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The COVID-19 pandemic forced school leaders to identify rapid solutions to adapt to an altered context. We studied a sample of school leaders from a northwest Italian city, investigating how they managed the consequences of the crisis, the threats and opportunities for professional and personal growth they identified, and what they learned with regard to new practices in terms of work and leadership. 25 semi-structured interviews were conducted with school leaders (6 males and 19 females, between July and November 2020). From the transcripts, analysed using the Template Analysis technique, 18 themes emerged: 6 addressed the threats encountered (e.g. neglected teaching aspects, work-life conflict, loss of direct relationships, and fatigue); 9 related to opportunities for growth (e.g. change in working practices, new attitudes towards technology, and e-leadership skills); and 3 leadership styles were observed: Transformational, Distributive and Directive. Our findings reveal that school leaders addressed the threats emerging from the crisis but also identified some positive outcomes and useful management practices both to overcome that difficult period and to be maintained once it was over. Finally, changes occurred in the way they saw their role: the managerial focus was supplemented by a psychological aspect, aimed at listening to and emotionally supporting followers, attempting to be a useful resource for them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents a survey among 300 employees in Northern Italy to assess the willingness to mentor and identify the factors that affect it. Men and respondents with previous mentoring experience indicate a higher willingness to be a mentor. Willingness is affected by personal characteristics that are perceived as necessary for a mentor and the perceived benefits and drawbacks of mentoring.

Aim: The study investigated the association of narcissistic leadership, workload and emotional demands with nurses' job satisfaction and the mediational role of meaningful work. Background: Considering the strong positive relationship that meaningful work has with job satisfaction, investigating its antecedents is crucial. Method: A group of 602 nurses participated in the study completing a self‐report questionnaire. Structural equation model analysis was applied. Results: Narcissistic leadership showed a negative association while emotional demands showed a positive one with meaningful work. The three determinants had a negative association with job satisfaction, while meaningful work showed a positive one. The indirect relationship with job satisfaction mediated by meaningful work was negative for narcissistic leadership and positive for emotional demands. Conclusion: The study adds to the literature mainly by the investigation of the mediational role of meaningful work in a sample of nurses. Implications for Nursing Management: Measures should promote supportive, instead of narcissistic, leadership behaviours. Moreover, nurses should be assisted in identifying emotional demands as a meaningful aspect of their work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Independence at work is commonly considered a job resource which fosters motivation and employee well-being. Somewhat paradoxically, it is embedded in a relationship, and employees’ independence also hinges on their leaders’ willingness to grant it. Analyzing this resource as part of the leader-follower relationship can be useful in exploring its beneficial, ambivalent, or detrimental reciprocal effects. We present two Actor-Partner Interdependence Models (APIM) which analyze leaders’ and followers’ independence as antecedents, and work engagement and emotional exhaustion as outcomes. We test our models on 112 pairs of UK workers, finding a significant partner effect between leaders’ independence and followers’ exhaustion. Our findings confirm the utility of a dyadic perspective for investigating leadership and well-being at work, and suggest improvements for leadership training and measures fostering job well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abusive supervision refers to the subjective employees' perception of the extent to which supervisors engage in the sustained display of hostile verbal and nonverbal behaviors, excluding physical contact, against them. This study proposes a first validation of the Italian version of Tepper's (2000) 15-item scale, in a sample of nurses. 496 nurses working in three hospitals in the North-West of Italy were investigated. Analyses were performed using SPSS and MPlus. The CFA confirmed the one factor structure, as in the original version of the scale, with satisfactory fit indexes. Moreover, discriminant and criterion validity analyses were performed. The findings show the good properties of the tool in its Italian version. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study investigated two followership behaviors, followers’ active engagement and followers’ independent critical thinking, and their relationship with job satisfaction in a sample of nurses. In addition, the study also considered a number of control variables and classical job demands and job resources—workload and emotional dissonance for job demands, and meaningful work for job resources—which have an impact on well-being at work. A paper-and-pencil questionnaire was administered to 425 nurses in an Italian hospital, and a hierarchical multiple regression was used to test the hypotheses. In addition to the job demands and job resources considered, followers’ active engagement had a significant impact on job satisfaction. Moreover, it showed a significant linear and curvilinear relationship with the outcome variable. Followers’ independent critical thinking has a non significant relationship with job satisfaction, confirming the mixed results obtained in the past for this dimension. These findings bore out the importance of analyzing followers’ behaviors as potential resources that people can use on the job to increase their own well-being. Looking at followers not just as passive recipients but as active and proactive employees can also benefit the organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Followership is a pervasive but understudied phenomenon in organizations. The topic is relevant for nurses, as not only can followership behaviors be essential in achieving goals and improving organizational wellbeing in general, but also because leaders' and followers' working styles can influence each other. Having a brief scale for measuring followership behaviors could contribute to further research in nursing management. This study evaluates the principal psychometric properties of a brief followership scale based on Kelley's model. A brief followership scale (8 items) was administered to 559 nurses in Northern Italy. Data analysis was performed using PASW 18 and Lisrel 8.72. The EFA results show a two factor solution (active engagement and independent critical thinking), confirmed by confirmatory factor analysis. Both subscales show adequate reliability. This brief scale seems to be a useful tool for training and organizational research in the nursing profession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: An increasing number of scholars argue that followers are a precondition for "successful" organizations. Nevertheless, followership has received scant attention in the literature. Starting from a theoretical analysis of the issue, this contribution aims to answer some questions regarding possible antecedents of Followers' Active Engagement (F.AE), a specific followership behavior described by Kelley (1988, 1992), described in previous works, which implies the propensity to take initiative, participate actively and be self-starters. Methods. A questionnaire was administered to 390 respondents from heterogeneous work settings. The questionnaire includes a personal data section and eight measures: F.AE; three personal/dispositional variables (extraversion, intellect, and avoiding coping), three individual-organization interaction variables (organizational citizenship behaviors directed at individuals - OCBI - and the organization - OCBO -, leader-member exchange), and a Lie scale as control variable. Data was analyzed with PASW 18. After analyzing reliability and descriptives, the relationship between the variables was explored using correlations and hierarchical multiple regression. Results. F.AE is related to six variables (25% explained variance). Three were positively related: in decreasing order, OCBO, intellect, OCBI, and Lie scale. Conversely, avoiding coping and gender were negatively related. Gender becomes significant only in the second step of the regression when dispositional variables are included. Conclusions. This study adds to the understanding of followers' Active Engagement, for example by measuring some organizational dimensions as its antecedents, and has practical implications for training and human resource management policies. Further studies should clarify the dynamics that influence followers' behavior and the dynamics of the mutual relationship between the leader's and followers' behavior, shedding light on the possible consequences for the organization, in terms of quality of work life and productivity [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability to transform followers into new leaders is an important task for leadership, as it guarantees organizational continuity and generativity. At the same time, however, it is a challenge that too often goes unanswered. In particular, research data emphasize that intergenerational transfer is highly critical in Italy: the number of elderly entrepreneurs, executives and top managers, for example, has increased significantly in recent years. This article presents a theoretical reflection on this issue, and has four main goals: to introduce the Italian leadership situation; to describe and understand the ‘dark side of leadership’ with particular attention to narcissism in leadership; to identify the main elements which can promote ‘generative leadership’ in organizational contexts (i.e. in this paper, a leadership based on the idea of generativity developed by Erik Erikson in 1968), highlighting the ability to achieve balance in leadership as a core aspect; and to provide suggestions about leadership training and development programmes, with a special focus on mentoring and coaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Quality of working life has been shown to play a key role in reducing strain inside and outside the workplace, supporting the fulfillment of workers' wellbeing and increasing workforce productivity. Van Laar et al. in 2007 developed the Work-Related Quality of Life (WRQoL) scale that was applied to several different work environments and translated into nine languages., Objectives: We aimed to test and validate an Italian version of the WRQoL scale., Methods: A cross-sectional design was conducted to collect a sample of healthcare professionals (N=430) in 8 hospitals in the Northwest of Italy. Internal consistency of each scale was tested through Cronbach's alpha. A Confirmatory factor analysis was performed. Independent samples t-tests and ANOVA were performed to determine whether the scores on the subscales differed according to various socio-demographic variables., Results: A seven factors structure was confirmed (Control at work; General well-being; Home-work interface; Stress at Work; Job and career satisfaction; Working conditions; Employee Engagement; χ2=682.453, p<.001; χ2 and df(251) ratio=2.71; CFI=.90; RMSEA=.06; SRMR=.06). All subdimensions showed Cronbach's alphas ≥ 0.70 but for Stress at Work (alpha 0.65). The subscales differentiated between groups of people according to several socio-demographic characteristics (i.e., profession, age, length of employment)., Discussion: The Italian version of WRQoL is a brief and sufficiently reliable tool that can contribute to a more complex and complete evaluation of the psychological well-being at work due to its multidimensionality. Overall, the use of this tool in occupational health practice, in addition to that of other instruments already available, should prove useful in monitoring workers' well-being before and after interventions.