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Accumulating evidence indicates that time spent in natural environments promotes creativity, but few researchers have considered how this occurs. We evaluate two candidate mechanisms, attention restoration and mind wandering. We compare the accounts in terms of attentional focus, brain network activation, cognitive effects, and the temporal progression of these processes across the stages of creativity. Based on this analysis, we propose that (1) gentle shifts between externally oriented soft fascination and internally oriented mind wandering can occur during nature experience; (2) this provides the basis for mutually reinforcing pathways that enhance attention control following nature experience; and (3) mind wandering might support additional benefits for creativity, including flexibility and new associations of ideas. We propose research to test the proposed pathways, including the conditions under which environments influence creativity, the ebb and flow of attention orientation during environmental experience, and the links between attentional focus, brain network activation and creativity.

We developed and tested a model linking developmental experiences to leadership effectiveness and promotability through 2 mediating processes based on social cognitive and social capital theories. We hypothesized that a manager's exposure to 3 types of developmental experiences (formal development programs, developmental job challenges, and developmental supervision) would positively relate to supervisor's assessment of the manager's leadership effectiveness in the current job role and promotability within the organization through the manager's leadership self-efficacy and size and quality of the manager's mentor network. Results based on a sample of 235 retail managers showed that leadership self-efficacy and mentor network fully mediated the relationship between job challenges and promotability, whereas leadership self-efficacy also fully mediated the relationship between job challenges and leadership effectiveness. Developmental supervision was indirectly related to promotability through mentor network. In addition, a 3-way interaction analysis revealed that participation in formal development activities had a positive indirect relationship with leadership effectiveness and promotability mediated by leadership self-efficacy when a manager experienced either lower levels of job challenge and developmental supervision, or higher levels of both. Our findings contribute to leadership knowledge by examining how both formal and informal developmental experiences relate to leadership effectiveness and promotability through social processes.

Based on attention restoration theory we proposed that micro-breaks spent viewing a city scene with a flowering meadow green roof would boost sustained attention. Sustained attention is crucial in daily life and underlies successful cognitive functioning. We compared the effects of 40-s views of two different city scenes on 150 university students' sustained attention. Participants completed the task at baseline, were randomly assigned to view a flowering meadow green roof or a bare concrete roof, and completed the task again at post-treatment. Participants who briefly viewed the green roof made significantly lower omission errors, and showed more consistent responding to the task compared to participants who viewed the concrete roof. We argue that this reflects boosts to sub-cortical arousal and cortical attention control. Our results extend attention restoration theory by providing direct experimental evidence for the benefits of micro-breaks and for city green roofs.

This study uses metaphor analysis to examine the meanings of retirement for a group of 35 retired Canadian executives and managers. Our analysis identified eight metaphors relating to the meanings of retirement. The findings provide us with a range of insights into the experience of retirement, from loss of purpose and identity to liberation from the constraints of work to retirement being constructed as a new beginning or renaissance. Based on the accounts given by each manager, metaphors were collated and compared across retirees to reveal four distinct configurations that conceptualize retirement as exploring new horizons, searching for meaning, contributing on your own terms and putting your feet up. We discuss the implications of these metaphor configurations for understanding the consumer and producer-oriented meanings of retirement and challenge dominant career constructions of retirement as disengagement and decline. Our findings reveal that retirement appears to be better understood by incorporating future-focused and agentic forms that contribute to different types of identity work in retirement.

This article considers the possibility that ‘high performance work system’ (HPWS) practices generate positive outcomes for employees by meeting their interests (specifically their interest in an orderly and predictable working environment). Utilising survey data on employees working in the Australian aged-care industry, statistical analysis is used to test the mediating effect of order and predictability on associations between HPWS practices and employee experience of work. The results suggest that positive outcomes arise in part because HPWS practices contribute to workplace order and predictability. In explaining this finding, the article highlights the importance of contextual factors, notably industry and employee characteristics, in shaping outcomes. The article concludes that socio-logically oriented analyses which apprehend the importance of employee interests provide a useful supplement to conventional psychologically oriented accounts of HPWS and provide a basis for continued development of labour process theory.

To address the increasing demand for mass undergraduate management education and, at the same time, a greater emphasis on student teamwork, this study outlines the development, delivery, and evaluation of a training intervention designed to build team-coaching skills in teaching assistants. Specifically, practice-centered and problem-centered techniques were used to provide teaching assistants with experiential learning opportunities to help them develop their skills. The authors evaluated the training intervention using a mixed-method multiple-data source design. Both the teaching assistants being trained as well as the student teams’ experiences and perceptions of their coaches’ performance were assessed. The evaluation showed that teaching assistants reported finding the program a positive experience. Importantly, students with trained coaches reported higher levels of coaching performance, team functioning, and productivity than those with untrained coaches. The implications of this intervention are discussed.

In spite of the growing body of research on high performance work systems (HPWS), there is little evidence on their application in the service sector. It is commonly argued, however, that occupational segmentation in services is a barrier to HPWS. Analysis of data from aged-care workers indicates that: HPWS have positive outcomes for workers; highly skilled nurses are no more likely than lowly skilled personal care workers to be subject to HPWS; and in some cases, HPWS are associated with more positive outcomes for low-skilled than high-skilled workers. These findings suggest that HPWS may well be widely applicable in service settings.

The present study examined the effects of rewarding contextual performance with career development activities on perceptions of justice. Participants (264) read vignettes which gave information regarding two colleagues in a large retail store who applied for a career development activity. Type of career development activity, level of contextual performance, and the development activity recipient was varied across the vignettes. Results indicated that participants believed there was greater justice when they themselves received the development activity, irrespective of whose performance was higher. Participants were also more satisfied and had greater interest in pursuing a career in the organization when they themselves received the development opportunity, especially for organizationally‐oriented activities. Happiness completely mediated the relationship between who received the career development activity and both procedural and distributive justice. Implications of these findings for organizational justice and careers research, as well as for managers, are discussed.

The aim of this exploratory study was to examine how boundary objects are produced and the role of power in this process. To do so, we investigated the use of boundary objects by managers to develop a customer oriented culture in a newly formed telecommunications company. The boundary object in question comprise an artifact – a culture toolkit that contains a brochure explaining the new culture – accompanied by a video of the CEO explaining the new culture and workshop instructions and guidance - and the workshops themselves. In addition to these sources of data, a series of follow up interviews were also conducted. Using discourse analysis, our findings suggest that an artifact can only be developed and maintained as a boundary object through the interactions of a range of actors as they negotiate its meaning. Thus, boundary objects depend upon the co-construction of meaning among actors, which, in order to be successful requires plasticity throughout the process. We also offer a framework for different ways of relating power to boundary objects, an often neglected yet critical issue.