Objective: To examine the workplace challenges of lupus patients. Methods: A cross sectional study surveyed lupus patients seen at the Toronto Lupus Clinic in the last 2 years. We included questions on health, work context and psychosocial perceptions. Descriptive statistics described the sociodemographic and clinical characteristics of the sample; multivariable analysis examined factors associated with workplace activity limitations, job strain, and job accommodations. Results: 362 respondents completed the questionnaire (60% response). 49.7% were currently employed. Participants who recently left work had higher disease activity and workplace activity limitations. Employed participants had low to moderate job strain. Seventy percent of employed participants used job accommodations. Health, work context, and psychological factors were significantly associated with workplace activity limitations, job strain and job accommodations. Conclusion: Persons living with lupus are faced by different challenges at the workplace. Workplace difficulties and needs of individuals with lupus should be assessed by health professionals.

Although diversity is often thought to improve team performance by expanding the range of ideas available to the group, reported relationships between team diversity and performance have been somewhat weak (e.g., Bowers, Pharmer,&Salas, 2000; Devine&Philips, 2001; Webber&Donahue, 2001). One possible explanation for the lack of findings on team diversity is that past research has largely taken an absolute (i.e., how much diversity) rather than a relative perspective (i.e., what pattern of diversity; Tsui&O'Reilly, 1989; Tsui, Egan,&O'Reilly, 1992). Conceptually and operationally defining team diversity using faultlines - i.e., the pattern of how different types of demographic divisions either do or do not reinforce the salience of the subgroup - is one way to study diversity from a relative perspective. This thesis posits that the relative approach using faultlines may better elucidate the relationship between demography and team outcomes. In particular, this thesis posits that the structural arrangement of diversity (i.e., faultlines) among team members gives rise to relational patterns of trust and coordination, which in turn determine team performance. Results support the notion of a negative relation between faultline strength and team performance.

No description available.

With the continuing influx of teams in the workplace it is important to understand how incivility affects team success. The purpose of this study was to address this topic by investigating the effects of leader incivility towards team members on team outcomes. The team emergent states of team satisfaction, team cohesion, and team commitment were tested as mediators between team leader incivility and team performance. Additionally, leader sex was examined as a moderator to the incivility emergent states relationship. The current study used a sample of female college basketball teams to test the proposed model. Results revealed that leader incivility had a detrimental effect on team emergent states and subsequently team performance. These findings further the understanding of incivility in a team setting and its effect on team performance.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Case Western Reserve University, 2007. / Adviser: David A. Kolb. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Florida State University, 2004. / Advisor: Dr. Stephen McDowell, Florida State University, College of Communication, Dept. of Communication. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Sept. 23, 2004). Includes bibliographical references.

A challenge of our time is that workplace fatality and injury rates have remained consistent for the past 25 years (AWCBC, 2017, Table 22). According to Association of Workers Compensation Boards of Canada statistics, since 1993 approximately 1000 workers have been killed on the job every year. The human and financial costs of these failures are high, so major incident reports are produced as means to guide how industries and corporations need to move forward on education, learning and safety as a whole. Questioning what these reports actually say is a necessity in terms of adult education for safety, but there is little in the literature that shows any focus in this area. Yet these reports are important because what they tell us, or do not, guides the future. Using critical discourse and content analysis, my study explored primarily one major accident report – The Report of the BP U.S. Refineries Independent Safety Review Panel (2007) – written in response to the 2005 BP Texas City Refinery accident. I chose this as it is very comprehensive report, available publicly, and is similar to many that have been produced. Findings show that on one hand, the Baker Panel actively worked to hold BP accountable for the accident, calling out the company for poor training programs and leadership staffing, indiscriminate cost-cutting and lack of investment, as well as tolerating unrealistic production pressures. In various ways, the panel named capitalism’s and profit over safety as problematic. However, the report also perpetuates a rigid, narrow view of leadership, bases its recommendations in part on the ‘myth’ of a safety culture, does not recognise workers’ knowledge, does not appear to understand or suggest anything around the importance of informal learning and mentions little about the important concept of mentorship. Further, it maintains a technical-rational status quo, supporting, even promoting, the existence of a ‘traditional’ corporate infrastructure framework that oppresses workers and inhibits their safety. / Graduate

D.Phil. (Leadership in Performance and Change) / Orientation: This thesis presents a model of spirituality in the workplace. Spirituality in the workplace has largely been avoided or neglected in the banking sector and is therefore ill understood. It shows little theoretical development and could very well be the next competitive advantage for business. Research question: A general research question guided the study, namely: "What are the subjective experiences of spirituality of a manager in a South African retail bank and how can these assist scholars in reaching an understanding of spirituality at work?” Research aim and objectives: The aim of the study was to explore and describe the concrete experiences and views of a branch manager of a retail bank with regard to spirituality in the workplace and to develop a model of it. The key objectives of the study were: · To develop an appropriate qualitative research approach to capture and unravel the experiences and views of the bank manager; · To study the work of prominent scholars in associated study fields in order to infer abstract constructs that could be used as analytic tools to illuminate the world of the bank manager, and · To develop a model of spirituality in the workplace by applying first-order constructs, that is, the concrete experiences and viewpoints of the manager, as well as second-order constructs, that is, the abstract concepts of scholars. Motivation for the study: Knowledge of spirituality in the workplace is in its infancy in the banking sector. Interest in the topic was raised by existential questions such as: Who are you? Where are you going? Why are you going there? The fact that human beings ask these questions, seek meaning and ask about the purpose of life fascinated me. This fascination was not limited to individuals' personal lives; I wanted to know more about spirituality as it is lived and felt in the workplace where workers spend a third of their lives; I also wanted to know the value of spirituality in the workplace for organisations. This finally led to my submission of a research proposal titled "Towards developing a model for spirituality in the workplace". The model I developed for spirituality in the workplace organises information in such a way that the relationships among the various elements are clarified. This theoretical framework provides an understanding for spirituality in the workplace. Research approach: A modernist qualitative research approach was employed, since I wanted to give my research participant a voice regarding spirituality in the workplace. The interpretive-constructivist research philosophy, and more particularly the assumption that reality is constructed by individuals interacting with their social worlds, underpinned my research. The research data were collected by means of a life history and analysed using Strauss and Corbin’s grounded theory. Regarding data management and storage, I followed Bogdan and Biklen’s (2007, p. 118) advice: pledge to keep your data physically well organised; develop a plan on how to achieve this; ensure that you stick to your plan; create a back-up system; have hard copies of all the recorded data in a manual filing system to secure valuable and often irreplaceable data should your computer become infected with a virus or dysfunctional for some other reason. I also ensured that all the data, whether paper-based or electronic, were kept safe and confidential. The writing style was mainly the scientific tale, but confessional, realist and autoethnographic tales were also used. The entire research process was influenced by symbolic interactionism, that is, seeing meaning as something that arises from the interaction between people, especially when they seek understanding of the world in which they work and live. Meaning was constructed through the researcher’s questions to, and discussions and interactions with the research participant.

Magister Curationis - MCur / Workplace violence is a worldwide issue, yet it remains underreported. Incidences of workplace violence, include, physical violence, verbal abuse, bullying, as well as sexual and racial harassment. Bullying is defined as any type of repetitive abuse, in which victims suffer verbal abuse, threats, humiliation or intimidating behaviours, or behaviours, by perpetrators that interfere with the victims’ job performance and place their health and safety at risk. The prevalence of workplace bullying might be underreported due to the embarrassment that victims have to endure, or because of fear. Research has revealed that, in South Africa, in the public hospitals of Cape Town, despite the end of Apartheid, there are still subtle, but unspoken, tensions between racial groups. It can be assumed that such tensions are likely to escalate in the work environment and lead to workplace bullying. Yet, there is a lack of documented workplace bullying in Cape Town psychiatric hospitals, especially workplace bullying among nursing staff in public hospitals. This study, therefore, investigated workplace bullying at a psychiatric setting in the Western Cape. The researcher used a quantitative research approach and a cross-sectional design to determine the extent to which workplace bullying occur among nursing staff at a Psychiatric Hospital in the Western Cape. Random sampling was used to obtain 119 completed self- administered questionnaires, during 2015. The Negative Acts Questionnaire-Revised was slightly adapted; a total of fifty eight (58) questions were sub-divided into three sections. The researcher computed the Cronbach Alpha coefficient to test the reliability and internal validity of the data analysis. The Cronbach Alpha coefficient was 0.87, which was above the accepted cut off of 0.7. Therefore, the reliability and internal validity were confirmed. The reliability was also ensured through the factor analysis, which technique was applied in the data analysis. The data analysis was done with the assistance of a statistician. The study used statistical analysis, which included descriptive statistics and bivariate analysis. The bivariate analysis used descriptive statistics and consequently calculated the frequency, proportion, mean and standard deviation of individual items, in order to describe workplace bullying. To determine the association between the variables, the Kolmogorov-Smirmov test was applied, to test the normality of the two variables, before deciding on the application of either Pearson’s or Spearman’rho’s correlation. To establish the difference in means, the t-test and ANOVA was applied. EXCEL and SPSS 22 software were used as tools. The findings indicated that there was high prevalence of workplace bullying, as 67(56.3%) declared that they were bullied in their workplace, during the previous 12 months, and 44(65.7%) disclosed that they considered the acts as typical incidents of bullying in workplace. The majority of the victims, 43(64.2%) were females and 19 (28.4%) were between 30-39 years old. However, most respondents, 32(47.8%), declared that the bullying incidents were not investigated. Additionally, the researcher identified that there were two types of workplace bullying, namely, personal bullying and administrative-social exclusive bullying, based on the Principal Component Analysis. Age-group, ethnicity, length of stay in nursing career and marital status did not play a role in the exposure of nurses to personal bullying, but gender did. Similar results were found for administrative-social exclusive bullying.

department of BKB Ltd. The research aimed at addressing the team balance, the environment and culture in which the team operates and teamwork competencies of the value chain. Thus, creating a high performance value chain team will add to the success of the team, and hence the company as a whole. Research to establish the degree of teamwork within the value chain was undertaken. A survey which included a structured self-administered questionnaire was used to elicit information from all eight value chain team members (four section heads and their four supervisors), who represented the entire cross-section of the value chain team. The research revealed the following important points pertaining to the value chain team: • The team’s balance needs to be addressed; and • The culture and environment in which the team operates needs to be reviewed. Points of interest pertaining to teamwork competencies include the following: • The degree of teamwork is average; • The level of individual competencies is high; • The extent that team members are team players is average; • That team communication is below average; • A high perception of hidden agendas exists; • Dysfunctional team conflict exists; • A high level of empowerment and autonomy exists; • Team leadership - team linker is absent; • Co-operation and collaboration is below average; • Team attitude is high; • Team motivation is high; • Team strategies exist, but need more attention; • Team set goals are set; • Free-wheelers exist in the team; • Job satisfaction is above average; • Team recognition is high; and • Team synergy is average. Teamwork needs to be analyzed holistically, to ensure that the complex dynamics of teamwork is acknowledged and understood. A greater knowledge and understanding of the characteristics and measurement criteria of teamwork will equip team enthusiasts in building high performance teams, to the benefit of all role players. High performance team based organisations will add to the current and future success of the business. As the term “synergy” implies, the result is greater than the sum of the individual effects and capabilities. This emphasises why team-based organisations are fast becoming the modern trend of doing business.