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The research examined the impact of management upon employee outcomes (perceptions of discretionary power, well-being, engagement, and affective commitment), comparing public and private sector nurses in Australia, the United Kingdom, and Italy. Overall, 1,945 nurses participated in a self-report survey within these core- and laggard-New Public Management countries. While management influenced employee outcomes for each country, there were significant differences between the public and private sectors, with private sector nurses reporting higher perceptions of outcomes. Importantly, nurses’ engagement was affected by management practice for each country. This study raises important implications for nurse managers, especially public sector managers, described within.

Purpose: To investigate forms of abusive supervision, namely personal at- tacks, task attacks, and isolation, and their links to outcomes for nurses, in- cluding job satisfaction, psychological strain, and intentions to quit.Design: Cross-sectional survey design. Data collected from July to November 2012.Methods: Two hundred and fifty public sector nurses employed at five gen- eral acute Australian hospitals completed the survey (response rate of 33%).Findings: Structural equation modeling on the forms of abusive supervision (personal, task, isolation) and nurse outcomes indicated goodness of fit statis- tics that confirmed a well-fitting model, explaining 40% of the variance in intent to quit, 30% in job satisfaction, and 33% in strain. An indirect relation- ship from personal attacks to intentions to quit, via strain, was observed. Task attacks were related directly, and indirectly via job satisfaction, to increased intentions to quit. Surprisingly, isolation was positively related to job satisfac- tion.Conclusions: Abusive supervision impacted nurse outcomes. Specifically, personal abuse had personal and health impacts; work-focused abuse had work-oriented effects. Applying appraisal theory suggests that personal attacks are primarily assessed as stressful and unchangeable; task-oriented attacks are assessed as stressful, but changeable; and isolation is assessed as benign. The findings highlight the impact of abusive supervision, especially task attacks, on outcomes important to nurse retention.Clinical Relevance: The findings can be used to devise programs to educate, train, and support supervisors and their subordinates to adhere to zero toler- ance policies toward antisocial workplace behaviors and encourage reporting incidents.Key wordsAbusive supervision, cognitive appraisals, Intent to quit, job satisfaction, stressNurses are a high-risk occupational group for a range of antisocial behaviors in the workplace (e.g., Hegney, Plank, & Parker, 2003; Quine, 2001). Despite being con- sidered a substantial issue in many organizations (Tepper, 2000), much of the research on hostile workplace behav- ior has focused on antisocial behaviors from co-workers (e.g., McKenna, Smith, Poole, & Coverdale, 2004) or ag- gression from those external to the organization (e.g., Demir & Rodwell, 2012; Duxbury & Whittington, 2005), with few studies specifically focusing on abusive super- vision (Tepper, Moss, Lockhart, & Carr, 2007), an issue that can have important detrimental effects, especially in health care (Whitman, Halbesleben, & Shanine, 2013).Abusive supervision refers to subordinates' perceptions of their supervisor's display of sustained verbal or non- verbal hostile behavior, such as intimidation through the use of threats, invasion of privacy, or humiliation (Tepper, 2000). Research in this area has examined abu- sive supervision consisting of personal attacks, demon- strating that these attacks lead to reduced job satisfaction, as well as increased psychological strain and intent to quit (e.g., Bowling & Michel, 2011; Tepper et ah, 2009; Tepper, Duffy, Hoobler, & Ensley, 2004). Little attention in abusive supervision research is paid to other behaviors related to employee work tasks (e.g., excessively moni- toring work tasks or being allocated meaningless tasks), which are assessed in the closely related and overlap- ping constructs of petty tyranny (Ashforth, 1994, 1997) and supervisor undermining (Duffy, Ganster, & Pagon, 2002). There is also a lack of research examining the consequences of different forms of abusive supervision. Therefore, the aim of this study is to investigate a wider range of forms of abusive supervision, particularly those involving task attacks, personal attacks, or a combination of these, such as isolating behaviors, and how different forms of abusive supervision might be linked to different health and work outcomes for nurses. …

While healthcare workers are recognized for their compassion towards patients, research suggests compassion towards the suffering of co-workers is often lacking, with workplace bullying over-repres...

This paper reports comparative research comparing the relationship between supervisor-subordinate relationships, teamwork, role ambiguity and discretionary power for nurses working in public and private sector hospitals in Australia and the UK. The findings indicate that the four factors accounted for approximately a quarter of the variance for nurses in the UK and almost a fifth of the variance for nurses working in public sector hospitals. Moreover, the findings identify a significant difference across all variables for nurses working in public sector hospitals compared with private sector with nurses in the private sector having higher satisfaction levels and perceiving lower levels of role ambiguity. There were fewer differences for nurses working in Australian hospitals compared with UK hospitals with nurses in Australia perceiving a better supervisor-subordinate relationship and nurses in the UK perceiving greater satisfaction with teamwork.

Within the Australian context of a shortage of skilled professionals, this article uses the Harvard model of human resources management (HRM) to conceptualise how changes in stakeholder interests coupled with changes to situational factors affect public sector HRM policy choices that in turn affect HRM outcomes for different types of public sector employees. The findings obtained using path analysis suggest that the proposed model explained almost 50% for nurses and less than 14% for police officers. In the case of nurses, the strong significant relationship between HRM inputs and outputs may provide a further plausible explanation for one of the long-term consequences of new public management – namely, the inability to retain skilled employees (especially those in the health sector) across numerous OECD countries. The implication of these findings is that the present public sector HRM policy choice should be re-examined because of its impact on HRM outcomes. Moreover, public sector employees should not b...

One strategy used by some Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) governments to stimulate national competitiveness is to encourage innovation via programmes aimed at assisting firms to collaborate. Economic Development Officers operate within a multi-government bureaucratic maze in order to implement these programmes. This paper examines what factors affect the way Economic Development Officers implement an array of government policies that foster collaboration amongst firms and the implications of those factors. The findings suggest that a number of factors compromise their ability to implement these policies effectively, especially since the implementation of New Public Management. In particular, the findings suggest that organisational bureaucratic communication processes moderate the way Economic Development Officers' perceive a chronic lack of resources and multi-stakeholder accountability. The findings reiterate the importance of ensuring that there is synergy between business policy goals and resourcing and accountability mechanisms for those expected to implement the programmes intended to foster collaboration amongst firms.

Project teams that lack sufficient resources are unlikely to be effective in their task irrespective of their individual and combined abilities. Correspondingly, teams with inappropriate ability are unlikely to complete a development task well irrespective of the resources placed before them. This paper summarises an evaluation study of 28 multimedia development projects undertaken by individual teams to determine the effectiveness and efficiency of various approaches to contracted multimedia development. The study adds information to the growing body of knowledge about the contribution individuals make to the successful completion of projects. The research undertaken for this paper provides an analysis of the roles and role-playing processes that individuals and their inclusion into project teams contribute in the development process. The development processes involved in multimedia production parallel those of conventional project management wisdom, and serve as a reminder of some of the forgotten requirements of any project process.

This paper compares the link between workplace relationships with management and employee’s perceptions of discretionary power and performance in the public and private sector post NPM wit...

This paper reports a study comparing relationships between supervisor-nurse relationships, organisational culture and discretionary power for public and private sector nurses within Australia and U...

In the Australian healthcare sector, many changes in the public sector have affected nurse management and thereby, nurses. Yet it is unclear whether such efficiency measures, based on private sector business models, have impacted private sector nurses in similar ways. This paper examines four important issues for nurses: supervisor–subordinate relationships; perceptions of autonomy; role clarity in relation to patients; and job satisfaction. The paper uses an embedded mixed methods research design to examine the four issues and then compares similarities and differences between public and private sector nurses. The findings suggest supervisor–subordinate relationships, patient role clarity and autonomy significantly predict job satisfaction. The private sector nurses reported more satisfaction than public sector nurses with their supervisor–subordinate relationships, plus higher perceptions of patient role clarity and autonomy, and hence, higher levels of job satisfaction. The findings raise questions about whether present management practices (especially public sector) optimise service delivery productivity.