When are clients helpful? Capitalising on client involvement in professional service delivery.

Professional service firms apply specialist knowledge to create customised solutions to client problems. In their work, teams of professionals undertake projects in which clients may be closely involved in co-creating solutions. However, we know little about the conditions under which client involvement contributes to better performance. We examine the direct and conditional contribution client involvement can make to project success and propose team bonding capital as a moderator. We conduct multi-level analysis of data from 58 project managers and 171 consultants nested in project teams. We find a positive impact of client involvement on both team performance and team member idea creativity. Team bonding capital moderates the relationships client involvement has with both team performance and individual member idea creativity, where the impact of client involvement is greater when team bonding capital is high. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Reducing burnout among nurses: The role of high-involvement work practices and colleague support.

BACKGROUND: The impact of human resource practices on nurses' well-being, the underlying mechanisms involved, and the contextual factors that enhance or impede their success are not fully clear. PURPOSE: The aim of this article was to examine a moderated mediation model whereby high-involvement work practices are purported to reduce nurses' burnout via psychological empowerment, and colleague support is expected to moderate the mediating role of psychological empowerment in the high-involvement work practices-burnout link. METHODOLOGY/APPROACH: Structural equation modeling was employed on cross-sectional survey data collected from a large sample of nurses in Canada (N = 2,174). RESULTS: The findings revealed that psychological empowerment partially mediated the association between high-involvement work practices and burnout, whereas colleague support was directly associated with lower burnout rather than exerting a moderating effect. CONCLUSION: The study identifies the universality of high-involvement work practices in alleviating nurses' burnout and highlights the important role of psychological empowerment as an explanatory variable. In addition, colleague support is an important yet independent predictor of nurses' burnout. PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS: This study identifies a strategy that can be adopted by hospital managers to help protect against nurse burnout while offering insights into the underlying process involved.

Individual variation in role construal predicts responses to third-party biases in hiring contexts.

We theorize that individuals' pre-existing beliefs about the hiring manager role (role construal) are associated with their tendency to condone bias accommodation in hiring contexts, in which a person aligns hiring decisions with the perceived biases of others. In two studies, we focus on human resources (HR) professionals' endorsement of the role demand to prioritize candidate fit with others (e.g., supervisor) when making hiring decisions. Study 1 examined bias accommodation from a vicarious perspective, revealing that role demand endorsement is positively associated with viewing it as acceptable and common for another hiring manager to accommodate third-party bias against women. Study 2 examined bias accommodation experimentally from an actor's perspective, showing lower preference for and selection of a female (vs. male) job candidate in the presence of cues to third-party bias against women, but only when role demand endorsement is relatively high. HR professionals in both studies indicated that third-party bias influences in hiring are relatively common. Responses in Study 2 provide preliminary evidence that the phenomenon of third-party bias accommodation might be relevant in the context of employment discrimination based on group characteristics other than gender (e.g., race/ethnicity, age). We discuss the practical implications of our findings for hiring professionals and for organizations seeking to increase diversity in their workforce.

Revisiting the Effect of Emotional Labor: A Multi-Level Investigation in Front-Line Service Teams.

The main purpose of this study is to consider individuals in teams and to reexamine how emotional labor affects the performance of front-line service team and team members through emotional exhaustion. Multi-source data collection and a time-lagged research design was adopted to collect data from matched team members and customers nested in 82 front-line service teams in a large electronics provider based in China. The findings show that surface acting increases emotional exhaustion which reduces customer loyalty at the team level and individual task performance at the individual level, supporting a full mediation model. While, deep acting is not associated with emotional exhaustion, it is positively linked with team member's task performance. This study provides evidence for the nested nature of emotional labor and exhaustion in teams.