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The objective of the study was to explore social integration of people with intellectual disabilities (ID) in the workplace and to identify the characteristics of positive workplace culture for them. An in-depth qualitative case study was conducted at two worksites to explore the process of social integration. Sources of information included company documents, on site observations, and interviews that were conducted for the following purposes: 1. to describe employees with IDs’ perceptions and needs of social integration and their experiences of social relationships in work settings; 2. to explore co-workers’ perceptions of and relationships with employees with ID; and 3. to identify what characteristics of workplace culture contributed to or detracted from social integration for people with ID. One workplace was an educational organization where four workers with ID were employed, the other a restaurant franchise where one worker with ID was employed. The participants with ID from both worksites believed people with and without disabilities should work together and felt they were included in their workplaces. The co-workers interviewed had positive opinions of fellow employees with ID. Several characteristics of workplace culture had an impact on social integration for employees with ID, including a job structure that promotes social interactions, work pace within the work setting, group or individual employment, culture of acceptance within the work setting, and a supportive managerial approach. The results of the current study have provided strategies to enhance social integration for employees with ID, and highlighted a number of potentially beneficial workplace conditions that merit additional study. Service providers can act as advocates to help create a work environment that emphasizes acceptance and respect for workers in this population. / Thesis (Master, Rehabilitation Science) -- Queen's University, 2008-02-01 15:55:38.935 / South Eastern Ontario Community-University Research Alliance in Intellectual Disabilities

This case study has been about the attitudes and values of a group of participants in a specific workplace. The aim has been to try and ascertain if the identified attitudes and values of the participants have had any influence on career development. There were 12 participants involved and at the time of this project they were either in permanent part or full time employment with ‘The Company’. ‘The Company’ is a pseudonym given to the business where the participants worked and the setting for this research project. The workplace is situated in a remote location on an industrial work site in New Zealand. Each participant engaged in the research voluntarily. They completed a questionnaire and took part in a semi-structured interview. Confidentiality and anonymity of all participants had been respected and maintained throughout the entire project. Results show that there were three principle influences that could be attributed to the ways that participants perceived the workplace and personal career development. They were workplace values, workplace training, and workplace goals. These attributes are influenced in different ways and hold divergent meaning for individual participants. The most highly rated value, as identified by participants in this project has been variation of tasks undertaken in the workplace. This was not challenged by any of the indicators used to consider opinions and values expressed by participants; education, generational groupings, career type and work streams. Seven of the twelve participants desired promotion within ‘The Company’. The ways that participants hoped to achieve promotion was often unspecified. Participants did not articulate specific planning methods. Future research is recommended such as focusing on how employees can develop career goals that fit with the goals of their workplace.

Diversity and conflict are often perceived as double-edged swords (Milliken & Martins, 1996; Jehn, 1995), in that increasing diversity and conflict may also harm implementation efficiency (i.e., speed, cost savings) and member satisfaction. The linkage between team outcomes and diversity and conflict has generally been found to be inconsistent in the literature (Williams & O Reilly, 1998; De Dreu & Weingart, 2003). Jackson, Joshi & Erhardt (2003) were the first to propose that the social context in which a team resides plays a critical role in influencing the outcomes of diversity and conflict. This thesis argues that the interactions between diversity, conflict and team innovation may be clearer if the research population consists of innovative performance driven IT project teams rather than arbitrary groups. / The research examines the effect of diversity and conflict in the tightly controlled context of IT service project teams in a Fortune 500 IT multinational in China (Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan) that operate with cross-functional, cross-national, cross-regional, cross-company (internal employee versus external client/contractor) and cross-demographic membership. The thesis investigates how the characteristics of the teams, the type of tasks the teams perform, and the research location influence the process. A three-part model hypothesizing the associations between the variables is proposed where diversity is separated into functional and demographic diversity and its effects on team outcomes in terms of innovation, efficiency and member satisfaction are investigated. Conflict is separated into two conditions; task or relationship, and is hypothesised as an intervening variable in this association while the adoption of cooperative goal and conflict management strategies by the teams is hypothesised as moderating the association. / The data presents details of a comprehensive field study into the effect of diversity and conflict on IT project teams in China. The unique nature of IT project teams in China has provided a rich testing ground which contributes to knowledge in the areas of diversity and conflict and highlights the following contributions: First, it has unravelled the crucial role of the project stage in affecting group processes and outcomes in project teams; second, it questions existing theory regarding the use of types of conflict as the mediators between diversity and outcomes; third, it extends the diversity literature by introducing new diversity variables, i.e., national, regional and company affiliations; fourth, it has tested some existing group theories on new group forms including short-term temporary, part-time membership, performance goal driven and virtual oriented IT project teams; fifth, it proposes a useful valid measurement of team performance by separating team innovation from team efficiency; sixth, it has tested some existing diversity and conflict theories in the Chinese context and lastly it has investigated the roles of cooperative goals and cooperative management styles in the conflict-outcome relationship. / Thesis (PhDBusinessandManagement)--University of South Australia, 2007.

Thesis (M.B.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 106-107).

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web. Available at http://hdl.handle.net/1947/9667. / "September 2008" Title from PDF cover (viewed on 25 September, 2009) Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at El Paso, 2009. / Title from title screen. Vita. CD-ROM. Includes bibliographical references. Also available online.

M.Tech. (Operations Management) / For any organisation to be effective and efficient in achieving its goals, its employees must maintain a shared vision of what they are striving to achieve, as well as clear aims and objectives of the organisation. Employees may be grouped into teams with which play important roles in an organisation. Companies have discovered that the introduction of teams to the production process, leads to innovative and goal oriented performance, with new products generated at a faster pace. Teams become a force of change when interaction within the group is dynamic. Similarly, effective teams may influence productivity and improve quality. In this context, a study was conducted at the Ferrosilicon Plant of Dense Media Separation (DMS) Pty Ltd located in Meyerton, South Africa, where a sink float process for the separation of mineral particles, involving suspension of dense powders in water is used. The study focuses on team structures, which are currently experiencing job dissatisfaction. It attempted to establish the problem areas that may be at the core of team ineffectiveness and offered suggestions for resolution. At the root of the study is an attempt by management to resolve job dissatisfaction by facilitating team development, establishing explicit team norms and expectations, fostering a collaborative team climate, exercising leadership skills in pursuit of team goals and encouraging open and candid communication within the production section. The study argues that if decisive action is not taken to address these issues, it would be difficult for any organisation to function and would in turn inhibit management’s control of the organisation, ultimately leading to a loss of productivity.

D.Phil. / Identity is a cognitive concept that describes “who I am”, and an important part of an individual’s identity is derived from shared social entities. However, as work and the work setting began playing prominent roles in most people’s social lives, the social identity derived from the working environment became the focus of several studies. It was, however, recognised that the locus of identification stretched beyond the organisation to other social phenomena available in the work setting. This finding encouraged a change of focus, which asserts that facets of work are sources of identification. The construct, work identity (WI), captures this extended understanding of social identity derived from work. There were also several research agendas about ways to strengthen or manipulate the relationship between employees and their work and/or workplace. Concepts such as work involvement, work commitment, work engagement, work centrality, and person-organisation fit represent this category of enquiry. As identity or identification was often mentioned in the definitions of these concepts, the concepts are perceived as WI-associated concepts. As several researchers recognised concept redundancy or concept contamination among the WI-associated concepts and between the WI-associated concepts and WI, further clarification of WI was needed. The purpose of this research project was to generate a model of the antecedents and consequences of WI in multicultural work settings. Conducting the research in a multicultural setting did not only test the theoretical ideas in a challenging context, but it contributed to a better understanding of employees from the research setting. The study used a cross-sectional field survey in order to gather responses from a convenience sample of employees from workplaces in Dubai. Data from 644 respondents was subjected to regression analysis and structural equation modelling. One characteristic of the dataset was the positively skewed distribution within some scales and significant disparity in the mean calculations of different nationality groups. Applying multiple regression to analyse and explore bivariate relationships, the data supported a positive relationship between job resources and WI. As an unexpected weak positive relationship between job demands and WI was also found, further research into the behaviour of job demands is required. A strong predictive relationship between WI and work engagement was indicated and a negative relationship between WI and turnover intentions was supported. Structural equation modelling identified a parsimonious model of WI in multicultural work settings which contained the concepts of job resources and job demands as antecedents of WI, with work engagement and turnover intentions as consequences of WI. The strength of causal relationships within this model was significantly affected by three moderator variables, namely level of education, age and, most strongly, by nationality. Therefore, although a stable covariance model was accepted, different nationality groups still processed the relationships between variables within the model in unique ways. Although WI manifested itself as a single-component structure in previous research that operationalised WI in the same way as this study, three facets of WI emerged here: work centrality, person-organisation fit, and value congruence. The different WI facets did not consistently relate to the antecedents or the consequences of WI in the same way. In addition, in response to findings of redundancy and contamination in previous studies, WI was found to be distinct from work engagement. This finding is a catalyst for future research to explore facets of WI and for researchers to revisit work engagement a consequence of WI and work engagement in multicultural work settings.

Violence in South Africa is not only prevalent in society and the home environment, but is also present in the workplace. Although substantial research has been conducted into school violence and learner-focused, school-based violence, the study set out to determine the nature and extent of workplace violence that educators face; identify the effects and consequences of workplace violence on victims; profile educators as victims of workplace violence with specific reference to gender, age and occupational level; and determine the presence and role of policies and educator participation in managing and preventing educator-targeted violence. The comparative investigation further established difference in such experiences between private and public secondary schools. In pursuit of the objectives of the study, 274 self-administered questionnaires were delivered to three public and three private secondary schools in Gauteng after both probability and non-probability sampling methods were employed. A total of 122 completed questionnaires were returned. Using descriptive and inferential data analysis, by means of the Mann-Whitney U test and the Kruskal-Wallis H test, relationships, differences and similarities were determined. Both univariate and bivariate data are displayed in multiple formats. Evident from the results and corroborating existing literature, educators in the study reported having experienced both physical and non-physical (verbal and social) violence, although the survey findings indicate the latter to be dominant. Notably, educators are victimised by various perpetrators and the opportunity to become victimised is greatest during classes, especially in public schools. Educator-targeted violence appears to be the result of multiple interrelated contextual factors that result in a fear for personal safety and far-reaching personal and professional consequences for educators. The profile of educators as victims verified and further exposed various risk factors in terms of demographics and background. Female educators, unmarried educators, public school educators, educators working for long periods of time and educators with lower educational achievements presented greater risk of victimisation. Similarly, female educators and public school educators experienced deficits in power and control. In terms of the public and private divide, significant associations indicated that educators in public schools were more likely to experience physical violence, verbal violence, bullying and vandalism by learners thus justifying their increased likelihood of feeling threatened in the workplace, considering their school at high risk of violence, and viewing workplace violence as a serious problem. Furthermore, with a higher chance of victimisation by not being heard, favouritism and overcrowding, public school respondents were more likely to report lower levels of involvement in decision-making regarding school issues, which consequently affected their sense of power and control in the workplace and increased their risk of victimisation. The majority of respondents indicated having neither been provided with material(s) related to workplace violence nor having received training with regards to the phenomenon (in particular female respondents) therefore the researcher recommends, amongst others, an increase in training and the dissemination of information regarding workplace violence against educators, both in the school setting and among the community. / Dissertation (MSW)--University of Pretoria, 2017. / Social Work and Criminology / MSW / Unrestricted