. M.S. Edwards, J. Greenberg, Issues and Challenges in Studying Insidious Workplace Behavior.

By any other name: American perspectives on workplace bullying

An eclectic model of intergroup conflict presents a multilevel, interactive, process-orientated, longitudinal picture of the development, escalation, and resolution of intergroup conflict. As such, the model is congruent with a general call in social psychology for the development of middle range theories that integrate variables from different levels of analysis (Fisher, 1982). In McGuire’s (1973, 1979) terms, there is a need for “miniature systems theories” specifying the relationships among a variety of theoretically important variables. Particularly in the field of intergroup conflict, there is a clear need for integrating existing independent theories into a comprehensive systems theory having both descriptive and predictive power (Thomas, 1976; Sherif & Sherif, 1979). However, once such a need is identified, a related deficiency immediately becomes apparent: the social sciences and social psychology in particular have failed to develop the required research methodologies to test and refine such models!