Despite the emerging interest in the job crafting construct, researchers know little about its dimensions and their potential benefits for organizations. In a quantitative investigation, using a self-report questionnaire among a group of 189 Portuguese nurses and nursing assistants, we analyze how job crafting can be strongly related to workers’ sense of calling and turnover intention. The results indicate that sense of calling totally mediated the negative relation between the increase in challenging job demands and turnover intention. Although traditional assumption is that a sense of calling leads workers to craft their jobs, we theorize about the potential reverse path, given that our results support the possibility that sense of calling may be triggered when workers increase their own challenging job demands. We recommend further research to provide additional insight into job crafting formation mechanism.

Authentic leadership and organizational commitment: The mediating role of positive psychological capital

Whenever individuals adapt their jobs to make them closer of their personal preferences, they are performing job crafting. This study aims to investigate if the way nurses perceive their leaders’ behaviors is related with job crafting development. To do so, a quantitative analysis was conducted among a group of 325 Portuguese nurses. Results indicate that the perception of an empowering leader was found to be strongly related with the increase of challenges in the work environment, and with the development of stronger relations with direct managers and co-workers, which are two job crafting dimensions. The perception of a directive leader was found to be positively related with the avoidance of performing hindering tasks. Strengthening relations with direct managers and co-workers was found to be particularly related to leadership perception. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

What is the purpose of our economic system? What would a more life-serving economy look like? There are many books about business and society, yet very few of them question the primacy of GDP growth, profit maximization and individual utility maximization. Even developments with a humanistic touch like stakeholder participation, corporate social responsibility or corporate philanthropy serve the same goal: to foster long-term growth and profitability. Humanism in Business questions these assumptions and investigates the possibility of creating a human-centered, value-oriented society based on humanistic principles. An international team of academics and practitioners present philosophical, spiritual, economic, psychological and organizational arguments that show how humanism can be used to understand, and possibly transform, business at three different levels: the systems level, the organizational level and the individual level. This groundbreaking book will be of interest to academics, practitioners and policymakers concerned with business ethics and the relationship between business and society.

We address the Magdalene Laundries. On the one hand this institution was constituted as a compassionate response to managing troubled young women; on the other hand it was seen as a disciplinary apparatus imposing total institutional life on its inmates. The antinomy of views about the institution is evident in the analysis we make of 116 comments by 66 commenters on an online newspaper article about the Magdalene Laundries. We analyse these comments in the context of broader concerns about contemporary approaches to the topic of organizational compassion. We argue that organizational compassion is a complex social process embedded within power relations that can be disciplinary in nature and create ambivalent rather than wholly positive outcomes.