Organisational behaviour in Australia and New Zealand: introduction to the special issue. (Editorial).

Origins of the Special Issue

In an increasingly globalised world of academic knowledge-sharing, one might well ask, `why have a special issue on organisational behaviour in Australia and New Zealand?' Surely, special issues should be focused on topic or theme, rather than where the researchers happen to be located? However, it is precisely because it is an increasingly globalised world that we designed this special issue. Every time the spell check routine on our word processing package underlines `behaviour' and suggests we replace it with `behavior', it is a small but important reminder that there are many features of Australia and New Zealand that differentiate us from our North American colleagues. Small differences like this may be trivial but without some focus on what we do locally, we will not identify the important differences and capitalize on them in our research agendas. We think that it is timely for us to actively promote the research of organisational behaviour scholars from `down under' and it is our hope that one contribution of this special issue will be to provide some clues to what is unique about organisational behaviour research in Australia and New Zealand.

A second aim of this special issue is to strengthen the invisible college that links us in a network of ideas, opportunities, support and recognition. Many Australian and New Zealand organisational behaviour researchers have or are developing reputations as leading international scholars but are not recognized at home. They publish regularly in the leading international journals in our field, hold prominent positions in learned academies, such as the Academy of Management (USA) and the International Association of Applied Psychology, and are members of the editorial boards of international journals. The distances between us and the increasing demands of daily management in Australian and New Zealand universities means that we often spend our limited time on our international connections and do not give enough attention to one another. In the past, we have not recognized the full range of contributions made from our local colleagues and we do not celebrate or support one another enough.

A third aim of this special issue was create a volume of work that would inform practitioners about our research. This was the major reason for the shorter format (not exceeding 2500 words) and the request that authors consider the practical implications of their work. Senior managers in Australian and New Zealand organisations often reach out to the US or the UK to find leading thinkers and consultants to help with their organisational problems. Like academics, managers can also be excessively focused on what is happening overseas, to the extent that they simply don't see the work being carried out locally. We hope that, by raising awareness, the special issue will stimulate greater dialogue amongst Australian and New Zealand-based researchers as well as between these researchers and practitioners

Finally, the special edition aims to promote our work to our international peers, and to highlight the expertise that we have here. In recent years, an increasing number of leading organisational behaviour scholars from overseas have visited Australia and New Zealand. Often, but not always, the different universities share visitors. At a practical level, the special edition will be something we can hand to visitors so that they can appreciate the range and quality of research that is going on in a wide range of universities. It provides a partial guide to the visiting scholar who wants to know `what type of research is being done in Australia and New Zealand and who are some of the people doing it?' Hopefully, it will help promote Australian and New Zealand as places of intellectual interest.

About the Special Issue

In the call for papers, we stated that the special issue would `showcase leading-edge organisational behaviour research that is being conducted by Australian and New Zealand-based researchers'. All submissions were subjected to two blind reviews as well as being read closely by the guest editors. One conclusion from our reading of the papers that are included in this volume and the many fine papers that we were not able to include because of space limits, is that organisational behaviour research in Australia and New Zealand is currently very healthy.

We asked for, and have included, two types of contributions. The first type, which forms the bulk of articles, is from established researchers with well-developed programs of research. These researchers present an overview of their leading-edge research--essentially providing a `taster' of their work that we hope will stimulate you to find out more by contacting the authors. Scholars whose current work has not yet produced a body of published work, mostly submitted the second type of contribution. These articles make a theoretical contribution to a single issue or topic. Together the articles in this volume represent the healthy mix of up-and-coming and established scholars in Australia and New Zealand.

The feast within is a diverse one and we believe that there is something of interest for all members of the potential audience. The articles included in this volume capture the diversity in our research topics and methods and cover issues that will be of interest to academics and practitioners. The articles have practical things to say about a range of applied topics, including the management of emotions, negotiation, time discounting in decision-making, electronic search, temporary workers, safety management and work design. For the researcher, there are descriptions of research programs that employ experimental designs, text analyses, longitudinal surveys, experience sampling, and structural-interpretive methods. Theoretical developments and potential research agendas are presented in areas such as value structures, organisational sustainability, intellectual capital, rumour and gossip and executive myopia. We summarise each of the articles next, in the order that they appear. They proceed loosely from articles at the level of the individual to those with a more macro emphasis.

About the Articles

It is more satisfying to be at least a little happy most of the time at work than to be intensely happy occasionally. This is one finding from Cynthia Fisher's intriguing research, which includes real time measures of affect at work that capture how people feel while actually working on the job. Rather than asking individuals to retrospectively report on their work feelings, Fisher's research involves employees' reporting their feelings at random intervals five times per day over a two-week period. This powerful technique (experience sampling methodology) allows for a more detailed look at causes and consequences of workplace affect than existing approaches. For example, drawing on affective events theory, Fishers showed that enriched job characteristics led to positive affective reactions, whereas role conflict led people to feel more negative affect. Neither positive nor negative affects were strong predictors of job satisfaction, although positive affect did predict commitment and helping behaviour. Findings like these show that affective and motivational processes that occur within-person are potentially distinct from those that occur between-persons. Understanding moment-to-moment how affect, work characteristics, motivation, personality, and performance influence each other will move us much closer to understanding dynamic organisational behaviour.

The theme of emotion and affect, and interest in affective events theory, is continued in the article by Neal Ashkanasy. The controversial concept of emotional intelligence is also explored and shown to be useful. For example, one study showed that work teams with members of low emotional intelligence initially performed more poorly than teams with members of high emotional intelligence, but with coaching over a 9 week period were able to catch up with their more emotionally intelligent counterparts. The power of emotions is also shown in a laboratory study of facial expression. Participant reactions to leaders giving performance feedback were more heavily influenced by the leader's facial expression than by the content of the feedback itself. Having described some empirical work, Ashkanasy then gives some tips about how to manage emotions in the workplace, such as recognizing the emotional content of jobs and taking this into account when allocating people their task assignments.

Taking a more cognitive emphasis than Fisher or Ashkanasy, Shelda Debowski reports the processes by which people conduct complex electronic searches. Her experimental studies examine the quality of the strategies used, the levels of task-focused effort, and how much effort is wasted in non-productive activities. A key emphasis is on identifying what types of training or other support that might help attain mastery in this complex, but increasingly required, workplace skill. For example, one study found that training involving guided exploration (i.e. structured practice) lead to better search processes and outcomes than less structured training that allowed more trial and error, perhaps because the latter is inefficient for complex tasks. This research has significant implications for training and development of search competencies within organisations, particularly as the workplace is becoming more electronic and knowledge-focused.

Why do we so often make choices that are good for the short term but not the long term? Beryl Hesketh looks at how people perceive time, and how perceptions of time and delay affect important life and organisational decisions. For example, the observation that employers so often select people with the skills for immediate performance rather than for longer-term adaptive performance relates to the concept of `time discounting'. This refers to the way that perceived value is discounted as a result of time delay. For example, given fixed choices, most people choose a $1000 in one year rather than a $2000 bonus in two years; but choose a $2000 bonus in six years rather than a $1000 bonus in 5 years. Hesketh shows how this phenomenon of time discounting can inform our understanding of important decisions in organisations, including those related to preventative maintenance, building long-term social networks, financial investment decisions, retirement planning, selection, training and career decisions, and job design.

Moving from an emphasis on the individual to the social, Mara Olekalns investigates communication processes in negotiations between two people. This research advances existing work on negotiation by taking into account the sequencing and timing of negotiation strategies. Effective negotiators are able to blend co-operative and competitive strategies, and use different strategies depending on the stage of negotiation and the motivations of the other negotiator. Negotiation outcomes are also affected by dyad composition. Negotiators who are more similar in cultural background and social motives are more likely to maximize joint gain than dissimilar negotiators. Olekaln's research can be used for training negotiators to be more effective, such as by coaching them to strategically intervene at critical points in the negotiation or by establishing similarity at the outset of negotiations.

Continuing the emphasis on social aspects, Elizabeth George and Prithviraj Chattopadhyay challenge the adage that `like attracts like' in their work on the effect of demographic differences (e.g. age, gender, race and functional background) on employee attitudes and behaviour. They show that the idea that we like, and are most influenced by, those who are similar to us does not fully explain the complex effects of demographic differences. For example, applying their ideas to temporary workers, the most negative effects of work status dissimilarity on employee attitudes and behaviour occurred for permanent workers in temporary-worker dominated groups. Consistent with more sophisticated models of social interaction, such as social identity theory, it seems that working with lower status temporary workers erodes the prestige that permanent workers have, and this effect is worse for those in groups dominated by temporary workers. Research such as this assumes greater importance in the light of the increasingly diverse composition of many work places, and the growth in non-permanent forms of employment status.

How rumour and gossip potentially affect organisational processes such as group behaviour, power, and career progression is the topic introduced by Grant Michelson and V. Suchitra Mouly. Rumours have as their basis unsubstantiated information, whereas gossip is typically presumed to be factual. Rumours are also usually broader than gossip, with the latter taking place between friends or close colleagues. The authors argue we need a better understanding of what individual and organisational factors predict rumour and gossip. They propose, for example, that low control over events in organisations might stimulate more rumours, whereas gossip might be more likely in highly competitive work places. This article will hopefully stimulate empirical work on rumour and gossip in organisations; a topic we all know intuitively is an important one in organisational life.

Andrew Neal and Mark Griffin turn our attention to an often neglected, but critical, issue in organisational behaviour--safety in the work place. Drawing on models of work performance, these authors identify two types of safety performance: safety compliance behaviours (e.g. following rules) and participation in activities that enhance the safety of the work environment (e.g. attending safety meetings). Their longitudinal and multi-level research shows that both types of behaviour are affected by safety climate, or how much value employees perceive is placed on safety in the work place (e.g. as reflecting in management policies and leader behaviours). Neal & Griffin's work is significant as it challenges the existing emphasis on blaming individuals for accidents and instead recognizes the effect that the wider work context and management structure can have on employee safety.

Renu Burr and Antonia Girardi look at the important issue of intellectual capital, and extend existing ideas about the factors that compose intellectual capital. Standard definitions of intellectual capacity propose it is a product of the competence (knowledge, skills, etc) and commitment of people to apply their capacity. These authors additionally argue for the importance of the opportunity provided by the work to activate intellectual capacity, such as manifested in higher job control. Thus, competence and commitment will not affect outcomes unless the work design allows individuals sufficient autonomy to act. Burr & Girardi rightly propose that these developments in the understanding of intellectual capital will help to unpack the much-talked about `black box' between human resource management and firm outcomes.

In their article, Boris Kabanoff and Joseph Daly report on the use of text analysis of organisational documents (e.g. annual reports) to investigate the values that senior managers espouse about their organisations. One advantage of this unique approach is that it is less intrusive than surveys or interviews, yet can still yield quantitative data for statistical analysis. For example, Kabanoff provided initial evidence that four `ideal' types of value structures (`elite', `meritocratic', `leadership', and `collegial') could be distinguished in a diverse sample of Australian organisations. Subsequent analysis showed that change was portrayed differently in these organisation types (for example, elite organisations tended to portray change as being due to negative circumstances, whereas collegial organisations talked about change in positive and active terms). A current study involves comparing the value structures of merging organisations and examining the impact of the difference in values on the financial success or failure of the merged companies. This is where the method of text-based analysis of organisational documents really shines. Survey-based methods are almost impossible because a researcher must survey a large number of organisations prior to any merger announcement--as the authors state, `a very tall order'. We await the results of this latest study with great interest.

Sustainability is a hot topic in organisational behaviour, and it is tackled in the article by Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee. Consistent with work on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, Banerjee and colleagues have shown that individuals vary in their level of inherent concern for the environment (i.e. internal concern) and their level of concern for external issues such as effect of environmental regulation. As one would expect, internal concern was more strongly linked with positive environmental behaviour than external concern. At the organisational level, other studies in this stream have shown that organisations were most likely to integrate environmental issues into corporate strategy if top-management commitment and a long-term focus were present. The presence of regulatory factors was also important, and Banerjee ultimately suggests that volunteerism alone is not likely to be enough, and that external regulatory agencies are probably needed. Banerjee makes a compelling plea for further empirical and theoretical work on this topic.

The theme of sustainability and corporate social responsibility is continued in the article by Marc Orlitzky and Diane Swanson, who focus on the social values held by executives. Executives increasingly need to respond to a broad range of stakeholder expectations, beyond purely financial considerations. To better understand this decision-making process, Orlitzky & Swanson develop Swanson's model of value attunement, or an organisations' positive responsiveness to social issues. The contrasting organisational response is value neglect, or poor corporate social responsiveness. It is proposed that executive receptivity to values (as oppose to executive `myopia') is necessary for attunement, but not sufficient. For example, executives can use the discretion that they have in their role to direct employees to ignore or respond to a variety of social issues. The authors also highlight the central role of trust in the attunement process. A number of important practical recommendations flow from this research on executive receptivity to values, such as the importance of designing flatter organisations for facilitating attunement.

Phyllis Tharenou examines a different type of receptivity--individuals' willingness to engage in international work, either abroad or at home. Drawing on social cognitive career theory, Tharenou proposes both person and environmental factors affect receptivity to international careers, but that the relative importance of these vary according to whether the international work is abroad or at home (working abroad, for example, is likely to be particularly strongly influenced by personal factors because of the degree of personal change it involves). Environmental factors include organisational opportunities for international work, supports (e.g. human resource support) and barriers (e.g. family influence). These factors influence, and interact with, person factors, notably individuals' ability (e.g. international skills), preferences (e.g. attitudes to relocating), and personal agency (e.g. self-efficacy). This research model brings theory more into line with the trend towards more international work as a result of globalisation.

All of the articles to date have focused on the work place. Anthony Winefield takes a broader perspective in his article and looks at unemployment and underemployment. Based on an important ten-year longitudinal study, Winefield and colleagues showed that leaving school to then go on to satisfactory employment or tertiary study enhanced psychological well-being, but leaving school for poor quality employment or unemployment had no effect on well-being. These findings and their theoretical implications are being further explored in a new longitudinal study of school leavers. Winefield also reports on a study that will be close to many readers' hearts--the levels and sources of stress amongst academics and university staff. Disturbingly, the overall levels of stress amongst Australian academics were very high compared to norms. One hopes findings of this sort of research will ultimately influence government to act to address some of the sources of stress in an academic's life, which included lack of funding and resources, work overload, and poor management practice.

Finally, providing an important macro-level perspective, Stephen Frenkel tracks significant trends in workplace relations and their implications for employees, unions, and organisations. Employing a structural interpretive perspective, he first describes early studies on industrial conflict and accommodation conducted in the strike-prevalent periods of the 1970s and early 1980s. Next, in the context of increasingly globalisation and rapid technological change, Frenkel and colleagues observed greater `co-operative dependence', with workers having diminished union influence and seeking greater involvement in decision-making. Third, Frenkel describes studies in the informational economies of advanced societies, and the workplace relations issues that are pressing for knowledge workers. Changes in organised conflict and the role of unions and the growing role of international regulatory institutions are just some of the important issues tackled.

Acknowledgements

Many people have contributed to the success of this special issue. We are very grateful to Linda Camilleri, Kristie Clemow, Sussanne Nottage and June Ohlson for their administrative and professional support in preparing the special issue. We also thank the AGSM and the AJM for financially supporting this special issue. Last but definitely not least, we thank the reviewers who so willingly provided expert opinions on the many articles that were submitted.

Sharon Parker ([dagger])

Robert Wood ([dagger])

([dagger]) Australian Graduate School of Management, UNSW, Sydney, NSW 2052. Email: [e-mail] [e-mail]

Sharon Parker is an Associate Professor in Organisational Behaviour at the Australian Graduate School of Management, University of New South Wales. Her research interests include how work design affects employee proactive motivation (i.e. their role, breadth, self-efficacy, flexible role orientation) & other outcomes (e.g. strain, safety, well-being); organisational change (e.g. team working, lean production, downsizing); and women in the workplace. She has published on these topics in tier one journals such as the Journal of Applied Psychology and Academy of Management Journal, as well as in a wide range of other outlets. Sharon is the OB editor of the Australian Journal of Management, and serves on the editorial panels of Human Relations and the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology.

Robert Wood is a Professor of Organisational Behaviour at the Australian Graduate School of Management, University of New South Wales. He studies the impacts of motivation in managerial problem solving and decision-making tasks. His research publications appear in many leading international journals, including Organizational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes and the Journal of Applied Psychology. He is editor of Applied Psychology: An International Review, and a member of several editorial boards.