Engagement: where has all the 'power' gone?

This article examines power and engagement. Since Kahn first explained engagement as the way people invest themselves in their work roles based on influence and role status, the engagement movement has subsequently experienced particular momentum both in academic and practitioner circles. The extensive body of evidence on engagement suggests that it is linked to a range of organizational outcomes as well as work-related measures of individual wellbeing. However, this evidence draws mainly from concepts and theories grounded in psychology and therefore important issues of context are often neglected. Moreover, the way engagement has been conceptualized reflects a particular gap in relation to the concept of power and tends to gloss over the realities of organizational life. We consider this limitation of the evidence and its implications along with ways in which other approaches to researching engagement might help to create more accurate and authentic accounts of the lived reality of work engagement

What makes work meaningful - or meaningless?

Meaningful work is something we all want. The psychiatrist Viktor Frankl famously described how the innate human quest for meaning is so strong that, even in the direst circumstances, people seek out their purpose in life. More recently, researchers have shown meaningfulness to be more important to employees than any other aspect of work, including pay and rewards, opportunities for promotion, or working conditions. Meaningful work can be highly motivational, leading to improved performance, commitment, and satisfaction. But, so far, surprisingly little research has explored where and how people find their work meaningful and the role that leaders can play in this process. We interviewed 135 people working in 10 very different occupations and asked them to tell us stories about incidents or times when they found their work to be meaningful and, conversely, times when they asked themselves, “What’s the point of doing this job?” We expected to find that meaningfulness would be similar to other work-related attitudes, such as engagement or commitment, in that it would arise purely in response to situations within the work environment. However, we found that, unlike these other attitudes, meaningfulness tended to be intensely personal and individual; it was often revealed to employees as they reflected on their work and its wider contribution to society in ways that mattered to them as individuals. People tended to speak of their work as meaningful in relation to thoughts or memories of significant family members such as parents or children, bridging the gap between work and the personal realm. We also expected meaningfulness to be a relatively enduring state of mind experienced by individuals toward their work; instead, our interviewees talked of unplanned or unexpected moments during which they found their work deeply meaningful. We were anticipating that our data would show that the meaningfulness experienced by employees in relation to their work was clearly associated with actions taken by managers, such that, for example, transformational leaders would have followers who found their work meaningful, whereas transactional leaders would not. Instead, our research showed that quality of leadership received virtually no mention when people described meaningful moments at work, but poor management was the top destroyer of meaningfulness

Negotiating business and family demands within a patriarchal society – the case of women entrepreneurs in the Nepalese context

The aim of this paper is to advance our understanding of how women negotiate their business and family demands in a developing country context. The highest cited motivation for women’s pursuit of entrepreneurship has been their need to attend to these demands. Yet, empirically we know little about the negotiating actions taken by, and the business satisfaction of women in the context of both livelihood challenges and patriarchal contexts, despite several scholarly calls for contextualised accounts of women’s entrepreneurship. We explore these issues by employing a qualitative study of 90 women engaged in primarily informal entrepreneurial activities in three Nepalese regions. Our findings highlight three main and interrelated themes – negotiating consent, family resource access and gaining status. These themes allow us to contextualise the process of negotiating business and family demands by highlighting how women legitimise their business activities, respond to family/societal expectations and mobilise support for, and find satisfaction in their business. Overall, our study contributes towards accounts of business-family interface that incorporate the everyday practices of entrepreneurial activities amongst those less privileged in terms of resource access in particular socio-cultural contexts

The mismanaged soul: existential labor and the erosion of meaningful work

Meaningful work has been defined as work that is personally enriching and that makes a positive contribution. There is increasing interest in how organizations can harness the meaningfulness of work to enhance productivity and performance. We explain how organizations seek to manage the meaningfulness employees experience through strategies focused on job design, leadership, HRM and culture. Employees can respond positively to employers' strategies aimed at raising their level of experienced meaningfulness when they are felt to be authentic. However, when meaningfulness is lacking, or employees perceive that the employer is seeking to manipulate their meaningfulness for performative intent, then the response of employees can be to engage in “existential labor” strategies with the potential for harmful consequences for individuals and organizations. We develop a Model of Existential Labor, drawing out a set of propositions for future research endeavors, and outline the implications for HRM practitioners

Modulation of station rainfall over the western Pacific by the Madden-Julian oscillation

Rainfall data from 140 stations in the PACRAIN network in the tropical western Pacific are analysed to assess the signal due to the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO). During northern winter, the station rainfall difference between the wet and dry phases of the MJO is up to 6 mm day-1, compared to the climatological mean value of 12 mm day-1. The anomalies have a strong spatial coherence, with over 80% of the individual point station anomalies having the same sign as the large-scale rainfall anomaly, as determined by the mainly satellite-derived CMAP rainfall product

Atmospheric response to observed intraseasonal tropical sea surface temperature anomalies

The major tropical convective and circulation features of the intraseasonal or Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) are simulated as a passive response to observed MJO sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies in an atmospheric general circulation model (AGCM), strengthening the case for ocean-atmosphere interactions being central to MJO dynamics. However, the magnitude of the surface fluxes diagnosed from the MJO cycle in the AGCM, that would feed back onto the ocean in a coupled system, are much weaker than in observations. The phasing of the convective-dynamical model response to the MJO SST anomalies and the associated surface flux anomalies is too fast compared to observations of the (potentially) coupled system, and would act to damp the SST anomalies

'For this I was made': conflict and calling in the role of a woman priest

There has been an increasing focus on ‘work as calling’ in recent years, but relatively few empirical sociological accounts that shed light on the experience of performing calling work. Although callings have generally been referred to as positive and fulfilling to the individual and as beneficial to society, researchers have also suggested there is a ‘dark side’ to calling, and have drawn attention to the potential conflicts and tensions inherent in the pursuit of calling, especially for women. This article explores these themes through the first-hand experiences of one woman who felt called to work as a priest. Her narrative illustrates how callings draw the individual irresistibly towards a particular line of work. It also shows how calling work can be both satisfying individually and beneficial to the wider community but, at the same time, involves sacrifice, compromise and a willingness to defer personal rewards

Real-time extraction of the Madden-Julian oscillation using empirical mode decomposition and statistical forecasting with a VARMA model

A simple guide to the new technique of empirical mode decomposition (EMD) in a meteorological-climate forecasting context is presented. A single application of EMD to a time series essentially acts as a local high-pass filter. Hence, successive applications can be used to produce a bandpass filter that is highly efficient at extracting a broadband signal such as the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO). The basic EMD method is adapted to minimize end effects, such that it is suitable for use in real time. The EMD process is then used to efficiently extract the MJO signal from gridded time series of outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) data. A range of statistical models from the general class of vector autoregressive moving average (VARMA) models was then tested for their suitability in forecasting the MJO signal, as isolated by the EMD. A VARMA (5, 1) model was selected and its parameters determined by a maximum likelihood method using 17 yr of OLR data from 1980 to 1996. Forecasts were then made on the remaining independent data from 1998 to 2004. These were made in real time, as only data up to the date the forecast was made were used. The median skill of forecasts was accurate (defined as an anomaly correlation above 0.6) at lead times up to 25 days