1,721,045 research outputs found
Pleasures and Pains about Remote Work Experience during the Covid-19 Global Pandemic: A diatextual approach
No full textThe Covid-19 global pandemic has radically redesigned social, economic and cultural
pivots of human life. Among these, individual professional experience has been completely
upset by the introduction of remote/smart working modalities thus imposing workers to fast cope
with this great change, adapting to different workloads and time schedules and in some cases
even learning new skills. One of the most evident consequence for many people has been a
stressful management of the work/family balance, because both life domains required attention
and engagement. The consequence being a high perception of overload and a poor quality of
life. In view of the above, adopting an applied psycholinguistic perspective, the present study
aimed to investigate how individuals made sense of the experience of smart working during
phase 2 of the Covid-19 pandemic. Individual in-depth interviews were conducted with a
group of 18 workers and diatextual analysis was used to analyze the discursive texture binding
the interlocutors to the wider context of talk
Performance and well-being in changing work environments: Pursuing a sustainable career in translation in post-pandemic times
No full textChange is a prerogative of any organizational and working settings. As open people-based systems, organizations grow, decline, transform themselves rapidly, continuously, deliberatively and unconsciously (Quinn & Weick, 1999). However, the current experience of change brought about by the outbreak of the global pandemic has posed original challenges, forcing individuals and organizations to cope with unexpected demands and to make sense of this brand-new personal and collective experience (van den Heuvel & Demerouti, 2009; Sonenshein & Dholakia, 2012; van den Heuvel, Demerouti & Bakker, 2013).
Evidently, the pandemic has invested and transformed undebatable pivots of human life such as professional identity, economic subsistence, work and family organization, children’s education management, imposing a radical revision of the traditional modalities, practices and skills used to manage them. In this vein, Covid-19 could be fundamentally defined as a people-based crisis : individuals are getting sick, and the repercussions for business and society are enormous, and are getting exponentially stronger day by day.
From an organizational point of view, the radical digitalization of work, for some companies a quite new experience, has required workers, with different cultural backgrounds, age, gender, to fast adapt fast to new processes and demands, to new workloads and to a new management of their work often relying on personal responsibility and measured on objectives rather than on outputs . As a matter of fact, this sudden change might have impacted on performance as well as on the person/organization relationship in terms of positive organizational behaviors (commitment, extra-role behaviors, etc.).
From an individual point of view, the remote management of work has greatly impacted on personal life, requiring also to conciliate work and family demands, often resulting in feelings of frustration and uneasiness with negative implications both for personal wellbeing and organizational performance (see for instance the bidirectional effect of negative work/life spillover or the increase of technostress and/or workaholism).
Therefore, a huge responsibility in the management of the implications following to the current situation is attributed to the HRM function, which is called to face these unexpected transformations, working on the impact of this “new normal” on individuals and groups and keeping high-quality and competitive performance (Caligiuri, De Cieri, Minbaeva, Verbeke and Zimmermann, 2020; Carnevale & Hatak, 2020).
Accordingly, recent studies in the field show that within the next few years the impact of this global change will lead organizations to confront themselves with a radical redefinition of the traditional person/organization relationship that in turn will be based on completely different premises in terms of mutual expectations and psychological contract as compared with the recent past. The pandemic has impacted on both objective and subjective aspects of the working experience: it has re-organized working spaces, organizational processes, tasks and skills forcing individuals to fastly rapidly? adapt to change .
There are many evident transformations that are radically redefining the current socio-cultural and organizational scenario. The main ones could be summed up as follows .
Different work conditions. Among the radical changes in work conditions we could consider home offices, new conditions for task setting and controlling, distant work, separation of employees, necessity to wear protective equipment, division of teams into micro-teams, possible loss of connections and relationships between colleagues, possible loss of work habits and behavior, inequalities between employees on home office and on those who have to work on place (Robelski et al., 2019; Stefaniuk, 2020). Research is needed to understand the impact of social separation and technology-mediated communication on workers’ health, well-being and job satisfaction.
Distance management and new competencies of managers (especially line and middle management). Issues like motivation, coaching and mentoring, problem and conflict solving, supporting employee performance, process management and employee development, risk management, controlling of working hours are becoming more and more urgent in order to make organizations more effective (Gordon, 2020; Blatch-Jones et al., 2020). Future research could carefully consider if and to what extent distance or online education and training of managers could lead to efficient performance.
New ways of HR practices. As a matter of fact, the global Pandemic has imposed a revision of traditional HR practices that have been transformed into distant (online or telephone) practices. Currently, organizations are increasingly exploring the use of digital tools to identify, recruit, retain and assess employees (Blatch-Jones et al., 2020).
Training and education of employees using technologies or managing teams online. Even these fundamental HR practices have been transformed using digital tools, with results that need further investigation (Gordon, 2020).
Different approach towards generations. Each generation reacts differently on changes, prefers different working conditions, have different computer literacy and have different level of willingness to work under new conditions (Yildirim & Korkmaz, 2017).
Information and data security. Use of technologies for sensitive information sharing brings higher demand on security of information systems and software used by organizations and employees (Stefaniuk, 2020).
Lowering of salaries and wages, necessity for requalification, risk of job loss. Lower or no possibility to work in some areas for a certain period due to closures, lack of supply, necessity to restructure work and work tasks or job descriptions, etc
The discursive construction of self care: Confronting different cultures on the meaning of well-being [La costruzione discorsiva della cura di s�: Culture a confronto sull'idea di benessere]
No full textBy adopting a qualitative perspective, this contribution aims at highlighting some occurrences within the communicative practices which are responsible for the subjective evaluations about psycho-physical well-being according to the expectations prescribed by the main scripts of �self care�. To this purpose the social representation of well-being conveyed by mass media has been compared with the conversational elaboration of this concept given by some privileged witnesses of the practices of �self care�. Actually, the social reality of subjective well-being has been anchored to the meanings expressed by a sample of customers and operators of some �wellness centres� who collaborated with the research, by giving their representation of the world through some in-depth interviews. The discursive data have been triangulated with the images of well-being and self care conveyed by mass media, both in its traditional format -two magazines specifically dedicated to the topic (Viver sani e belli e Star bene) - and in the format of virtual communication - two web sites dedicated to the topic, an Italian one (www.benessere.com) and an English one (www.thefitmap.com). The data have been ana-lysed by adopting a diatextual framework (Mininni, 1992; 2000; 2003a, 2003b) as to better highlight the interpretative repertoires (Potter e Wetherell, 1987) and the rhetorical formats, which give consistence to the discursive construction of subjective well-being
Learning to Be Employable Through Volunteering: A Qualitative Study on the Development of Employability Capital of Young People
Full text linkOver the last decades, consistent research showed that voluntary work could be considered as a tool for professional development and concrete employment: volunteering could be either experienced as a desire to improve career opportunities or to acquire new skills. The study aimed to investigate voluntary work as a context of informal and non-formal workplace learning and vocational guidance, useful to develop skills and abilities, namely the capital of personal and social resources, that could promote future employability. Participants were 38 young volunteers who experienced the Universal Civil Service, a national Italian program addressed to young people aged up to 28 years, giving them both the opportunity to engage in social activities useful for the community and have the first contact with a working context. In line with the objectives of the study, participants were invited to describe their volunteering experience in a diary, highlighting if and to what extent this context contributed to enhancing their employability capital, namely the asset of skills, knowledge, and networks acquired, that they could transfer to a future professional domain. The narrative data collected were examined through diatextual analysis, a specific address of discourse analysis designed to catch the relationship between enunciators, text, and context of the talk. This qualitative analysis allowed us to investigate the meanings young people attributed to these activities. In light of these results, the paper contributed to investigate volunteers’ perceptions about the conditions that could best foster this specific kind of workplace informal and non-formal learning and at proposing a qualitative perspective on the analysis of the employability capital they developed
Il ruolo dei modelli familiari nelle scelte di carriera nella transizione scuola-università-mondo del lavoro: uno studio sugli studenti di scuola secondaria superiore
Full text linkNegli ultimi decenni, il tema della scelta di carriera nella transizione dalla scuola al mondo del lavoro è diventato rilevante nella ricerca e nella pratica di orientamento. L’obiettivo di questo studio è quello di analizzare la relazione tra processo di career decision making e influenza della famiglia. Sono stati coinvolti nella ricerca 169 studenti di scuola superiore cui è stato chiesto di compilare un questionario volto a misurare la difficoltà nel career decision making, l’autoefficacia percepita nella scelta, la percezione del contesto familiare e le aspettative parentali. I risultati
mostrano come la percezione del contesto familiare influenzi le difficoltà percepite nella scelta di carriera e l’autoefficacia percepita nel career decision making, mentre le aspettative genitoriali hanno impatto solo sull’autoefficacia percepita
The meaning of the organization or the organization of meaning? Metaphors as sensemaking tools to understand organizational change management
Full text linkWithin the last decades, language and discourse have entered the conception of organizing, meant as a process of sense-making where discursively based interpretations define agents, purposes, and or-ganizations. The aim of the present paper was to connect sense-making theory with the study of me-taphor, being the latter one of the most valuable and multifaceted linguistic tools, useful to catch, de-scribe, and shape organizational identity. To this purpose, the focus of the investigation was on the sen-se-making processes used by employees to figure out their organization, analysing the metaphors they use when talking about it. Participants to the study were 115 employees working in a medium-sized company operating in the automotive sector and located in the south of Italy. At the time of data collec-tion, the company was experiencing a great change due to a recent process of commercial expansion. Consequently, employees were engaged in managing great transformations of the organization, both related to its cultural vision and to the tasks and working modalities. Therefore, in-depth individual interviews were used to collect discursive data about the way employees perceived this transformation. The study was intended as an action-research intervention aimed at collecting data to support the HR func-tion in dealing with these organizational changes. Practical implications for the development of work and organizational (W&O) psychology are also discussed
Homo faber cursus ipsius: il contratto psicologico dei lavoratori versatili e senza confini e gli effetti sul commitment e i comportamenti di cittadinanza organizzativi
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Sustainable Careers and Flourishing Organizations
No full textThe idea of this Special Issue emerged within the last two years that (exclusively
focusing on the impact of the pandemic on working life) will pass to history as one of the
most complex times for individuals and organizations.
Accordingly, since 2016, the Guest Editors of the present Special Issue, as well as some
of the authors who contributed to the discussion which is presented above, are members of
a national academic network, born within the Italian Association of Psychology, called Work
in Progress (WIP), whose aim is to produce empirical evidence and theoretical insights
on the huge changes that have transpired the labor market lately and that have radically
transformed organizational processes, human resource management practices, as well
as the meaning individuals attach to work and to career in their life (Available online:
https://aipass.org/node/11613 (accessed on 15 July 2022))
I forum di discussione online al servizio dell‟apprendimento. Analisi del caso “laboratorio di tecniche di pubblicità e marketing” all’Università di Bari
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