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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the reaction of female workers to the earthquake event that shocked the city of L’Aquila in April 2009, with a specific focus on work as a recovery factor. Design/methodology/approach The selected sample consists of current or former resident women in the affected province of L’Aquila, who participated in a series of focus group discussions on the ability to reconstruct their own professional identity after the earthquake. The focus group seemed to be the perfect instrument for this research, because of its ability to generate a true discussion among a group of people on the research topic of this study. The collected data were analyzed both in terms of metaphors, as well as linguistic agentivity and by automatic content analysis. Findings From the analysis of the data, emerges the value that adds to the sense of identity continuity for the women in the sample, together with interesting differences between employed and self-employed workers that are characterized by distinct challenges and assurances. In regards to the effects of gender in response to disaster events, the results make a peculiar echo to the studies on public-private space dichotomy developed by Fordham, according to which, during a disaster, women are not allowed to develop work-related desires. For the group of women that the authors interviewed, the challenge to have family focused or work focused desires was clearly evident; they seem predetermined to the above-mentioned dichotomy, valid in both directions: the women who invested in work and have become entrepreneurs seem to have no chance of a private life and, on the contrary, the women who were focused on more traditional family roles seem to have no chance in terms of job opportunities. Originality/value Based on the authors’ knowledge this is the first time that focus groups are used to assess the value that work had in supporting individual recovery for women in the aftermath of the L’Aquila earthquake.

Background: Several researchers have questioned the strategies necessary for effective risk management as well as of human error and its consequences, looking at both positive and negative consequences. Starting from this perspective, this study intended to investigate risk management in the emergency context due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: A total of five in-depth interviews were conducted with senior managers of multinationals, asking them to talk about the management of their human capital and the policies of error and safety management adopted in their organizations before, during, and after the pandemic. Results: Qualitative interviews analysis revealed three interesting clusters related to crisis, trust, and risk management, quantitative results, instead, confirmed the existent link between crisis and error management and the strategic role of organizational management in the diffusion of a climate in which is possible to learn from both success and failure. Conclusion: In summary, preliminary results seemed to confirm what emerged from the most recent literature, which is the urgency for organizations to create a culture of intelligent risk-taking that leads to learning and improved knowledge and that includes the participation of all workers. Moreover, this study also underlines the possibility of extending the advantages of Error Management Training in emergency context.

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic led the worldwide healthcare system to a severe crisis in which personnel paid the major costs. Many studies were promptly dedicated to the physical and psychological consequences of the COVID-19 exposure among healthcare employees, whereas the research on the other working populations has been substantially ignored. To bridge the current lack of knowledge about safe behaviors related to the risk of COVID-19 contagion at work, the aim of the study was to validate a new tool, the SAPH@W (Safety at Work), to assess workers’ perceptions of safety. Methods: A total of 1085 participants, employed in several organizations sited across areas with different levels of risk of contagion, completed an online questionnaire. To test the SAPH@W validity and measurement invariance, the research sample was randomly divided in two. Results: In the first sub-sample, Confirmatory Factor Analysis demonstrated the adequacy of the SAPH@W factorial structure. In the second sub-sample, multi-group Confirmatory Factor Analysis revealed that the SAPH@W was invariant across gender, ecological risk level, and type of occupation (in-person vs. remote working). Conclusions: The study evidenced the psychometric properties of the SAPH@W, a brief tool to monitor workers’ experiences and safety perceptions regarding the COVID-19 risk in any organisational setting.

Background. Historically, the most important approach to safety management consisted of controlling variability and error in human performance. This assumption was questioned by the changes of the economy and technology, which introduced higher levels of unpredictability and uncertainty. Starting from this consideration, our research aimed to investigate the issue of organizational safety from the dual perspective of individuals and organizations, with the aim of highlighting the weight that both actors have in the co-construction of a safe workplace. Method. A cross-sectional study was performed among workers of a multinational company of the automotive sector, through an online self-report questionnaire. Results. The results highlight the key role of two variables investigated, linked to safety management: organizational mindfulness and organizational citizenship behavior for safety. The first seems to be a partial mediator in the relationship between organizational support and affective commitment, the second, instead, seems to be a complete mediator between organizational support and safety ownership, otherwise non directly related. Conclusions. This study confirms the importance of considering both individual and organizational contribute to safety management in organizations, emphasizing the existing link between safety promotion and employee’s motivation and their personal involvement.

Organisations appear to pay little attention to rejection letters, considered a special form of organisational communication, despite a growing body of literature that shows they play an important role in terms of employer branding. This study aims to empirically test how applicants&rsquo, perceptions are affected by differently manipulated rejection letters. In detail, a sample of 138 rejected candidates filled in an ad hoc questionnaire on perceived selection procedure fairness and satisfaction, after receiving a rejection letter where we had manipulated time latency, the politeness formula and customisation. Results suggest that providing a timely, customised and informal notification is something agreeable, which is able to affect, above all, fairness perceptions and intention to re-apply. In detail, the time latency in giving feedback appears to affect the relationship between fairness perception and organisational recommendation and acts more as a mediator rather than an antecedent variable. Considering that providing feedback is a relatively low-cost activity that at the same time has a big impact on job applicants, our results show that organisations should be sensitive to negative feedback communication, especially in relation to response time, in order to support their employer branding.

Focus group technique is often described as a subaltern procedure for collecting and analysing data, underestimating the FG great value; today this method has such a big scientific reputation that it is widely applied in different social research areas such as marketing, education, communication. This theoretical study aims at deeply analyze the matter about the right number of participants for a focus group; this methodological consideration can provide useful elements in order to balance risks and benefits when planning qualitative research in social context. In addition to the numerosity matter there are some elements to carefully consider for an effective focus group research: the sensitivity of themes, the scope of the research, the recording setting, the social category of both participants and researcher, the client., Encyclopaideia, Vol 23, No 54 (2019)

Gratitude may be defined as a personal positive tendency to recognize and respond with gratitude to positive experiences. It has been extensively described within personal relationship literature, showing its correlations with life satisfaction and decreased psychopathology. We propose here to consider gratitude as both a personal and an organizational value able to improve job performance and job satisfaction. The specific aim is twofold: to explore how public administration workers are used to express and perceive gratitude in the workplace, and to validate a serial mediation model, in which dispositional, collective, and relational gratitude are predictors of job satisfaction and job performance. We have designed a mix-method study, with a survey and a diary study, choosing to collect data also on a daily basis because we were interested in gratitude exchanges in work contexts using the event-sampling data method. Nine employees from several Italian public administrations completed a gratitude diary for ten working days in the initial qualitative part of the study. Afterwards, a sample of 96 Italian public administration employees filled in a questionnaire with measures related to job satisfaction, job performance, and three dimensions of gratitude: dispositional, collective, and relational. Results confirm that the three types of gratitude are predictors of job performance and job satisfaction and this relation has been tested in a serial mediation model. This investigation on gratitude has practical implications for the planning of training interventions framed in the positive psychology context.