Developmental authenticity - underlying dynamics of inner work processes.

An emerging body of research attends to grasp the concept of authenticity. Nonetheless, a view on the developmental part with its underlying facets of Inner Work processes, is rare. In this paper, we aim to take a deeper look into the dynamics of inner work processes, that define certain authenticity developmental stages. Building upon our recently proposed "4C-view" of authenticity, we approach this developmental perspective from two different angles: from a process characteristic angle and a developmental level angle. Using vignettes of authentic client personality coaching processes, we propose that the interwoven dynamic between those two aspects yields several combinations of maturity levels within the individual. Continuity as an overarching concept thus contains various developmental authenticity stages that could be identified through different markers and vary in particular contexts.

The Job Perception Inventory: considering human factors and needs in the design of human-AI work.

Introduction: Artificial intelligence (AI) is seen as a driver of change, especially in the context of business, due to its progressive development and increasing connectivity in operational practice. Although it changes businesses and organizations vastly, the impact of AI implementation on human workers with their needs, skills, and job identity is less considered in the development and implementation process. Focusing on humans, however, enables unlocking synergies as well as desirable individual and organizational outcomes. Methods: The objective of the present study is (a) to develop a survey-based inventory from the literature on work research and b) a first validation with employees encountering an AI application. The Job Perception Inventory (JOPI) functions as a work-analytical tool to support the human-centered implementation and application of intelligent technologies. It is composed of established and self-developed scales, measuring four sections of work characteristics, job identity, perception of the workplace, and the evaluation of the introduced AI. Results: Overall, the results from the first study from a series of studies presented in this article indicate a coherent survey inventory with reliable scales that can now be used for AI implementation projects. Discussion: Finally, the need and relevance of the JOPI are discussed against the background of the manufacturing industry.

New Work Poses New Challenges-The Importance of Work Design Competencies Revealed in Cluster Analysis.

The continuous transformation process in the world of work, intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic, is giving employees more scope to shape their own work. This scope can be experienced as a burden or as a resource for employees. Work design competencies (WDC) describe employees' experience of their scope for design. Our study draws on existing datasets based on two Germany-wide studies. We used hierarchical cluster analyses to examine patterns between WDC, the age of employees (range: 18-71 years), the amount of weekly work time working from home (WFH), and work ability. In total, the data of N = 1232 employees were analyzed, and 735 of them participated in Study 1. To test the validity of the clusters, we analyzed data from N = 497 employees in Study 2. In addition, a split-half validation was performed with the data from Study 1. In both studies, three clusters emerged that differed in age and work ability. The cluster with the highest mean of WDC comprised employees that were on average older and reported a higher mean of work ability. Regarding WFH, no clear patterns emerged. The results and further theoretical and practical implications are discussed. Overall, WDC appear to be relevant to work ability and, in a broader sense, to occupational health, and are related to sociodemographic factors such as age.

Does Remote Work Make People Happy? Effects of Flexibilization of Work Location and Working Hours on Happiness at Work and Affective Commitment in the German Banking Sector.

(1) Background: In view of the advancing digitalization of the German banking sector, offering remote work can be an opportunity for banks to meet changing customer and employee needs at the same time. It allows flexible consultations at changing locations and, due to the high degree of autonomy, it also increases motivation, meaningfulness, happiness at work, and commitment. (2) Methods: This study used a quasi-experimental design to investigate how remote work affects happiness at work and affective commitment among employees in a German public bank. Therefore, two groups of customer advisors were examined, who work either remotely (N = 32) or stationary (N = 110) at similar tasks. (3) Results: The group comparisons show significantly higher values overall on three of the investigated four happiness dimensions ("meaningfulness", "self-actualization", and "community professional") for employees in the remote group. Commitment also differs, as employees in the remote group show significantly stronger commitment. The quantitative results were confirmed by qualitative interviews. (4) Conclusions: By investigating the positive effects of remote working, this study shows new findings on what is likely to be a growing design form of New Work in the future. The study provides evidence that self-selected work environments and working hours offer an opportunity to make work more conducive to happiness-even in a sector that still undergoes significant shifts.

Holding Up a Democratic Facade: How 'New Work Organizations' Avoid Resistance and Litigation When Dismissing Their Managers.

New work is used as a general term to summarize professional developments in contemporary work style, structure and modus of organizations and society-this means collaborative work and flexible working hours on individual levels, and flat hierarchies and participatory decision-making on organizational levels. Contemporary corporations strive to orient toward the concept of new work to keep up with stakeholder demands, for instance in their branding strategies as an employer. However, studies on organizational practices indicate that alongside explicit values and agendas, organizations tend to slyly exert power to secure their (economic) interests. Constructive dismissal is one such instance where contractually protected employees are made to resign their positions because the work environment is altered to become increasingly unbearable. This research analyzes two case studies to explicate routine dismissal procedures at the managerial level in two internationally operating German corporations. Both corporations explicitly profile as new work environments and are structured according to democratic principles including flat hierarchies, feature institutionalized diversity management including control committees for equal opportunities, and emphasize values such as workplace dignity, employee agency, and equality. The data contain long-term participatory observation collected over a 6-month period from two managers of 5 and 8 years of experience in managerial duties. The content analysis of data reveals characteristics of everyday processes in these organizations especially in terminating managers. The findings are presented as the 'model of the silent dismissal,' containing seven types of managerial termination carried out by implicit power and symbolic conventions that circumvent subject participation and litigation in an effortless manner. After exposing the model's mechanisms, we turn to discuss its meaning for both terminated and surviving subjects against a critical theoretical framework of neoliberalism, democracy, and power.

Linking real estate data with entrepreneurial ecosystems: Coworking spaces, funding and founding activity of start-ups.

This data article describes a panel dataset that combines flexible office space market data with entrepreneurial data, such as founding and funding of ventures in 47 European cities. One adaption of new ways of working are coworking spaces. They are shared working environments that offer office space and intangible resources, such as knowledge sharing, collaboration and networking. Access to flexible office space for self-employed, start-ups, and corporates is a key resource for businesses. Covid-19 has shown that space provision is becoming more flexible and ventures increasingly use scalable space instead of long-term lease agreements for office space or than owning it. Deskmag counts 18,700 coworking spaces worldwide in the year of 2018 with 1.65 million coworkers and high future growth expectations after COVID-19 [1]. Data were collected through two sources. Data about coworking spaces were collected through a web scraper crawling for coworking spaces within a city as of December 31, 2018. Those data were manually enriched by real estate and economic variables, such as the office high prime rent and office market size. Data about the funding and founding of ventures were obtained through using the database Crunchbase, including all start-ups in a city with their type of funding (including: seed, venture capital, private equity, debt convertibles and others) and their financing rounds. The Crunchbase database lists mostly young firms, commonly called start-ups and small medium enterprises (SME), and their financing with external funding. It includes firms that have needed or might need funding in the near future, or have already got funding. Hence, it is possible to relate spatial clusters with entrepreneurial activity and analyze for example the influence of (flexible) office markets on founding activity. This dataset enables researchers and practitioners to further explore important questions regarding the nexus between the real estate industry, entrepreneurship behavior, start-ups and regional clusters. Due to the scarcity of publicly available quality flexible office space market data, the dataset detailed in this article may play a relevant role to be ready to be used by researchers and practitioners. Funding data can be used for regional analysis, growth development, or any other economic issues.

Boundarylessness and sleep quality among virtual team members - a pilot study from Germany.

BACKGROUND: In the course of globalisation and digitalisation, new ways of work are becoming increasingly prevalent. To remain competitive as an organisation, cooperation across time, place, and organisational boundaries is becoming necessary. Virtual teamwork offers these advantages, but can also be both, an opportunity and a burden, for employees. This pilot study aims to gain first insights into job demands and resources in virtual teamwork to provide a basis for further research from which appropriate health promotion and prevention measures can be derived. METHODS: In this pilot study, an online questionnaire was used to examine the relationship between boundarylessness as a job demand, psychological detachment as a personal resource, as well as perceived stress and sleep quality as health outcomes among 46 virtual team members from Germany. Data collection lasted from October 2019 to January 2020. Validated scales were used for the questionnaire, except for virtuality. Due to insufficient operationalisation to date, a virtuality scale was developed based on the current state of research. The data were analysed with ordinal logistic regression analyses and median split t-tests. RESULTS: The results indicate that perceived stress impaired sleep quality of virtual team members in this sample. In contrast, successful psychological detachment from work was positively related to sleep quality. A higher degree of virtuality coincided with higher levels of boundarylessness. Virtual team members with leadership responsibility showed higher levels of psychological detachment. CONCLUSION: The present pilot study breaks ground and provides initial insights into the relationship between virtual teamwork and employee health in the German context. Further research, particularly on job demands in virtual teamwork, is needed to derive concrete health promotion and prevention measures.

Concepts and Solutions of the Digital Teams Platform to Support Mobile Work and Virtual Teams.

New work models have been discussed for several years. Especially in the area of knowledge work, mobile and distributed work provides advantages over presence time at companies: It offers more freedom and flexibility to the employees, reduces travel time, and counteracts a major trend: the exodus from rural areas. However, to provide an optimized digital work environment for distributed teams of knowledge workers, many different aspects must be considered, including social, physical, legal, and technological aspects. In this article, we focus on the technological aspects. Nowadays, a multitude of tools and technologies exist to support the communication of distributed teams, to allow working concurrently on documents, or to support data and document exchange. However, many existing solutions only provide solutions for a specific purpose rather than a sophisticated platform that offers all of these services in an integrated manner and additionally takes care of delivering intelligent and data-driven services in a trustful and ethical way. In the research project "Digital Teams", we aim at developing such a platform as open source. In this article, we provide the basic architecture of our platform and share the main concepts and solutions we are currently implementing, such as our dashboard, data exchange concepts, or authentication and authorization mechanisms.

The development of the new assistant practitioner role in the English National Health Service: a critical realist perspective.

Adopting a critical realist perspective, this article examines the emergence of a relatively new non-professional healthcare role, the assistant practitioner (AP). The role is presented as a malleable construct cascading through and sensitive to structure-agency interaction at different levels of NHS England: the sector, organisation and department. At the core of the analysis is the permissiveness of structures established at the respective levels of the NHS, facilitating or restricting agency as the role progresses through the healthcare system. A permissive regulatory framework at the sector level is reflected in the different choices made by two case study NHS acute hospital trusts, in their engagement with the AP role. These different choices have consequences for how the AP impacts at the departmental level.