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We conducted a lab experiment with 253 participants to examine how constraints on bonus akin to bonus regulations, such as bonus cap and malus, could affect individuals’ risk-taking in the presence of relative performance pay. Participants took greater risks when bonus was linked to investment performance relative to that of their peers (relative performance pay) than when it depended on their own performance only. In the absence of relative performance pay, bonus cap and malus reduced risk-taking. With relative performance pay, the risk-mitigating effects of bonus cap and malus were significantly weakened; but participants took less risk when bonus was made conditional on their team avoiding a loss.

Employees with high core self-evaluations (CSE) generally perform well in their jobs. The enactment of CSE in performance occurs within contexts, and leadership is one form of context that influences the activation and expression of CSE. Drawing on theories of CSE and leader–member exchange (LMX), we characterized the leadership context as the interaction between leader CSE and LMX quality. Examination of 173 followers and their 31 leaders in a manufacturing organization showed a positive association between follower CSE and performance when the context comprised high leader CSE and high LMX. Conversely, leadership contexts comprising high leader CSE and low LMX, or low leader CSE and high LMX, resulted in a negative relationship between follower CSE and performance. We also show that low CSE followers have relatively high performance under some circumstances. Thus, we contribute to understanding how some leadership contexts undermine high CSE followers’ performance and promote low CSE followers’ performance

IntroductionSimulation-based training (SBT) on shared leadership (SL) and group decision-making (GDM) can contribute to the safe and efficient functioning of a healthcare system, yet it is rarely incorporated into healthcare management training. The aim of this study was design, develop and validate a robust and evidence-based SBT to explore and train SL and GDM.MethodUsing a two-stage iterative simulation design approach, 103 clinical and non-clinical managerial students and healthcare professionals took part in an SBT that contained real-world problems and opportunities to improve patient safety set within a fictional context. Self-report data were gathered, and a focus group was conducted to address the simulation’s degree of realism, content, relevance, as well as areas for improvement.ResultsParticipants experienced the simulation scenario, the material and the role assignment as realistic and representative of real-world tasks and decision contexts, and as a good opportunity to identify and enact relevant tasks, behaviours and knowledge related to SL and GDM. Areas for improvement were highlighted with regard to involving an actor who challenges SL and GDM; more preparatory time to allow for an enhanced familiarisation of the content; and, video debriefs to reflect on relevant behaviours and team processes.ConclusionsOur simulation was perceived as an effective method to develop SL and GDM within the context of patient safety and healthcare management. Future studies could extend this scenario method to other areas of healthcare service and delivery, and to different sectors that require diverse groups to make complex decisions.

We conducted a lab experiment to examine how bonus caps and malus affect individuals’ choices of risk and effort. We find that a bonus structure that rewards individuals proportionally to realised investment returns, but does not penalise negative returns, encourages risk-taking; while a bonus cap and malus mitigate risk-taking. However, the difference in risk-taking between the bonus cap and malus treatment groups and the proportional bonus group weakened significantly when the participants’ bonus was conditional on hitting an absolute or relative performance target. We also find some evidence that the bonus cap discourages project search effort relative to the proportional bonus, whereas the difference in the levels of effort between the malus treatment group and the proportional bonus group was not statistically significant.

International audience; This article sheds new light on an understudied construct in mainstream management theory, namely, work alienation. This is an important area of study because previous research indicates that work alienation is associated with important individual and organizational outcomes. We tested four antecedents of work alienation: decision-making autonomy, task variety, task identity, and social support. Moreover, we examined two outcomes of alienation: deviance and performance, the former measured 1 year after the independent variables were measured, and the latter as rated by supervisors. We present evidence from a sample of 283 employees employed at a construction and consultancy organization in the United Kingdom. The results supported the majority of our hypotheses, indicating that alienation is a worthy concept of exploration in the management sciences.

We examined the relationship between information processing style and information seeking, and its moderation by anxiety and information utility. Information about Salmonella, a potentially commonplace disease, was presented to 2960 adults. Two types of information processing were examined: preferences for analytical or heuristic processing, and preferences for immediate or delayed processing. Information seeking was captured by measuring the number of additional pieces of information sought by participants. Preferences for analytical information processing were associated positively and directly with information seeking. Heuristic information processing was associated negatively and directly with information seeking. The positive relationship between preferences for delayed decision making and information seeking was moderated by anxiety and by information utility. Anxiety reduced the tendency to seek additional information. Information utility increased the likelihood of information seeking. The findings indicate that low levels of anxiety could prompt information seeking. However, information seeking occurred even when information was perceived as useful and sufficient, suggesting that it can be a form of procrastination rather than a useful contribution to effective decision making.

Background: To examine the associations between teamworking processes and error rates during vascular surgical procedures and then make informed recommendations for future studies and practices in this area. Methods: This is a single-center observational pilot study. Twelve procedures were observed over a 3-week period by a trained observer. Errors were categorized using a standardized error capture tool. Leadership and teamworking processes were categorized based on the Malakis et al. (2010) framework. Data are expressed as frequencies, means, standard deviations and percentages. Results: Errors rates (per hour) were likely to be reduced when there were effective prebriefing measures to ensure that members were aware of their roles and responsibilities (4.50 vs. 5.39 errors/hr), communications were kept to a practical and effective minimum (4.64 vs. 5.56 errors/hr), when the progress of surgery was communicated throughout (3.14 vs. 8.33 errors/hr), and when team roles changed during the procedure (3.17 vs. 5.97 errors/hr). Conclusions: Reduction of error rates is a critical goal for surgical teams. The present study of teamworking processes in this environment shows that there is a variation that should be further examined. More effective teamworking could prevent or mitigate a range of errors. The development of vascular surgical team members should incorporate principles of teamworking and appropriate communication.

Drawing upon interview data from three case study organizations, we examine the role of middle managers in UK public service reform. Using theory fragments from organizational ecology and role theory, we develop three role archetypes that middle managers might be enacting. We find that rather than wholesale enactment of a ‘change agent’ role, middle managers are balancing three predominant, but often conflicting, change-related roles: as ‘government agent’, ‘diplomat administrator’ and, less convincingly, ‘entrepreneurial leader’. Central government targets are becoming the main preoccupation for middle managers across many public services and they represent a dominant constraint on allowing ‘managers to manage’.

This article examines the role played by line managers in the link between HRM practices and individual performance outcomes. Drawing on social exchange theory, the authors test a mediated model linking perceived line manager behavior and perceived human resource management practices with employee engagement and individual performance. The study focuses on two self-report measures of individual performance; task performance and innovative work behavior. Two studies with a total of 1,796 participants were conducted in service-sector organizations in the United Kingdom and analyzed using structural equation modeling. The data reveal that perceived line manager behavior and perceived HRM practices are linked with employee engagement. In turn, employee engagement is strongly linked to individual performance and fully mediates the link between both perceived HRM practices and perceived line manager behavior and self-report task performance (study 1), as well as self-report innovative work behavior (study 2). The findings show the significance of the line manager in the HRM-performance link, and the mediating role played by employee engagement. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

We theorized that absence from work is a resource-based process that is related to perceived meaningfulness of work, well-being, and engagement. Broaden-and-build theory (Fredrickson, 1998, 2001) and engagement theory (Bakker, Schaufeli, Leiter, & Taris, 2008; Kahn, 1990) were used to develop a framework for explaining absence. Results of a study of 625 employees and human resource records of subsequent absenteeism data for a three-month period supported our hypotheses that meaningful work increases engagement with work, and that engagement is associated with low levels of absenteeism. Furthermore, data showed that engagement fully mediated the relationship between meaningfulness and absence, and that well-being strengthened the relationship between meaningfulness and engagement. The results have implications for understanding the role of individual-level resources in the workplace, and how meaningfulness, well-being, and engagement influence absence.

The present study examined a potential mediator of the job design-performance relationship, namely, employee engagement. Data were obtained via a survey of 283 employees in a consultancy and construction firm based in the UK and from supervisors’ independent performance evaluations. The results reveal that employees who hold jobs that offer high levels of autonomy, task variety, task significance and feedback are more highly engaged and, in consequence, receivehigher performance ratings from their supervisors, enact more organisational citizenship behaviours, and engage in fewer deviant behaviours.Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

This study contributes to our understanding of the mediating and moderating processes through which human resource management (HRM) practices are linked with behavioural outcomes. We developed and tested a moderated mediation model linking perceived HRM practices to organisational citizenship behaviour and turnover intentions. Drawing on social exchange theory, our model posits that the effect of perceived HRM practices on both outcome variables is mediated by levels of employee engagement, while the relationship between employee engagement and both outcome variables is moderated by perceived organisational support and leader–member exchange. Overall, data from 297 employees in a service sector organisation in the UK support this model. This suggests that the enactment of positive behavioural outcomes, as a consequence of engagement, largely depends on the wider organisational climate and employees' relationship with their line manager. Implications for practice and directions for future research are discussed.Keywords: employee engagement, leader–member exchange, organisational citizenship behaviour, perceived HRM practices, perceived organisational support, turnover intentions

Meaningful work has been defined as work that is personally enriching and that makes a positive contribution. There is increasing interest in how organizations can harness the meaningfulness of work to enhance productivity and performance. We explain how organizations seek to manage the meaningfulness employees experience through strategies focused on job design, leadership, HRM and culture. Employees can respond positively to employers’ strategies aimed at raising their level of experienced meaningfulness when they are felt to be authentic. However, when meaningfulness is lacking, or employees perceive that the employer is seeking to manipulate their meaningfulness for performative intent, then the response of employees can be to engage in “existential labor” strategies with the potential for harmful consequences for individuals and organizations. We develop a model of existential labor, drawing out a set of propositions for future research endeavors, and outline the implications for HRM practitioners.

Highlights? We show an expected utility approach to decision-making for group decisions. ? We test the model on a hypothetical context for the disposal of animal carcasses. ? We model expert judgements and supporting evidence within regulatory decisions. ? This approach reflects risk, uncertainty, and conflicts for multiple stakeholders. ? The model uses simplifying assumptions and static group decision making processes. Recent changes in the assessment and management of risks has had the effect that greater importance has been placed on relationships between individuals and within groups to inform decision making. In this paper, we provide the theoretical underpinning for an expected utility approach to decision-making. The approach, which is presented using established evidence support logic (TESLA?), integrating the expected utilities in the forming of group decisions. The rationale and basis are described and illustrated through a hypothetical decision context of options for the disposal of animal carcasses that accumulate during disease outbreaks. The approach forms the basis for exploring the richness of risk-based decisions, and representing individual beliefs about the sufficiency of evidence they may advance in support of hypotheses.

We report on a qualitative investigation of the influence of emotions on the decision making of traders in four City of London investment banks, a setting where work has been predominantly theorized as dominated by rational analysis. We conclude that emotions and their regulation play a central role in traders' decision making. We find differences between high and low performing traders in how they engage with their intuitions, and that different strategies for emotion regulation have material consequences for trader behavior and performance. Traders deploying antecedent-focused emotional regulation strategies achieve a performance advantage over those employing primarily response-focused strategies. We argue that, in particular, response-focused approaches incur a performance penalty, in part because of the reduced opportunity to combine analysis with the use of affective cues in making intuitive judgments. We discuss the implications for our understanding of emotion and decision making, and for traders' practice.

This paper considers how perceptions of costs and benefits can influence the association between personality and risky choice behaviour. We assessed perceptions and behaviours in six domains (ethical; investment; gambling; health and safety; recreational; social) using the DOSPERT and measured personality using the NEO PI-R. Results from structural equation modelling showed that personality had a direct effect on risky choice behaviour in four domains (social, ethical, gambling and recreational risk-taking). In addition, perceived costs and benefits mediated the relations between personality and risk-taking in the five domains (social, ethical, gambling, recreational and investment risk-taking). Evidence for a mechanism that integrates both direct and indirect effects of personality on behaviour is discussed.

Protection of human life and property from flooding is a strategic priority in the UK. We examine how to encourage home owners to protect themselves and their residences. A model of factors that influence the decision to buy flood-protection devices is tested using survey data from 2109 home owners. The results show that the majority of respondents have not purchased domestic flood protection ( N = 1732; 82.1%). Purchase of flood-protection devices was influenced by age; perceived seriousness; and beliefs about, and trust in, the role of regulators in managing flooding. In younger respondents the perceived seriousness of the dangers of flooding acted as precursors and barriers to action depending on individual sense of responsibility and agency. The second part of the study examines responsiveness to information. Information about flooding alone was insufficient to promote behavioural change, particularly among people who had not experienced a flood or who believed that they were not in a flood zone. Implications for understanding flood protection, managing agency issues, and flood-communication campaigns are discussed.

The prevalence of water quality incidents and disease outbreaks suggests an imperative to analyse and understand the roles of operators and organisations in the water supply system. One means considered in this paper is through human reliability analysis (HRA). We classify the human errors contributing to 62 drinking water accidents occurring in affluent countries from 1974 to 2001; define the lifecycle of these incidents; and adapt Reason’s ‘Swiss cheese’ model for drinking water safety. We discuss the role of HRA in human error reduction and drinking water safety and propose a future research agenda for human error reduction in the water sector.

Communicating the rationale for allocating resources to manage policy priorities and their risks is challenging. Here, we demonstrate that environmental risks have diverse attributes and locales in their effects that may drive disproportionate responses among citizens. When 2,065 survey participants deployed summary information and their own understanding to assess 12 policy‐level environmental risks singularly, their assessment differed from a prior expert assessment. However, participants provided rankings similar to those of experts when these same 12 risks were considered as a group, allowing comparison between the different risks. Following this, when individuals were shown the prior expert assessment of this portfolio, they expressed a moderate level of confidence with the combined expert analysis. These are important findings for the comprehension of policy risks that may be subject to augmentation by climate change, their representation alongside other threats within national risk assessments, and interpretations of agency for public risk management by citizens and others.

Purpose– Effective leadership is important to performance in both organisational and sporting arenas. The authors theorised that follower personality would influence perceptions of leadership, and that perceived effective leadership would be associated with performance. The authors drew on Social Identity Theory (Tajfel and Turner, 1986), Transformational Leadership and personality theory to develop a research model designed to assess leadership effectiveness and performance. The purpose of this paper is to test the research model in a sporting context.Design/methodology/approach– The context of the research was a round the world sailing race, a ten-month competitive circumnavigation with ten identical boats. Quantitative data were gathered concerning participants’ personality, their perceptions of transformational leadership and boat performance. Qualitative data on transformational leadership and leadership effectiveness were gathered from a subsample of crew members.Findings– Results showed that transformational leadership was associated with leadership effectiveness and performance. Personality influenced perceptions of leadership and, for moderate performing boats, there were associations between perceptions of leadership and performance.Research limitations/implications– The data have implications for the extension of transformational leadership theory. Further consideration of follower personality could enhance leadership effectiveness. A limitation is the relatively small scale of the study.Practical implications– The main implication is that leaders should take follower personality into account, and adapt their leadership style accordingly. Doing so has consequences for performance.Originality/value– This novel study examined personality, leadership, and performance and has implications for enhancing leadership and performance in sports and business.

This paper examines the consistency of risk preferences across three decision domains important in most people’s lives: work, health and personal finance. We consider the degree to which the five factor model of personality and a range of factors that influence risk-related decision-making (perceived risk, framing, emotions and cost–benefit analysis) impact upon cross-domain consistency. Data were gathered from a sample of participants for whom approaches to risk were likely to vary (academics, chess players, firefighters, mountaineers and City traders). The results showed that participants could be categorised into two groups: those who were consistent in their risk preferences in three decision domains, and those who were inconsistent or domain-specific. The consistent group was significantly lower on neuroticism and higher on agreeableness and conscientiousness with a less variable approach to weighing up the costs and benefits of taking risks than the inconsistent group. The majority of the consistent group was risk averse. When the domain-specific risk preferences of the inconsistent group were examined, data showed that different combinations of personality and decision-making factors predicted risk preferences within each domain.

The concept of risk propensity has been the subject of both theoretical and empirical investigation, but with little consensus about its definition and measurement. To address this need, a new scale assessing overall risk propensity in terms of reported frequency of risk behaviours in six domains was developed and applied: recreation, health, career, finance, safety and social. The paper describes the properties of the scale and its correlates: demographic variables, biographical self‐reports, and the NEO PI‐R, a Five Factor personality inventory (N = 2041). There are three main results. First, risk propensity has clear links with age and sex, and with objective measures of career‐related risk taking (changing jobs and setting up a business). Second, the data show risk propensity to be strongly rooted in personality. A clear Big Five pattern emerges for overall risk propensity, combining high extraversion and openness with low neuroticism, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. At the subscale level, sensa...

This paper examines the impact of illusory control beliefs on the performance of traders in financial instruments. The authors argue that the task and environment faced by traders are conducive to the development of illusions of control and that individual propensity to illusion of control will be (inversely) related to trader performance. Using an innovative computer task, designed to assess illusion of control in the field, data from 107 traders in four organizations showed individual differences in this bias to have a significant, inverse, association with performance, as measured by managers' ratings of trader performance and by total remuneration. The authors conclude that, at least in this context, illusion of control is maladaptive and that it is productive to take an individual difference approach to the study of such illusions. Implications for debates about the costs and benefits of positive illusions are discussed.

Complex regulatory decisions about risk rely on the brokering of evidence between providers and recipients, and involve personality and power relationships that influence the confidence that recipients may place in the sufficiency of evidence and, therefore, the decision outcome. We explore these relationships in an agent-based model; drawing on concepts from environmental risk science, decision psychology and computer simulation. A two-agent model that accounts for the sufficiency of evidence is applied to decisions about salt intake, animal carcass disposal and radioactive waste. A dynamic version of the model assigned personality traits to agents, to explore their receptivity to evidence. Agents with 'aggressor' personality sets were most able to imbue fellow agents with enhanced receptivity (with 'avoider' personality sets less so) and clear confidence in the sufficiency of evidence. In a dynamic version of the model, when both recipient and provider were assigned the 'aggressor' personality set, this resulted in 10 successful evidence submissions in 71 days, compared with 96 days when both agents were assigned the 'avoider' personality set. These insights suggest implications for improving the efficiency and quality of regulatory decision making by understanding the role of personality and power.

Most research on work engagement has been conducted in either North America or Western Europe. This is not surprising given that the two mainstay theoretical models were developed by William Kahn (1990) in the United States (see Chapter 4) and William Schaufeli and Arnold Bakker (2006) (see Chapters 1 and 7, respectively) from Europe. There is little research that examines whether engagement is considered a relevant construct in other parts of the world (cf. Bakker et al., 2011; Shimazu et al., 2008; Wajid et al., 2011).

Leaders play a pivotal role in creating the environment within which employees can engage with their work. There is a wealth of theoretical and empirical research that has demonstrated associations between strong leadership and a range of desirable outcomes such as high performance, commitment, creativity and well-being. In recent years, there has been a focus on engagement both as a valuable outcome of effective leadership and as a catalyst for other positive attitudes and behaviours. However, the processes by which leaders achieve engagement have received relatively little direct attention. This chapter will examine how leaders can stimulate and promote engagement by considering leaders as individuals embedded within a social organizational context, and leadership for engagement as a malleable process that can be enhanced through mindful interventions.

In this article we synthesize literature from several disciplines to develop a multilevel model of the individual, group and organizational processes that lead to the organizational risk position, ...

In running our increasingly complex business systems, formal risk analyses and risk management techniques are becoming more important part to managers: all managers, not just those charged with risk management. It is also becoming apparent that human behaviour is often a root or significant contributing cause of system failure. This latter observation is not novel; for more than 30 years it has been recognised that the role of human operations in safety critical systems is so important that they should be explicitly modelled as part of the risk assessment of plant operations. This has led to the development of a range of methods under the general heading of human reliability analysis (HRA) to account for the effects of human error in risk and reliability analysis. The modelling approaches used in HRA, however, tend to be focussed on easily describable sequential, generally low-level tasks, which are not the main source of systemic errors. Moreover, they focus on errors rather than the effects of all forms of human behaviour. In this paper we review and discuss HRA methodologies, arguing that there is a need for considerable further research and development before they meet the needs of modern risk and reliability analyses and are able to provide managers with the guidance they need to manage complex systems safely. We provide some suggestions for how work in this area should develop. But above all we seek to make the management community fully aware of assumptions implicit in human reliability analysis and its limitations.

Cost-benefit analysis has long been used in decision making about public health and security. Frequently, risk and uncertainty are involved, and benefit and cost are not evenly shared by all stakeholders in the activities where public welfare is concerned. The result of cost-benefit analysis may be controversial because it does not consider the conflict of interest among the stakeholders. In this paper, we propose a decision support approach that allows individual agents to make their own evaluations of benefit, cost and risk over available alternatives. Individual beliefs with respect to the alternatives will then be aggregated to form a group decision. This approach can also be used to integrate the cost benefit analysis into risk assessment. An application to this group decision making, considering the disposal of dead animals, is given.

We critically examine how evidence and knowledge are brokered between the various actors (agents) in regulatory decisions on risk. Following a precis of context and regulatory process, we explore the role power and personality might play as evidence is synthesised and used to inform risk decisions, providing a review of the relevant literature from applied psychology, agent-based simulation and regulatory science. We make a case for the adoption of agent- based tools for addressing the sufficiency of evidence and resolving uncertainty in regulatory decisions. Referring to other environmental applications of agent- based decision-making, we propose how an agent model might represent power structures and personality characteristics with the attending implications for the brokering of regulatory science. This critical review has implications for the structuring of evidence that informs environmental decisions and the personal traits required of modern regulators operating in facilitative regulatory settings.

In practice, risk and uncertainty are essentially unavoidable in many regulation processes. Regulators frequently face a risk-benefit trade-off since zero risk is neither practicable nor affordable. Although it is accepted that cost-benefit analysis is important in many scenarios of risk management, what role it should play in a decision process is still controversial. One criticism of cost-benefit analysis is that decision makers should consider marginal benefits and costs, not present ones, in their decision making. In this paper, we investigate the problem of regulatory decision making under risk by applying expected utility theory and present a new approach of cost-benefit analysis. Directly taking into consideration the reduction of the risks, this approach achieves marginal cost- benefit analysis. By applying this approach, the optimal regulatory decision that maximizes the marginal benefit of risk reduction can be considered. This provides a transparent and reasonable criterion for stakeholders involved in the regulatory activity. An example of evaluating seismic retrofitting alternatives is provided to demonstrate the potential of the proposed approach. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Background Senior management and leadership are believed to be responsible for the employment of such initiatives and their own level of engagement appears to have a strong impact on the levels of employees’ engagement, theory suggests. This qualitative research explores the perceived levels, drivers and benefits, as well as the levels of managerial engagement at Organisation A, a leading support services company in the UK. This working paper means to contribute to previous studies of engagement conducted by the Kingston Business School Employee Engagement Consortium.

This article aims to provide an overview and discussion of the sources and effects of individual variation in how individuals make choices and decisions. This review encompasses both the micro and the life-span perspective, with the common assumption that individual differences are part of the evolved human design. Individuals reap the benefits of comparative advantage through differentiation, sustaining the survival of the species through complex social organization and their own reproductive fitness by occupying niches within it. Behavioural genetics research contains plentiful evidence for the existence of heritable differences in temperament and dispositions that will bear upon how we make decisions at the micro and life-space levels of choice.

Government institutions have responsibilities to distribute risk management funds meaningfully and to be accountable for their choices. We took a macro-level sociological approach to understanding the role of government in managing environmental risks, and insights from micro-level psychology to examine individual-level risk-related perceptions and beliefs. Survey data from 2,068 U.K. citizens showed that lay people's funding preferences were associated positively with beliefs about responsibility and trust, yet associations with perception varied depending on risk type. Moreover, there were risk-specific differences in the funding preferences of the lay sample and 29 policymakers. A laboratory-based study of 109 participants examined funding allocation in more detail through iterative presentation of expert information. Quantitative and qualitative data revealed a meso-level framework comprising three types of decisionmakers who varied in their willingness to change funding allocation preferences following expert information: adaptors, responders, and resistors. This research highlights the relevance of integrated theoretical approaches to understanding the policy process, and the benefits of reflexive dialogue to managing environmental risks. Department of Environment Food and Rural Affairs, EPSRC, NERC, ESRC