This study examined the extent to which leadership styles affect the organisational commitment of the employees at Abu Dhabi Police in the UAE. The aim was to find out whether there is a significant correlation between preferred leadership styles and organisational commitment. It sought to assess the current leadership styles and practices in order to identify patterns and trends that have a direct impact on employee commitment within Abu Dhabi Police (ADP), as leadership styles drive employee commitment which in turn leads to better organisational performance. The leadership literature has both depth and breadth. It is a highly researched topic area, which has been approached from many perspectives involving different organisational settings. Much of the leadership debate focused on leaders’ characteristics and attributes, while popular and common models, theories and styles are investigated to find out the impact of leadership effectiveness in these organisational settings. The conclusion that can be drawn from the broad and long leadership debate is that it has advanced the understanding of leadership and its associated training, as well as generating useful insights, all of which is positive, but the term ‘leadership’ remains a source of personal interpretation. Today, the leadership topic is big business. Leadership gurus/business celebrities compete to sell leadership wisdom and courses for transforming people into effective leaders. Agencies, academic courses, etc. all claim leadership expertise on how to nurture and develop leaders by providing ready-made packages, tool-kits and guidelines for forward-thinking people who aspire to be leaders. Based on the purpose of the study, the nature of the problem and the research questions, this study adopted quantitative and qualitative data collection instruments. This allows the researcher to address the multidimensional nature of leadership and employee commitment by investigating the perspectives of the key stakeholders at ADP. Interviews were conducted to obtain qualitative data in the form of words and meaning to address issues that may not have been covered by the survey. The quantitative survey allowed for statistical analysis and numerical evidence about leadership styles and their impact on employee commitment at ADP. The study findings revealed that there is a predominance of attributes of transformational leadership rather than transactional leadership at ADP. Findings showed that the leadership style is a strong driver of employee commitment. Employees are more committed if the organisation meets their expectations and needs. The findings also showed that the current levels of commitment at ADP are adequate; there is a sense of loyalty at every level. Findings from interviews with key ADP stakeholders revealed that levels of commitment are high but leaders must do more to address the particular needs of employees to secure higher performance. Interviewees stated that the ADP has a strong organisational structure which provides confidence and commitment for employees. However, in order to achieve its mission objectives, there is a need for a transparent policy committed to providing each employee with a sound working environment, complete with clear reward schemes which inspire and motivate employees to achieve a high level of performance. The findings have practical implications as they will benefit the ADP leadership, initially in understanding the drivers and challenges of employee commitment. The findings will also help formulate a future strategy to enhance employee commitment by effectively exploiting this study data. Finally, this study has expanded the existing literature and provides a platform for further research on the impact of leadership styles on employee commitment in the UAE.

The purpose of this thesis is to explore the role of theatrical interventions in developing community change. The study explores the work of one theatrical outreach department known as Encompass, with reference to the five key themes of individual and collective change, space and play, co-production, communication and catharsis. This thesis argues that the work of Encompass can be seen as successful in facilitating change for community members both individually and collectively. Furthermore, this thesis suggests that the five key themes explored are interlinking and as such are combinable components in pursuit of change. An ethnographic approach underpinned by an interpretivist paradigm was employed during this study. Data collection was completed via semi-structured interviews, participant observations, document analysis and photography. This thesis suggests that theatrical outreach departments have the potential to make real and sustained contributions to the lives of individuals and communities. Creative methods such as Cultural animation are shown to have significant impacts in bringing together diverse sets of individuals to work on shared community problems, while also improving participant confidence. The study offers insight into the consequences of such work for theatrical practitioners, while also offering a new theoretical model illuminating the potentially interdependent relationships of the key themes explored within this thesis in relation to achieving individual and collective change. This thesis adds to the existing literature on how theatrical interventions can facilitate community change. The thesis also has the potential to benefit theatrical practitioners attempting to develop their work within their local communities, and individuals contemplating participation in Encompass projects.

Government reforms have led nonprofit organisations (NPOs) to become more involved in the provision of mainstream public services in the UK and consequently they have been subject to an increasingly demanding regime of performance measurement and inspection if they wish to provide services on behalf of the state. The creation of a contract culture has put nonprofit providers in a position where they have to bid against each other to deliver pre-determined services, resulting in a very competitive operating environment. NPOs have become more professionalised and performance-driven and this new climate encourages a business-like attitude to the management of their services. Pay-for-performance schemes have become a recognised phenomenon in NPOs, despite having generated controversial discussion in the literature. The literature on incentive theories has been applied almost exclusively to private sector organisations and limited attention has been devoted to the nonprofit sector. It is argued here that one cannot simply transfer across for-profit sector ideas; one must try to establish a framework that is more suited to the logic of the NPO. The aim of this thesis is twofold. First, it investigates the use of performance-related pay (PRP) in nonprofit housing associations in England and looks at whether PRP acts as a motivator encouraging nonprofit employees to improve their work performance. Second, it inquires whether the new competitive and performance-driven environment influences the reward decisions of NPOs. This thesis examines influences on the choice of reward practices in housing associations in order to provide an alternative to agency explanations for the use of PRP in the nonprofit sector. The results not only point to the ineffectiveness of PRP schemes in housing associations but also identify the strength of institutional pressures on NPOs to conform with best practice in pay decisions.

Using a two-sector model of production with potentially different capital shares in each sector, I show that the evolution of the skill premium from 1970 to 2005 is consistent with skill-neutrality and even a mild unskill-bias of technological change for plausible values of capital shares. The main channel of adjustment to changes in labor supply is instead via the reallocation of capital. New investment occurs predominantly in the skilled sector, to the detriment of the unskilled sector of the economy. This result is shown both theoretically in a simple model and in a quantitative exercise using data on the US economy. Repeating the exercise with industry level data for the US reveals that there has indeed been skill-biased technological change in a number of industries (such as Business Activities and Health), while others have experienced skill neutral and unskill-biased technological change (e.g. Agriculture). This difference in results across industries is largely due to very different capital shares. Finally, I look at the impact of the increasing importance of information and communication technology (ICT) on the production function and the skill premium in each industry. I estimate a translog price function with skilled and unskilled labor, ICT capital and non-ICT capital as factors of production and find that most industries exhibit ICT capital-skill complementarity. For most industries, technological progress has led to an increased use of both types of capital, but the results on skill-biased technological change are as mixed as in chapter two. ICT has affected the skill premium negatively in nearly two thirds of the industries studied.

This thesis analyses the impact of globalisation on the boundary of the firm and, in turn, how outsourcing policies have shaped the reallocation of labour across sectors. The first chapter ("Outsourcing and the Rise in Services") investigates the impact of out sourcing on sectoral reallocation in the U.S. over the period 1947-2007. Roughly 40% of the growth of the service sector comes from professional and business services, an industry highly specialized in the production of intermediates and where most of the service outsourcing activity is concentrated. As a result, business services have experienced an almost fourfold increase in their forward linkage, the largest change among all industries. I find that the overall change in input-output structure of the economy accounts for 33% of the increase in service employment, and business services outsourcing contributes almost half of that amount. The second chapter ("Exporting, Coordination Complexity, and Service Outsourcing") investigates the determinants of service outsourcing, and professional and business services in particular. Drawing on the insights of a model of the boundary of the firm based on adaptation costs and diminishing return to management, I argue that an increase in coordination complexity (e.g.: more inputs in the production process) leads firms to outsource a higher share of their total costs and to focus on their core competences. Since country-specific inputs are needed to export to a particular country (e.g.: a specific advertisement campaign), I proxy coordination complexity with the number of export destination markets and I find support for the theory using an extensive dataset of French firms. Over time, firms that export to more countries increase the amount of purchased business services; the finding is very strong and robust to size and many other determinants of outsourcing proposed in the literature. The firm-level evidence also contributes to opening the black box of fixed export costs and to establishing a new causal link between globalization and structural transformation exploiting plausibly exogenous demand shifters The third chapter ("Variety Growth, Welfare Gains and the Fall of the Iron Curtain") analyses two key issues in the literature of international trade: the welfare gains from trade and the estimation of the elasticity of substitution across goods. In particular I investigate the welfare gains coming from the increase in the number of varieties in the U.K. I find that the fall of the Iron Curtain and the expansion of trade with the countries of the former Soviet contribute for roughly 10% of the total gains. China, in comparison, accounts for 5% of the gains. The methodology is an improved version of the one proposed by Broda and Weinstein (2006) and Feenstra (1994), which is more robust to the definition of goods and to the classification used.

European labour markets are increasingly divided between insiders in full-time permanent employment and outsiders in precarious work or unemployment. Using quantitative as well as qualitative methods, this thesis investigates the determinants and consequences of labour market policies that target these outsiders in three separate papers. The first paper looks at Active Labour Market Policies (ALMPs) that target the unemployed. It shows that left and right-wing parties choose different types of ALMPs depending on the policy and the welfare regime in which the party is located. These findings reconcile the conflicting theoretical expectations from the Power Resource approach and the insider-outsider theory. The second paper considers the regulation and protection of the temporary work sector. It solves the puzzle of temporary re-regulation in France, which contrasts with most other European countries that have deregulated temporary work. Permanent workers are adversely affected by the expansion of temporary work in France because of general skills and low wage coordination. The interests of temporary and permanent workers for re-regulation therefore overlap in France and left governments have an incentive to re-regulate the sector. The third paper then investigates what determines inequality between median and bottom income workers. It shows that non-inclusive economic coordination increases inequality in the absence of compensating institutions such as minimum wage regulation. The deregulation of temporary work as well as spending on employment incentives and rehabilitation also has adverse effects on inequality. Thus, policies that target outsiders have important economic effects on the rest of the workforce. Three broader contributions can be identified. First, welfare state policies may not always be in the interests of labour, so left parties may not always promote them. Second, the interests of insiders and outsiders are not necessarily at odds. Third, economic coordination may not be conducive to egalitarianism where it is not inclusive.

The organizational literature concerning status has focused on its consequences more than its antecedents; moreover, the research that has addressed status origins has drawn its evidence from traditional face-to-face organizations, featuring task-focused and/or enduring groups. The present research addresses both of these literature gaps by examining how individuals in global, distributed, electronic networks of practice allocate status in a legitimate hierarchy. Taking as its context one of the first of these organizations – the SAP Community Network – this dissertation employed the DELPHI Method, AllOurIdeas.org, and panel data to leverage a research design that kept distinct status antecedents and outcomes, and yielded five distinct contributions to knowledge. First, it identified an unambiguous, unified structure of status – providing powerful clarification against its cognate constructs. Second, it challenged the attenuation principle of Status Characteristics Theory by suggesting that additional, similar status information does not contribute less to status allocation. Third, it indicated that the factors which effect status allocation differ depending on the level of status being determined; moreover, status establishment might function differently than either status maintenance or status enhancement. Fourth, the present research revealed that to the extent that status characteristics affect status allocation, they do so through the mechanism of performance; in other words, organizational culture can downgrade ascription and engage performance during status allocation. Fifth, the present findings challenge the argument for perpetual returns to initial high status – i.e., the Mertonian Matthew Effect – but do support Merton’s Phenomenon of the 41st Chair. Managerial practice must now recognize how organizational structure and culture can influence status allocation, which has implications for the strategic use of multiple routes to status in the achievement of organizational goals. Through focusing on a new, yet prevalent organizational form, the present research significantly advanced status theory in organizations.

The growth in the global call centre industry over the last twenty years has been huge. The main motivating factor for businesses to introduce call centres as their main vehicle for handling customer contacts has been that call centres are inherently efficient. Since the mid-1980's, UK businesses have sought to establish competitive advantage by using call centres to reduce the cost of managing their customer contacts. Over the last decade or so, however, an alternative strategy has emerged based not on cost-reduction and efficiency, but on revenue generation and service quality. This new strategy places high value on customer and staff retention. This thesis is concerned with the operations management task of employee rostering. We argue that traditional models for producing rosters for call centre employees are designed to support the older efficiency-based culture, and are inappropriate for call centres adopting the more recent quality-based culture. We show how the use of methods and models drawn from conflicting management philosophies contributes to the high level of employee turnover, and inhibits the drive for service quality. Our primary contributions are to identify a set of rostering goals which reflect the interests of the employees, and to quantitatively represent these goals in a system of mathematical rostering models designed to support the revenue generation strategy. Our models are implemented using the robust Mixed Integer Programming methodology. In addition, we adapt our model to address the related problem of nurse rostering, and solve two benchmark problems to optimality. We demonstrate that our model generates rosters of a higher quality than the alternatives, at no additional cost.

This study asks: how do members of high identity demand organizations perform identity work relating to their organization membership? Using social identity theory, Kreiner, Hollensbe and Sheep (2006a) defined high identity demand vocations as imposing significant forces on members towards integration with a role. Through an inductive empirical study I respond to their call for studies taking the organization, rather than role, as the referent for identity work. Taking large professional service firms (PSF) as high identity demand organizations, this study explores: how identity work on the social identity is conducted from within multiple identity positions; how identity work responses are combined to address the challenges within multiple identity positions; how the identity work setting influences the performance of identity work; how the concurrent performance of identity work by others supports an individual’s identity work; and the types of events creating difficult identity work for PSF partners. Finally I combine these in considering the reversal of spirals of de-identification.

Organisational routines i.e. firms specific, path dependent, repeated patterns of collective behaviour are at the heart of the capabilities-based perspective of building competitive advantage. It is therefore not surprising to see a large body of scholarly work on the impact of organisational routines on performance of firms. However, in contrast to the number of studies on the impact of organisational routines, there are far fewer studies on the mechanisms by which organisations filter through alternates before adopting routines. The three essays in this dissertation contribute to our understanding of what influences organisational choices in adopting routines i.e. how to choose what to do? Building on the concepts in evolutionary economics, behavioural theory of the firm, and attention-based theory of strategic decision making, we argue that performance is not just a function of availability of resources and capabilities, but it is also guided by structural constraints that act as attention-focusing mechanism and influence choices in allocating limited resources. We propose that these mechanisms operate across macro- and micro-levels and that the observed behaviour of the macro-system is the aggregated result of the heterogeneous choices made by agents at the micro-level under these attention-focusing mechanisms. The three essays in the dissertation contribute to our understanding of how three different attention focusing mechanism namely organisational mandates, competitive pressure under constraints, and multipoint competition focus the attention of decision makers on some opportunities more than others. These attention-focusing mechanisms help decision makers to filter though alternatives and make micro-level choices to adopt or not to adopt routines that influence innovation performance at a macro-level.