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Primary care healthcare organizations are complex and multidimensional, and there has been much discussion about the potential dangers of focusing on outcomes as quality indicators in isolation without understanding the processes and system characteristics that drive them. Organizational health, as a concept, shifts the focus of measurement upstream and considers the elements needed for sustainable long-term success. This study has both designed and tested the first survey seeking to measure organizational health specifically within the context of primary care. A stepwise approach was taken to ensure that the validity and reliability of the survey was examined at multiple stages.Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/00185868.2021.1947164.

With an increasing proportion of UK healthcare delivered by independent sector providers (ISPs) it is important that performance data is reviewed with a similar rigour as within the public sector. However, there is a relative paucity of work considering quotients of performance in the independent healthcare sector. This study sets out to measure organizational health within ISPs in the UK and juxtapose this with contemporaneous data taken from public sector NHS organizations. Survey data was tested for construct validity with fit of the existing factor structure of the Healthcare-OH survey examined using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). Multiple-group CFA was used to establish measurement invariance to permit comparison of latent sum scores between ISP and NHS organizations. Measurement invariance analysis evaluated the fit of sequential invariance models, proceeding iteratively to establish partial metric and scalar invariance. Latent sum scores comparisons demonstrated ISPs outperformed NHS trusts across all elements of organizational health. This is the first time organizational health has been measured in ISPs explicitly for comparison with results in the public sector. Comparative measurement and analysis in this way is novel and has the potential of fostering a two-way learning process for the ultimate benefit of both NHS and ISP organizations.

Healthcare-OH is the only healthcare-specific measure of organizational health currently in use and for this concept to be truly applied in a healthcare context then reliable and valid measurement ...

This study aimed to qualitatively develop a conceptual framework for organizational health, within the setting of GP practices in the UK, through a qualitative interview study utilizing aspects from grounded theory. Data saturation was reached after 33 interviews revealing six themes: Strategy, Resources, Leadership, Staff Wellbeing, Capacity for change and Ways of working. The structure of each theme is discussed in detail. By unpicking the elements of organizational health in GP practices in this way, we hope to shift focus from considering down-stream clinical outcomes in isolation to practices taking a more long-term view centered around fostering ongoing high performance.

Co-ordinating collective work and communicating a shared understanding of tasks is necessary to accomplishing organizational goals. Stigma could exacerbate co-ordination challenges between public and private organizations by further widening differences in goals and incentives among employees. Using relational co-ordination theory, we explore how stigma can influence employee behaviour in the context of healthcare delivery. We study healthcare professionals and frontline workers involved in the fight against AIDS in India to examine how public health systems fail due to a lack of communication and co-ordination, and that these failures are worsened by stigma. When stigma is present, relationships between employees become strained due to misaligned work routines, lack of information sharing and cooperation failure. Our findings reveal emergent responses from frontline employees that mitigate co-ordination failures through: (1) role adaptation to improve predictability of tasks; (2) social purpose identification to promote a common understanding and engage stigmatized clients; and (3) affective attachment that encourages extra-role behaviours and task ownership. We draw implications for relational co-ordination and stigma, as well as public-private co-ordination in public health systems.

Healthy organisations have a strong provision of the vital elements required for long-term sustainable success and proponents of organisational health concern themselves with the recognition and me...

In this paper we put forward the need to build a risk taxonomy and a simply digestible risk score to highlight areas of COVID-19 infection risk for individuals as part of their typical daily activities. The taxonomy will cover the areas people live, work (study), travel and socialise to enhance the views of infection rates in specific but very common environments. This taxonomy will allow users, via a proposed application (named YRisk- COVID), to assess their own individual risks, their household and work place risk. The taxonomy will include factors such as regional levels of infection, local population density where an individual lives, their work place (or school) and their typical travel methods. The further collection of data will enable refinements of the taxonomy and identification of other risk factors and model improvements. The result will provide a near real time view of risks to individuals. The model has been built based on the latest infectivity research and uses data collected from UK government COVID-19 case data, as well as the data collected within the application. The model has been designed to improve individual's decision making of risks of COVID-19 infection and will provide users with the ability to compare the risks related to their daily activities. The data collected will be provided back to users and will lead to an opportunity for users to be able to relate to the regional risk of becoming infected. The application can provide the means for enhanced risk planning across regions, work or study locations, and for the individual. The data collected will provide not only advanced warning of risk, but can also be used to assess how the wider population responds to measures taken by regional and national governments. The application provides a unique means for individuals to self regulate their risks in conjunction with government guidelines.

In the present research, we examine the relation between leader mindfulness and employee performance through the lenses of organizational justice and leader-member relations. We hypothesize that employees of more mindful leaders view their relations as being of higher leader-member exchange (LMX) quality. We further hypothesize two mediating mechanisms of this relation: increased interpersonal justice and reduced employee stress. In other words, we posit that employees of more mindful leaders feel treated with greater respect and experience less stress. Finally, we predict that LMX quality serves as a mediator linking leader mindfulness to employee performance—defined in terms of both in-role and extra-role performance. Across two field studies of triadic leader-employee-peer data (Study 1) and dyadic leader–employee data (Study 2), we find support for this sequential mediation model. We discuss implications for theorizing on leadership, organizational justice, business ethics, LMX, and mindfulness, as well as practical implications.

The role of mindfulness in the workplace has emerged as a legitimate and growing area of organizational scholarship. T he present research examined the role of employee emotional exhaustion in mediating the relationship of mindfulness with turnover intentions and task performance . Drawing on theory and empirical research on both organizational behavior and mindfulness, w e predicted that more mindful employees would show lower turnover intentions and higher task performance and that th e s e relationship s would be mediated by emotional exhaustion. We tested these hypotheses in two field studies in an Indian context. Study 1 was a field study of call center employees of a multinational organization, an industry in which turnover rates are very high. This study found that mindfulness was associated with lower turnover intentions and less emotional exhaustion , and that emotional ex haustion mediated the relationship between mindfulness and turnover intentions. Study 2 replicated these results in a sample of employees based in major Indian cities and drawn from different industries. In addition, it showed that mindfulness was positive ly related to supervisor - rated task performance, with e motional exhaustion again playing a mediating role. We discuss theoretical and practical implications of our findings , as well as future research directions .

Load flow studies are introduced to acquire voltage, active and reactive power and load angle at every bus of power system to dissect its steady state conditions. Distinctive artificial neural network are produced for estimation of bus voltages and other obscure parameters of the system. A feed-forward back propagation network with sundry learning algorithms are created to acquire bus parameters. The proposed method is authenticated through a MATLAB simulation.

Research summary: We examine individuals' collaboration preferences in the Knowledge Transfer Network (KTN) for the UK plastics electronics sector. Using conjoint analysis, we investigate how aspiration gaps and relational capability affect the value placed on potential organizational collaborations. Aspiration gaps reflect individuals' perception of whether they are ahead of or behind peers on their career trajectory, and relational capability captures three distinct dimensions: networking skills, openness to collaborate, and network awareness. Our findings suggest that positive and negative aspiration gaps augment preferences to form organizational partnerships. These effects are positively moderated by networking skills and openness and negatively moderated by network awareness. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories of partnership formation, scientific collaboration, and behavioral strategy. Managerial summary: University–industry collaboration is important to the creation and application of new knowledge. Such collaboration requires individuals of different backgrounds to work together, which can be difficult. We investigate what drives individuals' preferences to collaborate. We find that individuals who consider themselves ahead of or behind their peers are more favorable toward collaboration. We also find that networking skill and openness augment this positive collaboration disposition whereas awareness of the network members makes one more selective and reduces the proclivity to collaborate. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In response to an increasing body of evidence on the importance of employee health and well-being (HWB) within health care, there has been a shift in focus from both policymakers and individual organizations toward improving health care employee HWB. However, there is something of a paucity of evidence regarding the impact and value of specific HWB interventions within a health care setting. The aim of this article was to systematically review the literature on this topic utilizing the EMBASE, Global Health, Health Management Information Consortium, MEDLINE, and PsycINFO databases. Forty-four articles were identified and, due to a large degree of heterogeneity, were considered under different headings as to the type of intervention employed: namely, those evaluating changing ways of working, physical health promotion, complementary and alternative medicine, and stress management interventions, and those utilizing multimodal interventions. Our results consider both the efficacy and reliability of each intervention in turn and reflect on the importance of careful study design and measure selection when evaluating the impact of HWB interventions.

Using the upper echelon perspective and imprinting arguments as key theoretical lenses, this paper examines how characteristics of new venture core teams influence internal consistency and distinctiveness of human resources (HR) values at the early–growth stage of the firm. We found that shared organizational experience among founding core team members positively predicts internal consistency and distinctiveness of the dominant HR values, whereas functional diversity positively predicts distinctiveness of these values. Contrary to our prediction, when the levels of both prior shared organizational experience and functional diversity are high, positive effects turned negative, indicating more complex interaction effects between the two team characteristics.

This paper discusses the role of energy provision in influencing the social aspirations of people living in slums. We examine factors that influence the shift in aspirations in five slum settlements using data from 500 interviews conducted in serviced and non-serviced slums from the state of Gujarat in India. The non-serviced slums did not have access to basic services namely water, sanitation, energy, roads, solid waste and rainwater management. We find empirical evidence which suggests that when basic infrastructure provisions are met, slum dwellers shift their focus from lower order aspirations to the higher order aspirations like health, education, housing and land ownership. We argue that energy provision enhances productivity and enables slum dwellers to shift their aspirations upwards. Furthermore, we test the effect of work days lost due to illness on the relationship between higher order aspirations and aspirations for energy provision. When provision of energy is low, higher work day loss dampens higher order aspirations. For policy makers, this study highlights the critical link between the infrastructure services preferred by slum dwellers and their social aspirations for growth.

This research examines the influence of leaders’ mindfulness on employee well-being and performance. We hypothesized that supervisors’ trait mindfulness is positively associated with different facets of employee well-being, such as job satisfaction and need satisfaction, and different dimensions of employee performance, such as in-role performance and organizational citizenship behaviors. We also explored whether one measure of employee well-being, psychological need satisfaction, plays a mediating role in the relation between supervisor mindfulness and employee performance. We tested these predictions in two studies using data from both supervisors and their subordinates. Results were consistent with our hypotheses. Overall, this research contributes to our understanding of leadership by examining the foundation of supervisors’ effectiveness in their awareness and attention. It also contributes to our understanding of mindfulness by examining its interpersonal effects in a very important domain of human life: the workplace.

In this study, we examined the moderating influences of gender and age with respect to testing the heritability of leadership emergence. A large data base of 12,112 twins from Sweden was used in the current study to decompose the variance of emergent leadership into an unobservable genetic component and environmental components that are either common or unshared among twin pairs. Consistent with prior leadership research on genetics, we found that a genetic factor is able to explain a significant proportion of the variation across individuals in predicting how twins perceive their emergent leadership behavior (about 44% for women and 37% for men). Furthermore, we also found that the magnitude of genetic influence on emergent leadership varied with age, but only for women with the heritability estimate being highest for the mid-age women versus lowest for the older women. Implications for advancing research on the genetic and environmental influences on leadership emergence are discussed.

In this paper we explore the linkages among various types of person-organization (PO) fit and their effects on employee attitudinal outcomes. We propose and test a conceptual model which links various types of fits—objective fit, perceived fit and subjective fit—in a hierarchical order of cognitive information processing and relate them to employee organizational commitment and job satisfaction. By unveiling how the different types of fit relate to each other in influencing individual outcomes, we address some of the theoretical and methodological concerns in the use of different methods in measuring PO fit.

In this study, the authors investigate the extent to which dispositional hope mediates genetic influences on transformational leadership. Based on a sample of female twins (214 identical and 178 fraternal) from the Minnesota Twin Registry, results indicated that 53% of the variance in hope and 49% of the variance in transformational leadership were accounted for by genetic factors. After controlling for positive emotionality and negative emotionality, it was found that the genetic influence on transformational leadership was mediated by dispositional hope with the overlapping genetic factors explaining 20.8% of the total variance in transformational leadership.

In this study we investigate the extent to which dispositional hope mediates genetic determinants of transformational leadership. Based on a sample of female twins from the Minnesota, results indic...

Extending previous research on the genetic underpinnings of entrepreneurship, we investigate gender differences in the genetic influences on the tendency of people to become entrepreneurs. We also examined two mediating variables through which genetic factors may impact this tendency: extraversion and neuroticism. Based on 1285 pairs of identical twins (449 male and 836 female pairs) and 849 pairs of same-sex fraternal twins (283 male and 566 female pairs), we found that females have a strong genetic influence and zero shared-environmental influences on their tendency to become entrepreneurs. In contrast, males show zero genetic influence, but a large shared-environmental influence. Extraversion and neuroticism mediate the genetic influences on women's tendency to become entrepreneurs, whereas extraversion mediates shared-environmental influences on men's tendency to become entrepreneurs. We discuss this sharp difference in genetic influences on entrepreneurship across gender groups and highlight the different challenges that men and women face in their entrepreneurial endeavors.

This study examines the role of procedural justice and power distance in the relationship between high-performance work systems (HPWSs) and employee attitudes (affective commitment and job satisfaction). The study tests the mediating role of procedural justice on the relationships between HPWS and employee attitudes and the moderating role of power distance in this relationship. The results, based on a sample of 1,383 employees across 23 firms from three countries, indicate that HPWS is strongly related to employee attitudes. The results also indicate that procedural justice mediates the influence of HPWS on employee attitudes.

How and why do individuals make sacrifices to protect similar others within vulnerable contexts? We explore how self-disclosure of one’s identity as a member of a marginalized community can trigger...

Background The demand for the highest-quality patient care coupled with pressure on funding has led to the increasing use of quality improvement (QI) methodologies from the manufacturing industry. The aim of this systematic review was to identify and evaluate the application and effectiveness of these QI methodologies to the field of surgery. Methods MEDLINE, the Cochrane Database, Allied and Complementary Medicine Database, British Nursing Index, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature, Embase, Health Business™ Elite, the Health Management Information Consortium and PsycINFO® were searched according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses statement. Empirical studies were included that implemented a described QI methodology to surgical care and analysed a named outcome statistically. Results Some 34 of 1595 articles identified met the inclusion criteria after consensus from two independent investigators. Nine studies described continuous quality improvement (CQI), five Six Sigma, five total quality management (TQM), five plan-do-study-act (PDSA) or plan-do-check-act (PDCA) cycles, five statistical process control (SPC) or statistical quality control (SQC), four Lean and one Lean Six Sigma; 20 of the studies were undertaken in the USA. The most common aims were to reduce complications or improve outcomes (11), to reduce infection (7), and to reduce theatre delays (7). There was one randomized controlled trial. Conclusion QI methodologies from industry can have significant effects on improving surgical care, from reducing infection rates to increasing operating room efficiency. The evidence is generally of suboptimal quality, and rigorous randomized multicentre studies are needed to bring evidence-based management into the same league as evidence-based medicine.

Although trust and commitment are important for the success of any alliance activity, there is only a minimal attention given to the 'soft' side of alliance management. In this article we propose a dynamic framework for the development of trust and commitment in different alliance types. We argue that firms with competitive motives will lead to a failure of the alliance and suggest that both trust and commitment have two components - rational and emotional. Based on these, we propose that the final outcome of an alliance relationship will depend on the development of trust and commitment over time, which in turn will depend on the motives with which firms enter into relationships.

By underlining the way trustors perceive and reassess trustee’s mis-performance in addition to the concern of violation types, we emphasise the role of trustor as an active information processor rather than a passive receiver of the information. Our findings show that the initial perception of high integrity backfires after the violation in the same domain- it incurs a greater trust decrease which neutralises its initial advantage for the relationship, whereas the initial perception of high ability does not have a significant impact on the effect of the violation.

We examine network members’ collaboration preferences between and within academic and commercial organizations that are members of a UK-based Knowledge Transfer Network in the plastics electronics ...