Questionnaires are a widely used research method in human resource management (HRM), and multi‐item psychometric scales are the most widely used measures in questionnaires. These scales each have multiple items to measure a construct in a reliable and valid manner. However, using this method effectively involves complex procedures that are frequently misunderstood or unknown. Although there are existing methodological texts addressing this topic, few are exhaustive and they often omit essential practical information. The current article therefore aims to provide a detailed and comprehensive guide to the use of multi‐item psychometric scales for HRM research and practice, including their structure, development, use, administration, and data preparation.

The sources and types of social support that athletes receive during the transition out of sport have been well documented. However, less is known about how athletes perceive, mobilise, and manage supportive relationships. This study aimed therefore to gain a more comprehensive insight into the ways that social support may influence how athletes adjust to life following retirement from elite sport. The study was designed according to the principles of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. Eight former British elite athletes (four male and four female) from eight different Olympic sports were recruited using criterion-based purposive sampling strategies. Data collected using semi-structured interviews were analysed to explore subjective experiences of social support during transition. Participants' perception of feeling cared for and understood enabled support to be effective. There were variations in participants' ability to seek out and ask for support and those who found this difficult also found transition a more distressing experience. As transitions progressed, the adjustment process was closely linked to the participant's evolving sense of self. New social relationships and social roles fostered a sense of feeling supported, as well as providing opportunities to support others (e.g., other retired athletes). Providing support helped the participants to experience a sense of growth that facilitated adjustment to life after sport. The content of support was largely dependent on context; that is, perceptions of supporters were just as important, if not more so, than specific support exchanges. Stigma around asking for help was a barrier to support seeking.

Team working is becoming increasingly important in modern organizations due to its beneficial outcomes. A team's performance levels are determined by complex interactions between the attributes of its individual members, the communication and dynamics between members, the working environment, and the team's work tasks. As organizations evolve, so too does the nature of team working. During the past two decades, product development in engineering organizations has increasingly been undertaken by multidisciplinary integrated product teams. Such increasing complexity means that the nature of research methods for studying teams must also evolve. Accordingly, this paper proposes an agent-based modeling approach for simulating team working within an engineering environment, informed by research conducted in two engineering organizations. The model includes a number of variables at an individual level (competency, motivation, availability, response rate), team level (communication, shared mental models, trust), and task level (difficulty, workflow), which jointly determine team performance (quality, time to complete the task, time spent working on the task). In addition to describing the model's development, the paper also reports the results of various simulation runs that were conducted in response to realistic team working scenarios, together with its validation. Finally, the paper discusses the model's practical applications as a tool for facilitating organizational decision making with respect to optimizing team working.

Procedural justice theory (PJT) is now a widely utilised theoretical perspective in policing research that acknowledges the centrality of police ‘fairness’. Despite its widespread acceptance this paper asserts that there are conceptual limitations that emerge when applying the theory to the policing of crowd events. This paper contends that this problem with PJT is a result of specific assumptions that are highlighted by two studies using a novel experimental approach. Study 1 systematically manipulated the social categories used to describe crowd participants subjected to police coercion. The experiment demonstrates how these social categories dramatically affected participants’ perceptions of the same police action and that it was participants’ relational identification with the police, rather than a superordinate category, that mediated the association between judgements of procedural fairness and intentions to cooperate. In Study 2, using a quasi-experimental design, we then replicated and extended these findings by demonstrating how perceptions of procedural fairness are also influenced by levels of in-group identification. The paper concludes by exploring the implications of the data for reconceptualising the social psychological processes mediating these judgements and impacts of police legitimacy.