Enhancing Employee Stress Resilience (Wellness): A Study of Women Leaders in Asia Pacific

2020 ◽  
pp. 263145412097351
Author(s):  
Subba Vaidyanathan ◽  
Gopal Mahapatra

We live in an era of globalisation where technology, automation and digital networks drive disruptions in various spheres of life, work, family, health and society. They have increased productivity, ease of working and material comfort for humans worldwide, along with accelerating the pace of work and life. With the continued growth of technology, we are on the verge of Industry 4.0. The implications are changing at a fast pace and are associated with negative impact on health and wellness, as employees struggle to cope. In the last two decades, there has appeared a growing awareness of the need for total wellness, with implications for employee engagement and productivity. In the recent months, COVID-19 has caused further pressure on mental health, with employees struggling with anxiety, stress and depression, when organisations need them to be fully engaged, focused and making critical decisions. In this article, the authors highlight the need to equip employees with tools to build total resilience: physical, mental and spiritual. They propose a toolbox called ‘R-box’ (resilience box) to enhance employees’ ability to perform under stress. The toolkit is developed from the perspective that employees and leaders see themselves as corporate athletes ( Loehr & Schwartz, 2001 ) and train themselves as athletes do, so as to sustain high levels of performance and, in the process, achieve high personal growth. Considering time as a major resource constraint for low adoption, R-box uses a range of mini-interventions, focused on the four areas of ‘run’ (body movement), ‘refresh’ (nutrition), ‘restore’ (sleep) and ‘rebalance’ (mind-related). Being Strong is a programme for leaders who have been running for a few years in Asia-Pacific (APAC). ‘R-box’ is central to this programme. An exploratory study was conducted with women leaders in Southeast Asia, especially from Malaysia and Indonesia, who were a part of the Being Strong programme. In the study, the authors try to find out how the R-box toolkit, practised by the participants over 12 weeks, has impacted their ability to deal with stress and grow their resilience. This article elaborates the findings of the survey conducted in 2020, 90 days after the programme. The survey showed over 80 per cent adoption by the participants. Further, over 85 per cent of those who adopted the toolkit saw an improvement in their ability to deal with stress with enhanced resilience. This appears to demonstrate the usefulness of R-box as a powerful toolkit for enhancing resilience. Based on the above, the authors propose the study to be extended to a larger audience in Southeast Asia and beyond. They also recommend HR to play a lead role in bringing wellness, as a driver of employee engagement and productivity. This has implications for the immediate situation of COVID-19 pandemic-impacted work and life, and the future of work too.

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 164
Author(s):  
Quang Bach Tran ◽  
Quoc Hoi Le ◽  
Hoai Nam Nguyen ◽  
Dieu Linh Tran ◽  
Thi Thuy Quynh Nguyen ◽  
...  

Brand is considered a valuable asset that a business wants to create and maintain growth throughout its business cycle. This paper examines the impact of corporate brand equity on employees’ opportunistic behavior. The paper uses quantitative research methods, through linear SEM (Structural Equation Modelling) analysis of structural model with a scale of 609 samples of employees of enterprises in Vietnam. The research results show that corporate brand equity has a negative impact on employees’ opportunistic behavior. In the relationship between these two factors, trust and emotional engagement act as intermediate factors. Additionally, the research demonstrates that trust has a positive effect on all three components of employee engagement, including emotional engagement, computational engagement, and standards-based engagement. On that basis, the research suggests a number of recommendations to minimize the opportunistic behavior of employees in the enterprise. The findings of this study have shown the importance and impact of brand equity on employee opportunistic behavior. These are meaningful contributions in both theory and practice to help businesses gain deeper insight into brand equity and the need to pay attention to building and developing durable brand equity for businesses. At the same time, it is an important basis for the next research projects.


2021 ◽  
pp. 951-965
Author(s):  
Yana Vadimovna Mishchenko

The article discusses the main results of two major international summits held in October-November 2021, the key topics of which were the issues of the global fight against climate change and environmental protection. The decisions taken at these conferences, with the broad participation of world leaders, reflect the fundamental trends of the global environmental agenda. Within the framework of this agenda, Japan and the countries of Southeast Asia are building their modern energy and environmental cooperation. In this context, the article examines the main urgent tasks of energy-environmental interaction and sustainable development of Japan and the states of Southeast Asia. These countries are located in the Asia-Pacific region, which remains until now the main emitter of greenhouse gases in the world. However, the indicators of environmental pollution by Japan and the Southeast Asian countries are relatively not so high, compared to some other states in the region and the world. The article discusses the most relevant and significant examples of bilateral and multilateral cooperation between these countries in areas related to curbing global warming and climate protection. It has been revealed that with all the efforts made, since the 1990s, the indicators of reducing harmful emissions into the atmosphere in Japan remain modest and even lag behind some of the Western countries. The Southeast Asian countries show a serious attitude to the development of renewable energy, but their intention to abandon coal still raises some doubts about the methods of implementing this ambitious plan. In particular, it is currently not entirely clear whether these countries are preparing to make a full-fledged "energy transition" in the coming decades, or whether they just intend to replace their coal-fired thermal power plants with gas ones.


2019 ◽  
Vol 69 (4) ◽  
pp. 337-344
Author(s):  
Li Huang ◽  
Ke Chen ◽  
Mi Zhou ◽  
Brendan Nuse

Abstract Using export panel data for China and 24 bamboo and rattan trading partners from 2007 to 2017, this study simulates the export trade of Chinese bamboo and rattan products using a gravity model. Our results showed that economic size has a significant positive impact on the bilateral trade of bamboo and rattan products, while absolute distance between two major economic centers and population size have a significant negative impact. Furthermore, relevant Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) trade arrangements have an impact on bamboo and rattan product trade flows from China. Meanwhile, trade of bamboo and rattan between China and APEC countries such as South Korea, Canada, Russia, and Thailand shows much room for growth.


Author(s):  
Giacomo Morabito ◽  
Vittorio D'Aleo ◽  
Davide Di Fatta ◽  
Roberto Musotto ◽  
Walter Vesperi

The costs of the Southeast Asia maritime piracy to the global economy are largely underestimated regarding the issue of the fight against piracy. In particular, the region suffers from severe negative socio-economic impacts due to over-fishing, and the reduction and collapse of the fisheries have led to a widespread loss of income and employment. The attacks on fishers take place regularly in most Southeast Asian countries. Also, in many cases, the pirates are the fishers themselves, and they attack fishers of other nationalities. All those attacks have a serious negative impact on food security in the region by damaging fishing industry and threatening artisanal fishers who risk losing their entire income. Given the fact that large parts of Southeast Asia's fish populations are overfished, fishers have less possibility to avoid areas prone to pirate attacks.


Author(s):  
Bao-Linh Tran ◽  
Chi-Chung Chen ◽  
Wei-Chun Tseng ◽  
Shu-Yi Liao

This study examines how experience of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) influences the impact of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) on international tourism demand for four Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) economies, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand, and New Zealand, over the 1 January–30 April 2020 period. To proceed, panel regression models are first applied with a time-lag effect to estimate the general effects of COVID-19 on daily tourist arrivals. In turn, the data set is decomposed into two nation groups and fixed effects models are employed for addressing the comparison of the pandemic-tourism relationship between economies with and without experiences of the SARS epidemic. Specifically, Taiwan and Hong Kong are grouped as economies with SARS experiences, while Thailand and New Zealand are grouped as countries without experiences of SARS. The estimation result indicates that the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases has a significant negative impact on tourism demand, in which a 1% COVID-19 case increase causes a 0.075% decline in tourist arrivals, which is a decline of approximately 110 arrivals for every additional person infected by the coronavirus. The negative impact of COVID-19 on tourist arrivals for Thailand and New Zealand is found much stronger than for Taiwan and Hong Kong. In particular, the number of tourist arrivals to Taiwan and Hong Kong decreased by 0.034% in response to a 1% increase in COVID-19 confirmed cases, while in Thailand and New Zealand, a 1% national confirmed cases increase caused a 0.103% reduction in tourism demand. Moreover, the effect of the number of domestic cases on international tourism is found lower than the effect caused by global COVID-19 mortality for the economies with SARS experiences. In contrast, tourist arrivals are majorly affected by the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Thailand and New Zealand. Finally, travel restriction in all cases is found to be the most influencing factor for the number of tourist arrivals. Besides contributing to the existing literature focusing on the knowledge regarding the nexus between tourism and COVID-19, the paper’s findings also highlight the importance of risk perception and the need of transmission prevention and control of the epidemic for the tourism sector.


2020 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheng-Wei Lin ◽  
Yuan-Hung Liu ◽  
Eugenia Y. Huang

PurposeThis study empirically verified employee engagement (EE) as an outcome of organizational communication and confirmed that the formation of EE is strengthened when smartphone use (SU) is at a higher level.Design/methodology/approachA quantitative approach was used in this research, whereby 408 valid samples were collected with an online survey. The hypotheses of direct effects were tested using the structural equation modeling (SEM) procedure, and the moderating effects were tested using the unconstrained product indicator method and the PROCESS macro.FindingsThe results showed that EE was significantly influenced by person–organizationvalue fit (POVF), transformational leadership (TFL) and job autonomy (JA), and the effects of POVF and TFL were moderated significantly by SU. Although the influence of social support (SS) on EE was insignificant in the full model, SU moderated the effect of SS. The evidence also showed that work–family conflict (WFC) had no negative impact on EE.Research limitations/implicationsThe participants of this study were restricted to a local area.Practical implicationsOrganizations should develop job designs via two-way communication to bring up EE and SU can facilitate the process.Originality/valuePrevious research has identified EE as an outcome of organizational communication, but this concept has not yet been empirically verified. This research provides evidence to verify the above-mentioned concept and additionally confirms the moderating role of SU.


2020 ◽  
pp. 088626052093850
Author(s):  
Yuvaraj Krishnamoorthy ◽  
Karthika Ganesh

Physical violence during pregnancy can have negative impact on health status of mother and fetus. Hence, the current study was done to determine the prevalence and determinants of physical violence and its impact on birth outcomes during pregnancy in India. We have analyzed the most recent National Family Health Survey 4 data (NFHS-4) gathered from Demographic Health Survey (DHS) program. Stratification (urban/rural) and clustering (villages/census enumeration blocks [CEBs]) in the sample design was accounted using svyset command. In total, 62,165 ever pregnant women aged 15 to 49 years were included. Prevalence of physical violence during pregnancy in India was 3.3%. Husband/partner (2.7%) was the person most commonly responsible. Women who were widowed/separated/divorced (aPR = 1.88), belonging to the poorest quantile (aPR = 2.32), women who were employed (aPR = 1.42), women in the Southern states (aPR = 3.24), and women whose husband/partner has lesser educational qualification (adjusted prevalence ratio [aPR] = 2.02) had significantly higher prevalence of physical violence during pregnancy ( p < .001). Women who faced physical violence had significantly higher proportion of miscarriage (4.3%), abortion (3.3%), and stillbirth (1.1%) when compared with women who did not face any violence (4.1% had miscarriage, 1.8% had abortion, and 0.5% had stillbirth; p < .001). These findings show the importance of providing general supportive measures and strengthen the existing punitive legislations to prevent the violence during pregnancy.


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