Thesis (M.S. in Management)--Naval Postgraduate School, 1975. / Bibliography: l. 166-172.

Emotional labor has been defined by Hochschild (1983) as “the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display” (p. 7, 1983). Many jobs contain an emotional component that goes beyond the normal burden on feelings caused by work and thus require “emotional labor”. Hochschild (1983) distinguished between two approaches available to the emotional laborer - surface acting and deep acting. This thesis examines the relationships between employee emotional labour (Hochschild, 1983), customer perceived interaction quality and customer intention to continue the private banking service relationships. It also tests the mediating effects of customer expectations of emotional labour on the relationship between employee emotional labour and customer perceived interaction quality. Dyadic data was generated from customer-relationship manager pairs involved in private banking service relationships. Key findings demonstrate that employee deep acting relates positively with customer perceived interaction quality; however, employee surface acting does not relate negatively. At a more specific level, the greater the customer expectations of deep acting - the more positive the relationship between employee deep acting and customer perceived interaction quality and the more negative the relationship between employee surface acting and customer perceived interaction quality. The lower the customer expectations of surface acting, the more positive the relationship between employee deep acting and customer perceived interaction quality. Higher levels of customer perceived interaction quality then relate positively to the customer intention to continue the service relationship. This work helps simultaneously explore the flow of emotional labour from employees to customers and helps understand the service relationship holistically. Findings establish the importance of emotional labour and how it influences customers’ perception of their interactions. This knowledge is useful in building sustainable and fruitful service relationships for the benefit of the customers, employees and organizations.

Twenty years ago David Ulrich presented a new concept asking HR to move away from administration and routine and to become strategic. By using new technological developments (newly developed software, the internet, and the segmentation of HR services) he created the foundation for HR to become a ‘business partner’. However, contemporary HR departments still seem be dominated by administrative tasks, now executed by new IT systems. This is reinforced by the Roffey Park “Management Agenda 2014” which states that the vast majority of HR professionals view themselves as “too reactive” spending “too much time on unimportant things” (p.33). Working as a consultant in HR I am confronted with these realities and the impact of Ulrich’s model on relationships between HR and its customers. By interviewing experts and surveying line managers and employees, the evidence indicates that the relationship between HR and employees faces disturbances, as benefits from business partnering are not obvious to HR’s customers. Hence, HR is at a crossroads as a function; it can either contribute to business by using current (and future) technological tools, or increasingly lose significance within the business. This research develops an ‘in-partnership’ approach that aims to re-connect HR and business. The in-partnership approach addresses relationships and helps to overcome the segmentation in HR by entering into a dialogue between HR and business. This research therefore provides novel insights into HR by understanding the importance of the relationships with the different communities which need to benefit from Business Partnering, allowing a useful contribution to practice that values the relationships to HR customers, internally as well as externally.

The broad aim of the research presented in this thesis was to explore the process by which small firm owner-managers become employers, their early experiences as employers and the impact of these experiences on their subsequent management decisions. The research topic derived from the researcher’s interests and experience in human resource management and small business and was designed to contribute to a richer understanding of early employment in small firms, as there was a lack of published research in the field. The study used an interpretive, qualitative approach. The research design derived from an analysis of four pilot interviews, in which issues emerged that were then explored in the literature review. These issues included motivation to become an employer; the use of social capital within networks as an alternative to employment; the experiences and learning process of the owner-manager during and after the decision to become an employer; and subsequent employment policy and behaviour. The main fieldwork comprised a further fifteen semi-structured interviews with micro-business owner-managers, eight of whom had become employers and seven who had not. The analysis of both the pilot and subsequent interviews was conducted through thematic analysis that gave rise to approximately fifty themes. These were then reduced on the basis of inter-case frequency to ten key issues. A ‘thick description’ of these was presented and used as the basis for the development of a model of the process, as presented in Chapter Five. The findings highlighted the use of social capital as an alternative to initial staff employment, that once exhausted led to the hiring of first employees by members of the ‘employer’ sample, most of whom could be characterised as ‘reluctant employers’. Contrary to expectations, the first employment experience was not of high salience to the majority of these owner- managers. Instead, the later experiences of employment were perceived by the employers to be of greater significance, in particular the emergence of skilled and trustworthy employees enabling the gradual development of early formal structures in the firm. In some cases, such an employee was perceived as significantly contributing to the business and its growth potential - one who in the thesis is referred to as ‘first line manager’ These positive experiences of employment tended to be self-reinforcing, leading to further enhancement of the owner-managers’ self-concept as employers and bringing some stability and formality to employment relations practices within the firm, with the characteristics of these employees tending to become informal templates for further employment decisions. In developing the model, an understanding is advanced of the various tensions to which owner-managers were subjected in becoming employers. These included finding a balance between the use of social capital versus employment, the desire to recruit versus perceptions of the risk of needing to terminate employment, the benefits of additional human capital versus the costs and other risks, and different degrees of formality in employment practices. The implications of these insights are profound, in the light of the need to facilitate employment in small firms. They point to ways that support practices might be better tailored to meet the needs of this significantly large group of owner managers. It is suggested that through sustained engagement and mechanisms which serve to support owner-managers in the development of social and business networks, both social and economic benefits will be accrued.

The main purpose of this study is to understand the nature and maturity level of HRD activities in Libyan manufacturing companies, and to investigate how far Libya has moved along a continuum comprising traditional T&D to HRD practices. It aims to assess whether the concept of HRD can be applied to activities of these companies. This study aims in particular to deduce empirical evidence through descriptive accounts of HRD and to compare them with standard HRD models. A descriptive methodology has been adopted in this research, and multi-methods (qualitative and quantitative) are used to gather and analyse multi-sources of data that comprise observation, semi-structured interviews, questionnaires, literature, and official documents. Triangulation analysis has been employed, which is appropriate for multi-source data. The findings include: The majority of the investigated companies do not have a formal HRD system. HRD programs are still carried out on a piecemeal basis rather than through a systematic long-term policy. Findings which were common among the majority of the approached companies were: an absence of a systematic organisational training needs analysis; the use of traditional training methods; and a lack of effective procedures for T&D evaluation. All of this shows that Libya has made little progress along the continuum from T&D to HRD, and that this progress is mostly confined to large manufacturing companies. Findings revealed that in order to move to the practice of HRD in the manufacturing sector, Libya is faced with the challenge of enhancing employees' learning and development in the workplace and coping with the demand for knowledge-workers. These challenges and the various deficiencies in the HRD system are observed to have resulted from the lack of professional and intellectual HRD expertise. This has implications for the continuous development of human resources, as well as for the development of knowledge-workers. From this study, models of HRD have been constructed to simplify the complex and multiple realities associated with developing employees in organisations and to provide a framework against which a clearer understanding of the nature of HRD can be conceptualised and theorised. Therefore, this study contributes to research by mapping the extent of HRD development in the manufacturing companies in Libya and forms a basis upon which future research studies may be developed. From the conclusions of the study, various implications were generated for other researchers, management practitioners and policy makers.

In Libya today, there is a movement towards improvement in organizations and to achieve this goal the Government has introduced liberalization of the economy. It is also creating stronger ties with the Western world, now that sanctions have been lifted. There is now greater scope to allow to private enterprise. Although there has been previous research carried out, into the ways that the competitive nature of all Libyan organizations can be improved, this thesis however, is the first that compares the governance structure, management style and culture of organizations in both the Public and Private sectors of Libya and the UK and focuses on employee involvement participation (EIP). Previous studies suggest that organizational culture is significantly influenced by the national culture in which the organization is located. The influence of culture in general, and more specifically in the sub-divisions of national, organizational, and occupational culture, has been the subject of much discussion over the last few decades. However the debate on whether national culture has an impact on organizations and their human resource management practices remains unresolved. The main aim of this study is to compare two very different cultures to discover any significant differences that exist between the two countries and between organizations in the two sectors particularly with regard to EIP. Therefore this research entailed a survey of the organizational culture, and structure as well as the EIP apparent in a sample of Public and Private sector companies in Libya and the UK. The research was carried by questioning a purposive sample of managers and employees, by distributing a self-completion questionnaire and conducting interviews in these companies, to provide both quantitative and qualitative data, which could then be analysed to discover any link between national and organizational culture, corporate governance, management style, the employment relationship and the implementation of EIP. The literature reviewed for this research- generated a number of research questions and allowed hypotheses to be generated. These were then tested to investigate the differences in national and organizational culture between organizations with different organizational structures in capitalist or state-owned enterprises. Also considered were their implementation of employee involvement and participation practices (EIP), to allow workers greater participation in the decision making process. This research concludes that there are significant differences between UK and Libyan public and private sector employees with regard to the national culture in their country. However, there appears to be areas in the organizational culture of the companies sampled that indicate some level of convergence, in their use of HRM practices, management style and preferred forms of EIP. The specific conclusions drawn from this study contribute to our knowledge and understanding in a number of areas, including, national as well as organizational culture, the apparent transfer of Western management techniques and practices, and their effect on the direct or indirect nature of communication with employees. Furthermore this research contributes to our understanding of the degree of autonomy offered to employees, within different organizational cultures, which although they exist in dissimilar economies and are operating different methods of corporate governance in either publicly or privately owned enterprises, now appear to be implementing EIP practices which are converging on the Anglo-Saxon model of HRM.

Research into generational differences in the workplace is limited. Academic studies range from being robust to those which portray generational differences in more generalised terms, omitting characteristics such as age, life-stage, gender or profession. Studies into a career style, progression and career success, are likewise varied, being studied from a range of different perspectives, including gender, life-stage or age; however, to date, there has been no research conducted from a generational perspective. There has also been an acknowledgement that there have been only a few studies conducted that have a clear theoretical and empirical underpinning. With the majority being quantitative-centric; these studies do not have the rich insight into understanding the complexities surrounding a generation and / or of an individual’s career that a qualitative study would offer. Reflecting this existing gap, the aim of this study to investigate the role of generational differences in an individual, British manager’s career type, progression and perception of career success. The main study using an interpretivist methodology in the form of semi-structured interviews, investigated the careers of 42 British managers across three generations. The participants’ CVs were analysed using a documentary analysis approach, while the findings were interpreted using content analysis. The study’s first key finding is the acknowledgement that there is theoretical and empirical evidence to support the contention that a generation is a reliable means for grouping individuals. The second key finding of the study using, Verbruggen et al.’s (2008) Career Categorisation model, relates to the career types and progression are influenced by a generational grouping. This study contends that career styles and career progression are influenced by determinants such as age, life-stage, gender, profession but also by their generation. The final key finding is that the Kaleidoscope Career model provides a means to view differences towards career success from a generational perspective, but also reveals that a generation does not operate in isolation; rather, an individual’s profession, life-stage and gender are also significant. In conclusion, this thesis provides a deep and rich conceptual insight, knowledge and understanding for Human Resource practitioners and academia as to how a career is influenced when viewed through a generational lens. The first contribution of the study sets out the extent to which theoretical and empirical evidence demonstrates that a generation is a reliable means to group individual managers. The second contribution, relates to the extent to which career types and progression are influenced by a generational grouping. The final contribution extends Mainiero and Sullivan’s (2005, 2006) original Kaleidoscope Career model to more accurately depict career success when individual managers are grouped generationally, by introducing a new “glass chip” to represent the need for a ‘subjective challenge,’ which is reflective in the shift to careers becoming more protean.

This research explores the experiences of downsizing survivors from the UK and from Germany and Switzerland. It makes a unique contribution to organizational studies theory by applying the concept of sensemaking from Weick (1995) as a theoretical lens for the study of survivors’ experiences. Since this concept was never previously operationalized in this way, this research adds value to the theoretical debate about the sensemaking processes of organizational members in times of change. This work also contributes to the body of knowledge in this field by proposing a theoretical model about survivors’ sensemaking of organizational downsizing. Unlike previous research that mainly addressed causes and effects of organizational downsizing (e.g. Brockner, 1988), the present model depicts survivors’ sensemaking as an iterative process and thereby provides a more holistic view and a new dimension about how survivors respond to the situation post-downsizing. Further theoretical contributions relate to the long-term effects of downsizing on survivors. As it was found that survivors’ attitudes were still negatively affected up to 18 months post-downsizing, this study provides more evidence that the effects of downsizing are not only felt in the short term but are long-lasting. Moreover, this research revealed that repeated exposure to downsizing led to an accumulation of stress and thereby impacted survivors’ well-being over time. Thus, it contradicts several studies, mainly from North America (e.g. Chreim, 2006), which had indicated that surviving repeated waves of downsizing has a favourable effect on survivors and makes them more resilient over time. The present study also has implications for business practices with its recommendation that organizations need to have a clear concept in place to facilitate survivors’ change processes, as well as with its suggestion that organizations provide their line managers with more training opportunities with regard to how downsizing survivors should be supported.

Universities in Libya and in other North African and Middle Easter countries have experienced massive expansion in terms of quantitative growth and geographic distribution in recent years (Al-Badri, 2006; El-Hawat, 2007; Mogassbi, 1984). The labour markets in these countries, on the other hand, traditionally suffer from a shortage of skilled manpower (ILO, 2007). Thus, the main questions of this research are formulated as: In what ways could higher education (HE) skills and changing labour market (LM) needs in Libya be better aligned? The research was conducted by collecting and analysing primary and secondary sources of documented material on the case study of Libya, in particular the second city of Benghazi. The secondary data collection largely focused on the generation of continuous datasets on students and graduate numbers in Libya, a country in which the state controls such sectors as HE, but does not make data on the sectors easily available in the public domain. The empirical data collection comprised semi-structured interviews and the application of the Delphi Technique (DT) to develop future scenarios using a panel of experts. The latter activity generated a final key research question: How can the DT be adapted and applied to the understanding of the relationship between HE skills and LM needs in the context of Libya? This research focused specifically on the graduate skills and attributes of job commitment, competitiveness, desire for excellence and teamwork and problem-solving, due to factors relating to the internal and external environment. The DT has been applied effectively on this topic and has developed the analysis from primary data collection research resulting in four potential strategies for both HE and LM, as follows: 1. Survival strategy: to reduce negative effects of external threats. 2. Defensive strategy: to face threats and strengths as a support. 3. Reorientation strategy: to take advantage of opportunities to decrease weaknesses. 4. Radical strategy: to benefit from opportunities by exploiting strengths. In the light of all that has been said about the strategies for Libyan HE and Libyan LM, three kinds of scenarios - optimistic, possible and pessimistic - have been built for HE and three others for LM.

The migration of highly skilled persons is not a new phenomenon in the global economy. International labour migration has significant economic, social, political, and cultural implications in both developing and developed countries. Given this context this study explores the reasons that contribute to highly skilled persons migrating abroad, using the migration of highly skilled Tanzanians to the UK as an example. The study takes a qualitative exploratory approach that employs a subjective ontology to explore reasons that apply in Tanzania that contribute to the decision for highly skilled Tanzanians to migrate to the UK and its effect on brain circulation in Tanzania. Thematic analysis was used together with Nvivo 10 software to analyse the research findings. Data were collected through qualitative interviews that afforded opportunities to gain understanding from participants’ views, experiences and perceptions of the reasons that contribute to migration decisions. Moreover, remittances, diasporas and return migration were major migration issues perceived by participants who discussed these influences on brain circulation. By returning home, even for a short time, highly skilled Tanzanians can impart their knowledge and experience acquired abroad to ‘circulate’ or mobilise the resources and activities in Tanzania so that they can be used in the most efficient way. Lee’s (1966) theory was used to guide this study and the findings led to a modification of the theory that assisted in suggesting ways in which the Tanzanian government can develop policies that influence its highly skilled people to remain and work in the country, and its expatriates to return for brain circulation. Moreover, given the lack of previous qualitative research studies on the influence of migration of highly skilled Tanzanians on brain circulation, this paper contributes a qualitative method that is of value for future research.