David Brougham

Organizational safety climates are not solely enacted through policy documents but are operationalized in everyday interactions between leaders and employees, as well as through the implementation ...

Emerging research indicates that mātauranga Māori (Indigenous Māori knowledge and worldview) can meaningfully inform leadership practices and organisational decision-making, contributing to economic, social, and environmental outcomes. However, research investigating the potential link between organisations that integrate mātauranga Māori into their practices and employees’ perceptions of psychosocial safety climate (PSC) remains unexplored. This rich case study within an Aotearoa/New Zealand secondary school collected data from multiple sources to examine how mātauranga Māori shaped perceptions and the enactment of PSC. It found that mātauranga Māori has a reciprocal relationship with PSC and can act as a complementary framework by embedding tikanga (Māori cultural values) that enable relational trust, collective responsibility, and a holistic approach to psychological health and safety. This study’s contribution advances the PSC literature by demonstrating that Indigenous perspectives offer novel insights and cultural value in PSC development, reinforcing the importance of culturally responsive practices for employees’ well-being.

Workplace incivility may seem minor compared to bullying or harassment, but its cumulative impact is profound, eroding employee well‐being, team dynamics, and organisational productivity. Incivility reflects low‐level behaviours and actions (e.g. being rude), which are still detrimental because they contravene workplace norms around manners and respect and can be cumulative. Unlike bullying and abusive supervision, incivility is likely to be ignored because it is seen as inconsequential. Despite this, incivility has strong evidence of having detrimental consequences. A major gap in the literature is around why employees might experience incivility. Further, unlike other destructive social behaviours, incivility has a personal focus, with incivility likely to be experienced from supervisors and peers, but also to be personally instigated. The present study explores organisational‐based self‐esteem to determine whether personal disposition protects public sector employees from incivility experienced and instigated. Further, high‐performance work systems and perceived organisational support are included as moderators (including together) to better understand the role of organisational context in shaping incivility. Using a sample of New Zealand and Australian public sector employees ( n = 356), we find strong support for our hypotheses, although interaction effects typically show that only one form of organisational context is most beneficial. We discuss the implications for the sector. Points for practitioners: Public sector employees receive incivility from supervisors and peers at low levels and engage in such behaviours even less. Public sector employees are less likely to receive and engage in incivility when they have strong self‐esteem and work in a context of strong HR practices supporting staff. Combinations of effects show that high self‐esteem and high HR practices lead to the lowest levels of incivility received and engaged in.

The purpose of this study is to examine how the leadership competence of school leaders supports the implementation of psychosocial safety climate (PSC) within an educational workplace. While recent studies have considered how various leadership styles influence PSC, the processes through which school leaders at different levels enact and develop PSC in practice continue to receive limited attention. This study addresses this gap through a qualitative case study at a school in Aotearoa, New Zealand, which employed a sequential data collection process comprising 26 interviews and three focus groups. This investigation found that exemplary leadership, overcoming complexity, and multiskilled leadership are pivotal competencies that enable PSC implementation within a school setting. More broadly, we discuss how these key leadership competencies facilitate the development of policies, practices, and procedures that promote teachers’ psychological health and the four domains of the PSC framework. Finally, we propose a Leader Competence–PSC Framework as a practical tool for investigating and evaluating school leader competence across specific PSC domains.

Our paper challenges current understanding of the importance of relational leadership by demonstrating how the relational energy of leaders influences employee job satisfaction, career satisfaction, and OCBs across three countries. Our overall sample was n = 1277 and comprised employees from New Zealand ( n = 427), Australia ( n = 401), and the United States ( n = 449). We found that leaders' relational energy across three countries (the United States, New Zealand, and Australia) was positively related to followers' work‐life balance, job and career satisfaction, and OCBs. Overall, the moderated mediation model highlighted that the work‐life balance of employees mediated the relationship between their outcomes and their leaders' relational energy at least partially. Ultimately, we suggest that when leaders create positive relationships with followers by engaging in emotionally energetic and uplifting interactions, positive outcomes for employee wellbeing ensue and we provide empirical evidence of this relationship.

Following Covid‐19, quiet quitting has attracted significant media attention. This study uses organizational citizenship behaviours to contextualise quiet quitting and examines its antecedents using two New Zealand samples: 791 employees and 228 managers. Drawing on the organizational citizenship behavior literature, we find empirical support for quiet quitting across both individual and organisational dimensions. We also develop and validate a new measure of re‐evaluating work post Covid‐19, which is strongly associated with quiet quitting. Most antecedents show significant direct relationships in the expected direction, with regression results indicating consistent variation across samples and dimensions. Gender moderation analyses reveal strong effects for organisationally directed quiet quitting, although mixed patterns emerge across specific antecedents for men and women. The findings suggest organisations should prioritise meaningful work and adequate pay to reduce quiet quitting, and strengthen organisational identity and supportive cultures, as quiet quitting is more prevalent toward organisations than co‐workers.

This paper examines workplace bullying in the hospitality sector – an industry paradoxically defined by welcoming others – through a mixed-method approach integrating large-scale quantitative analysis with an in-depth qualitative case study. Study 1 draws on survey data from 2,302 hospitality employees in Aotearoa, New Zealand, to identify the prevalence, patterns, and perpetrators of bullying, and employees’ confidence in employer responses. Over half (56%) reported experiencing or witnessing bullying, with women and supervisors most affected. Study 2 explores a Māori hospitality business guided by manaakitanga (care), whanaungatanga (relationships), and tika (fairness), illustrating how Māori values can counter bullying behaviours. Together, the studies reveal the gap between hospitality’s ideals and workplace realities, proposing Māori-informed approaches as a pathway towards more respectful, inclusive, and restorative organisational environments. The paper contributes to management and hospitality scholarship by demonstrating how Indigenous relational ethics can operationalise organisational care as an antidote to workplace harm.

Job insecurity is detrimental to employee wellbeing. However, we understand little about how unforeseen external shocks, such as Covid‐19, might shape these perceptions. We explore how job changes during the Covid‐19 lockdown notification period impacted New Zealand employees’ wellbeing (anxiety, depression, life satisfaction, happiness), hypothesising that these changes heightened job insecurity, leading to poorer wellbeing, using Conservation of Resources (COR) theory. Using data from 628 employees, we explore differences in outcomes between pre‐ and post‐lockdown notification respondents and find non‐significant differences in wellbeing and job insecurity, but significant increases in Covid‐19 job changes. We then used a follow‐up survey on N = 323 employees and compared relationships one month later into lockdown using change‐over‐time analysis. Here, we find relatively stable wellbeing with only life satisfaction dropping significantly, with Covid‐19 job changes increasing significantly. Structural equation modelling shows that Covid‐19 job changes influence job insecurity, which, in turn, influences wellbeing, and this holds for both data sets, including the change‐over‐time data. Using COR Principles, we discuss that in such uncontrollable and unforeseeable external events, employees adopt a defensive mode, acknowledging job changes due to Covid‐19 but resisting job insecurity perceptions.

Purpose: The world of work is changing rapidly as a result of technology, with more workers being impacted by automation, the gig economy and temporary work contracts. This study focusses on how employees perceive their disruption knowledge and how this perception impacts their career planning, career satisfaction and training behaviors.Design/methodology/approach: The authors use data from 1,516 employees across a broad range of industries and professions from the United States (n = 505), New Zealand (n = 505) and Australia (n = 506).Findings: The authors find that an employee's knowledge and research into automation positively influence how employees plan their careers, their career satisfaction and their training behaviors. While career planning is positively related to career satisfaction and training behavior, career satisfaction is negatively related to training behaviors. The authors test mediation effects and find consistently significant indirect effects, and these findings are all largely replicated across the three countries.Originality/value: This study highlights the importance of understanding the processes that employees go through when thinking about disruption knowledge, their careers and the impact on their training behaviors.