THE PRINCIPLE OF A RATIONAL LEGISLATOR AND THE SYSTEMIC REGULATION OF SOME LABOUR LAW INSTITUTIONS

A systemic review of selected legal institutions of employees’ disciplinary liability leads to the conclusion that the regulation of disciplinary law is not based on rational and logical assumptions. Concerns are raised as to the existence of many statutes that regulate, separately for individual employee groups and, as a rule, differently, functionally identical substantive and procedural institutions of disciplinary liability. Such differences are not explained, by the different times at which individual statutes were enacted and the subject matter differences related to the exercise of particular professions. As for the legislator, a review of the relevant provisions of law indicates that the said regulations do not, in many situations, satisfy the principle of terminological consistency or the requirement of systemic coherence. This applies in particular to norms that, due to their faulty treatment of linguistic issues relating to the rational creation of law, do not meet the requirement of the said adequacy.

Building Support for Practice Research

This chapter was designed to provide readers a broad understanding of factors that should be considered when attempting to implement research in a practice environment. Common obstacles to conducting research in practice settings are discussed in this chapter and include administrative factors, work demands placed on practitioners, the availability of research knowledge and skills, and the research tradition of some professions. To address these, recommendations have been developed to remediate these barriers. These involve building support and demand for practice research by increasing its value to stakeholders, the development of and/or accessibility to research skills, and providing the infrastructure necessary to conduct practice research. The importance of including practitioners in the process of building research capacity is discussed. In order to increase the chances of success, capacity building must be collaborative. All activities should include representation from all employee groups that will either participate in the research process or be consumers of research.

Possible transmission of Covid-19 infection among healthcare professionals; first defense to early wave of the pandemic

Objective: Healthcare professionals play an essential role in the COVID-19 pandemic on the front lines. There have been a limited number of publications and national status reports on COVID-19 infected healthcare professionals. We aimed to determine the factors that play a role in transmitting COVID-19 infection to healthcare professionals. Material and methods: Among healthcare professionals, those evaluated as a possible COVID-19 case and whose Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) tests were studied in our Emergency Service and Employee Health Polyclinic were included in the study. Age, gender, task, unit, working in COVID-19 units, Thorax Computerized Tomography (CT) and PCR test result, hospitalization status, suspicious contact, and appropriate use of personal protective equipment (PPE) in the work environment and social environment were investigated. Results: A total of 369 cases were included in the study. 54.7% (n = 207) of potential COVID-19 healthcare professionals worked in COVID-19 units, 22.5% (n = 83) had PCR positive. Employee groups with the highest PCR positivity rate were security guards (88.9%), cleaning staff (31.6%), doctors (26.3%) and nurses (18.8%), respectively. When contact histories with COVID-19 infection were examined; 46.3% of the cases had in-hospital social contact (PCR positivity rate 21.6%), 39.6% had a history of contact with COVID-19 patients (PCR positivity rate 11%). It was determined that 3.3% of the cases (n = 12) were treated in the COVID-19 service, 0.3% (n = 1) was hospitalized in intensive care, 26% (n = 96) were isolated at home, and 70.5 % (n = 260) continued to work. All of the participants were discharged after treatment and returned to their duties. Conclusion: Adequate training should be given to healthcare professionals to protect them against COVID-19 infection. Additionally, healthcare professionals should show the care to prevent infection in social areas inside and outside the hospital as well as at contact points with patients.

Rural poverty in Poland between the wars

Poverty is the consequence of not having sufficient income to sustain lives and ways of life. While there are many papers addressing poverty in today’s Poland, no comprehensive study was done to explain and describe rural poverty also in a historical aspect. Therefore, this article attempts to synthetically identify the patterns and particularities of rural poverty in Poland between the wars, and to present the multifaceted and diverse nature of Polish poverty in the initial years of national independence. The authors’ main objective is to indicate the changes in the scope of Polish poverty and to describe the adaptive mechanisms and the discomfort involved in the depreciation of needs. Before independence, the situation varied across the Polish territory. The relatively worst socio-economic conditions were experienced in Galicia due to absence of non-agricultural activities. The population of Prussian rural areas found themselves in a more advantageous situation because of industrial development and working outside agriculture. The situation of peasants was exacerbated by the destructive and resource-draining First World War, whereas rural misery was made even worse by the combination of unemployment and underdevelopment of the country. In the Second Polish Republic, the situation of the rural population did not improve even though the country made great progress at that time. Note that rural poverty varied across employee groups, with cultural and lifestyle differences, limited competences and passive attitudes playing an important role.

S-LCA Indicators as Employee Motivation Factors

There are a lot of factors affecting employee motivation in the company. Some of them are supported by law, while others result from voluntary activities of the company, and the way to some of them still have not been found. Our research dealt with one of the possibilities, the S-LCA indicators as employee motivation factors. The attention is usually paid to companies and their system of employee stimulation. This research is supported by in-depth literature review in the field of S-LCA. Our research addressed employees of one medium-sized company to find out what they think of the activities of their management in the area of stimulation of their employees. Using a factor analysis, we found seven basic motivation factors, i.e. Safety at Work, Fair Remuneration, Social Security and Benefits, Work Climate, Basic Rights and Freedoms, Corporate Image, and Equal Opportunity. In the context of social impacts of manufacturing on employees, individual employee groups are motivated to work in different ways.

Sustaianble Relationships within Organisations in an Age of Transition of Economy: Focus on Employees’ Trust in Organisations

This exploratory research aims to provide an overview of employees’ current views regarding their organisations, with a focus on evaluating their trust in their workplace. A quantitative approach was applied to a dataset collected from Japanese businesspeople. From the analysis, it was found that the respondents’ perspectives differed depending on three demographic variables: gender, education, and annual income. Descriptive analysis results indicate that males express more positivity and support for the organisational directions in the new lifestyle phase resulting from the COVID-19 impact, that more highly educated respondents are more positive than other cohorts, and that higher-income respondents are more positive than others. These findings imply that organisations need to design different communicative approaches with different employee groups if they are to establish sustainable relationships with employers and cope with the disruptive environment.

Effects of Self-Compassion Training on Work-Related Well-Being: A Systematic Review

Self-compassion, sharing some commonalities with positive psychology 2.0 approaches, is associated with better mental health outcomes in diverse populations, including workers. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there is heightened awareness of the importance of self-care for fostering mental health at work. However, evidence regarding the applications of self-compassion interventions in work-related contexts has not been systematically reviewed to date. Therefore, this systematic review aimed to synthesize and evaluate the utility of self-compassion interventions targeting work-related well-being, as well as assess the methodological quality of relevant studies. Eligible articles were identified from research databases including ProQuest, PsycINFO, Science Direct, and Google Scholar. The quality of non-randomized trials and randomized controlled trials was assessed using the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale and the Quality Assessment Table, respectively. The literature search yielded 3,387 titles from which ten studies met the inclusion criteria. All ten studies reported promising effects of self-compassion training for work-related well-being. The methodological quality of these studies was medium. All ten studies recruited workers in a caring field and were mostly conducted in Western countries. The Self-Compassion Scale or its short-form was used in almost all instances. Findings indicate that self-compassion training can improve self-compassion and other work-related well-being outcomes in working populations. However, in general, there is need for greater methodological quality in work-related self-compassion intervention studies to advance understanding regarding the applications and limitations of this technique in work contexts. Furthermore, future studies should focus on a broader range of employee groups, including non-caring professions as well as individuals working in non-Western countries.

“Tit for Tat”—The Outcomes of Coaching in Service Companies

Workplace coaching has been established as a popular managerial development tool to support employees on all hierarchical levels. In service industries, coaching is underrepresented. This is rather surprising because more than in any other industry, the employees’ attitudes and personal job satisfaction have an impact on customers’ service perceptions. Thus, taking care of the service personnel should be a top concern for service firms. This position paper therefore presents the challenges service employees are confronted with, according to their distance to the customer, and describes how coaching may help them to overcome those challenges from a conceptual point of view. Service employees may be influenced by workplace coaching, affecting not only their work performance (i.e. skill-based outcomes), but also their attitude and personality (i.e. psychological outcomes). Theoretically, this study adds on previous research, by presenting a conceptual discussion of positive outcomes of coaching for service organizations, which is supplemented by considerations about negative or unwanted effects. Service practitioners learn that coaching can be widely applied to different employee groups and gain a differentiated perspective about conceivable positive and negative outcomes.

Ostracism and nationalism in the workplace: discursive exclusionary practices between cultural and geographic neighbors

So far, management research on mechanisms of exclusion of employee groups has mainly applied constructs of racism to understanding issues of origin-based ostracism. This research has primarily focused on issues faced by employees whose heritage is markedly different from the heritage shared by the norm group in the given socio-cultural, linguistic, and geographical setting. Against this backdrop, the present study investigates how ostracism plays out when the heritages involved are similar, as exemplified by German employees in Austria. Study 1 examines the discursive production of Austrian stereotyping of Germans in the usage of different terms of reference for ‘Germans’ in Austrian discourse. A corpus analysis of online comments on newspaper sites highlights the implicit Austrian need for delineation against Germany. Study 2 analyzes Germans’ perception of Austrians’ exclusionary linguistic practices and how this impacts on their employment experience and turnover intention. A quantitative analysis of survey data from 600 German nationals employed in Austria reveals that the degree of exposure to these demarcating practices is associated with lower job satisfaction, a higher burnout level and an increase in turnover intention. This study is amongst the first to shed light on the central role of nationalism and national identities in organizational mechanisms of exclusion.

Does HRM's reality fit with those of others? Exploring and understanding HR attributions

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to contribute to the existing literature by providing insights about how employees make attributions about the reasons why management adopts HRM practices based on a case study of a company in Turkey.Design/methodology/approachThe case study was carried out through semi-structured interviews with multiple employee groups aimed at capturing a broad range of perspectives. The data were processed by way of categorical and frequency analyses, which are forms of content analysis.FindingsNon-managerial employees make similar attributions regarding recruitment and selection, training, performance as well as career development and benefits.Research limitations/implicationsAcknowledging different views regarding the changing nature of employees' attributions, qualitative longitudinal research would provide more rigorous analysis in terms of ascertaining whether there are any alterations in employees' attitudes towards HRM practices over time.Practical implicationsManagement and practitioners can draw valuable insights from the fact that when the meanings attached to HR practices by different employee groups are agreed upon, this may lead to their more enthusiastic involvement with these practices.Originality/valueThis study examines employees' attributions regarding HR practices through a case study. It provides evidence that when employees ascribe positive meanings to such practices, they are more committed to them and this may promote more favourable outcomes regarding HR efforts.