Search Results (721)

Background: Despite being considered a country with a larger health workforce in Africa, the South African health workforce continues to experience shortages and a maldistribution of health workers across regions and sectors. Current projections suggest that the workforce is expected to decline further, especially among doctors, nurses and midwives, in large part, due to attrition—which could compromise the delivery of primary health and maternity services. These health workforce shortages and uneven distribution threaten the sustainability and effectiveness of health services in South Africa and drives the need to investigate the factors that may be influencing career choice and change decisions among health professionals in South Africa. Methods: A qualitative exploratory study, making use of purposive sampling and semi-structured interviews, was conducted to investigate the factors influencing career choice and change decisions among health professionals in South Africa. The participants were qualified health professionals in the fields of medicine, nutrition, pharmacy, nursing, and psychology working in the private, public, and academic sectors. Data was collected until saturation was achieved and then thematically analyzed using MAXQDA 24. Results: A total of 10 participants made up of three males and seven females were interviewed. These participants worked in different employment sectors with some having dual roles in private practice, public sector, and academia. The analysis revealed three major themes that capture the nature of and factors influencing career choice and career changes occurring in South Africa. The first theme related to factors influencing career choice (including altruism, family influence, personal experiences, financial/job security, academic achievement, career guidance, and opportunity for change). The second theme focused on career change dynamics (nature of career changes and career transitions occurring in the form of specialization, switching health professions, exiting health professions, adding non-health interests, and shifting focus areas). The third theme revealed factors influencing career change. These were categorized into personal and individual factors, workplace or job-specific factors, and administrative factors. This study has contributed to understanding the career choices and career changes taking place within the health professions in South Africa. It has also revealed a need for reforms in policy and practice for the current health professionals who have no intention of changing their careers while highlighting implications for future training of health professionals. Also, addressing the challenges of poor working conditions, lack of support, unemployment and placement delays, and other administrative barriers will help mitigate some of the issues leading to health workforce shortages and inequities in the South African context. Conclusions: The strongest motivator for choosing a career in health professions is the desire to care for others, while retention of the health workforce is challenged by personal, workplace, and administrative factors. Enhancing workplace conditions and support systems, implementing policy reforms, and minimizing administrative barriers is essential for achieving universal health coverage and sustaining a resilient health workforce in South Africa. Full article

The construction sector is undergoing a transformation and has established itself as an approach with the potential to improve the efficiency, quality, and sustainability of building projects. However, their contribution to sustainability is not fully reflected in the evaluation frameworks in use today. These were largely developed within traditional construction models and tend to prioritise the environmental dimension over social and economic ones. Previous studies have highlighted that significant shortcomings exist in the way industrialised construction is represented within the main sustainability assessment frameworks, in particular regarding the benefits associated with controlling the construction process, such as optimised timelines, cost certainty, decreases in unforeseen problems, improved workplace conditions, or the optimisation of logistics. These aspects, closely linked with social and economic sustainability, are seldom assessed explicitly by existing indicators. This article proposes a new set of indicators aimed at specifically assessing how industrialised construction contributes to sustainability in building projects. The proposed indicators are designed to complement the current assessment tools and focus on capturing the advantages gained from production in controlled environments, forward planning and a skilled workforce, paying special attention to economic and social dimensions and controlling the construction process. Full article

This study examines the effect of values-based leadership on workplace engagement and explores the moderating role of sustainable social responsibility. The proposed study is based on the social learning theory, the leader–member exchange theory, and the social exchange theory, proposing a multidimensional model of values-based leadership, leadership qualities (LQ), ethical values (EV) and balance in achieving interests (BAI). The quantitative survey design was employed in the collection of data amongst 390 employees of the Ministry of Interior, Qatar. The measurement and the structural models were tested using the partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) using WarpPLS V. 7 Software. The findings show that the three dimensions of values-based leadership make important and positive contributions to engagement in the workplace. The results indicated that sustainable social responsibility had no significant moderating effect on the relationship between leadership qualities and workplace engagement, or on the relationship between achieving a balance of interests and workplace engagement. However, sustainable social responsibility significantly moderated the relationship between ethical values and workplace engagement. The study adds value to the literature on leadership and workplace engagement by separating the dimensions of values-based leadership and the contextualized enhancing role of sustainable social responsibility. Full article

Returning to work (RTW) following sickness absence due to common mental disorder (CMD) symptoms, such as anxiety, depression and stress, is increasingly recognised as a critical yet complex phase of recovery. Despite this, individuals do not always experience the process as supportive or straightforward. This study explored the factors shaping RTW by examining the perspectives of service users, employment advisors (EAs) and human resource (HR) professionals. In a qualitative study, using purposive sampling, we recruited 17 participants across the three stakeholder groups. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and analysed using thematic analysis. The findings suggest that RTW is shaped by a dynamic interplay between individual experiences, workplace relationships and organisational structures. Participants described returning to work as an ongoing and often uncertain process, influenced by shifts in confidence, expectations of support and the extent to which workplaces were able to respond flexibly to individual needs. While some accounts reflected collaborative and supportive environments, others highlighted disconnection, misalignment and unmet expectations across stakeholders. Overall, the findings point to RTW as a negotiated process, requiring alignment between employees, managers and organisational systems. The study highlights the importance of consistent, flexible and context-sensitive approaches to support sustainable RTW following CMD-related absence. Full article

Seasonal workers in the tourism sector are exposed to significant psychosocial risks, such as work overload, emotional exhaustion, and precarious employment conditions. Despite growing interest in positive organizational psychology, little is known about how organizational culture impacts perceptions and experiences of seasonal workers in Italy. This study explores the role of positive organizational culture in promoting well-being among seasonal workers in the tourism sector, examining their direct perspectives on organizational climate, work challenges, and individual and organizational resources. Eight semi-structured interviews were conducted with seasonal workers employed in the hospitality industry in Italy. Data were analyzed through an integrated mixed-method approach combining Grounded Theory methodology with quantitative lexical analysis using T-LAB software, ensuring both analytical rigor and interpretive depth. Five macro-categories emerged inductively from the data: trust and relations, coping strategies and emotions, perceived justice, teamwork, and meaning of work. These were integrated into a core category defined as flourishing at work, interpreted through the lens of Seligman’s PERMA model. These findings suggest that well-being in seasonal work is an active and relational achievement, sustained by emotional self-regulation, perceived fairness, and collective identity. The results carry direct implications for organizational policies and psychosocial risk prevention strategies in precarious work contexts. In particular, positive organizational culture and environments can act as protective factors against psychosocial risks, with direct implications for organizational policies, psychosocial risk prevention, and evidence-based workplace interventions. The specificity of the analysis method offers an original contribution by integrating qualitative and quantitative textual analysis to investigate psychosocial well-being in an under-explored population: Italian seasonal workers. Full article

Workplace inclusion and the sustainable well-being of people with disabilities represent a critical social and technological challenge. This paper presents the exploratory insights of a study aimed at identifying both interaction needs for workplace technologies and socio-organizational conditions that support inclusive and sustainable employment. The study adopts a co-creation methodology based on the Design Thinking approach through the implementation of four co-creation events with workers with disabilities and key stakeholders. The findings reveal persistent barriers at structural, cultural, and operational levels, including the lack of dedicated support roles, limited awareness of disability diversity, and the persistence of non-accessible environments, tools, and work processes. From a technological perspective, the study identifies key interaction needs for inclusive workplace design across five dimensions: usability, accessibility, robustness, accuracy, and personalization. While these requirements manifest differently across disability types, several cross-cutting needs emerge, including accessible and comprehensible information, adaptive and customizable systems, reliable assistive technologies, and inclusive organizational practices. The results conceptualize workplace inclusion as a socio-technical ecosystem in which technological innovation, organizational arrangements, and accessibility culture co-evolve. The paper contributes to research and practice by providing empirically grounded design implications for developing inclusive workplace technologies that promote autonomy, participation, and long-term well-being. Full article

Background/Objectives: This study aimed to evaluate burnout, psychological distress, and intention to quit among healthcare workers one year after the 6 February 2023 earthquakes, and to examine the relative contributions of disaster-related exposures and organizational factors using a hierarchical analytical approach. Methods: This cross-sectional study included 640 healthcare workers from a tertiary referral hospital in one of the provinces most severely affected by the earthquakes. Data were collected using validated instruments, including the Maslach Burnout Inventory, Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale, Impact of Event Scale–Revised, and Intention to Quit Scale. Hierarchical multiple linear regression analyses were performed to evaluate factors associated with burnout dimensions, psychiatric symptoms, and intention to quit. Results: Clinically significant anxiety symptoms were observed in 32.5% of participants, depressive symptoms in 55.8%, and PTSD risk in 54.1%. Low personal accomplishment was the most prevalent burnout dimension (69.1%), while high emotional exhaustion and depersonalization were observed in 43.0% and 18.9% of participants, respectively. Workplace climate variables accounted for the largest increment in explained variance across all seven models. Low job satisfaction was the strongest and most consistent factor associated with adverse outcomes, with standardized coefficients ranging from β = +0.27 to +0.61. Non-close colleague relations were independently associated with higher burnout, anxiety, depression, and intention to quit scores, as well as lower personal accomplishment. Despite the high prevalence of psychological symptoms, post-earthquake psychiatric help-seeking was reported by only 6.2% of participants. Conclusions: One year after the earthquakes, healthcare workers continued to experience a substantial psychological burden. Although disaster-related exposures were associated with several adverse outcomes, organizational factors appeared to demonstrate more consistent associations with mental health indicators. These findings highlight the potential importance of improving modifiable workplace conditions to support psychological well-being and workforce sustainability in post-disaster healthcare systems. Full article

This study investigates the relationship between toxic workplace culture and voluntary employee turnover, undermining workforce sustainability in Ghana’s construction industry. While some previous research has found a relationship between a toxic working environment and employee withdrawal habits, few studies have investigated the psychological processes between the toxic work culture and employee turnover in Global South construction companies. Based on the theories of Conservation of Resources and Social Exchange, this research examines the possible mediating factors between the toxic work culture and employee turnover: employee burnout, psychological safety, and job dissatisfaction. Structured questionnaires were used to design a quantitative cross-sectional survey, which was administered to 174 construction workers in Ghana. The data were analysed using mediation regression models based on Ordinary Least Squares (OLS). The findings show that a hostile work environment and a lack of organisational support were the two highest dimensions of work culture assessed as negatively impacting employee burnout, psychological safety, and attrition intentions. Employee burnout was the only significant predictor for voluntary employee attrition (β = 0.3628, p < 0.001), and psychological safety had a significant protective effect (β = −0.1785, p = 0.016). Mediation accounted for 67.4% of the variance in attrition outcomes. This paper shows how a negative organisational climate can undermine the stability of human resources, psychological well-being, and the social dimension of sustainability in construction companies. The results indicate that organisational support, leadership accountability and psychologically safe working environments are important for increasing employee retention and long-term organisational resilience. Full article

In a time of pandemic interruptions, work arrangements and flexible work environments are becoming more and more crucial in service firms. While this issue is central to the ethics and effectiveness of human–AI interaction, it has received limited focused attention in both research and practice. As businesses increasingly deploy AI to enhance productivity and efficiency, concerns are emerging about its potential impact on employee well-being resulting specifically in work–life conflict. This study investigates how AI implementation can simultaneously drive performance and contribute to burnout, drawing on an empirical framework. Using a quantitative research design, data will be collected from employees at a university in Kuwait actively integrating AI technologies into their workflows. Guided by the IMPACT model and grounded in the Conservation of Resources (COR) theory and the Social Cognitive Theory (SCT), this study explores how organizational investment in AI influences employees’ experiences of work–life conflict. The findings will highlight AI’s dual role as a productivity enhancer and a potential stressor within a Kuwaiti institution. The study underscores the importance of balanced digital strategies—aligning technological advancement with leadership empathy, robust support systems, and employee well-being initiatives. By contextualizing global research within Kuwait’s evolving digital landscape, this study contributes region-specific insights and practical recommendations for fostering human-centered, sustainable AI integration. Ultimately, it aims to guide organizations in designing AI policies that enhance productivity without compromising employee health, advancing the responsible and ethical management of AI in the workplace. Full article

Accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations have shifted to remote work to transform traditional office conditions and take advantage of the new arrangements. Studies confirm working remotely sustains and boosts performance and satisfaction compared to conventional office states. However, work stress remains a constant concern negatively impacting well-being, engagement, and productivity across both settings. Less explored is how workplace authenticity, shaped by authentic living, accepting external influence, and self-alienation, impacts work stress and performance. We address this research gap by studying how these authenticity dimensions predict work stress across both working-from-home and office work environments and its effect on performance. We used extensive survey data to test the hypothesis implied by these relationships. The findings indicate that work stress is negatively associated with work in both settings. Additionally, accepting external influence and self-alienation may seem to increase work stress, while authentic living reduces it across both contexts. The results of this study provide a cross-context validation rather than strong differentiation between working from home and in office. Organizations should promote authentic living and target self-alienation to attenuate work stress. This is the first study to provide empirical evidence that these dynamics hold in both remote and office work contexts. Full article

Real-time energy management for large electric vehicle (EV) clusters requires both fast aggregate flexibility estimation and executable per-vehicle dispatch. Classical LP/MILP/MPC formulations provide strong feasibility and optimality guarantees when the model is fully specified, but their online solve time increases rapidly with cluster size; learning-based methods are fast but often rely on soft constraint penalties or external feasibility repair. We propose the Physics-Constrained Mamba-3 MIMO Aggregator (PC-M3), an amortized, constraint-aware sequence model that integrates a MIMO Mamba backbone, a history-dependent differentiable projection, a sparse routing layer, and an aggregation–disaggregation consistency loop, scaling AI-EMS from a single battery to ten-thousand-vehicle clusters in one forward pass. PC-M3 assigns every EV to one channel of a multi-input multi-output (MIMO) state-space recurrence and embeds the per-vehicle state-of-charge, power and energy constraints as a differentiable in-loop projection, jointly producing the cluster-level flexibility envelope and the per-vehicle charging trajectory. A sparse Routing-Mamba mixture-of-experts layer adaptively allocates capacity to behaviourally distinct sub-populations without supervised labels, and a consistency-trained aggregation–disaggregation loop binds the predicted envelope to the executed dispatch, forming a digital-twin-style predictive EMS pipeline that couples cluster dispatch with per-vehicle SoC evolution. On a single NVIDIA A100, PC-M3 sustains 0.34 s inference for 10,000 EVs over a 24-h horizon, about 18× faster than an Informer baseline and 2.4× faster than PowerMamba. Evaluated on the open ACN-Data and ElaadNL workplace and public charging corpora and on a 10,000-vehicle NREL dsgrid-TEMPO 2030 stress test, PC-M3 reduces the normalised envelope Hausdorff distance from 9.7% (PowerMamba) to 3.4%, cuts closed-loop cluster tracking RMSE from 1.45 MW (model predictive control) to 0.82 MW, and maintains zero observed feasibility violations with respect to the specified or imputed per-vehicle polytopes on every evaluated session. The framework provides a scalable, predictive, constraint-aware AI-EMS for V2G/G2V virtual-power-plant operation of large EV fleets. Full article

Building a sustainable workplace necessitates a fundamental commitment to employee safety and psychological well-being, particularly in high-risk sectors like construction. While individual unsafe behavior is a primary cause of accidents, the psychological mechanisms linking organizational practices to safety outcomes remain underexplored from an industrial-organizational psychology perspective. This study examines the relationship between safety ritual sense (a psychological outcome of socio-affective organizational practices) and the safety behavior of construction workers, with safety psychological capital (a positive psychological resource) tested as a mediator. Data were collected via questionnaire surveys from 444 construction employees in China and analyzed using structural equation modeling. The results confirm a significant positive correlation between safety ritual sense and safety behavior. Furthermore, safety psychological capital significantly partially mediates this relationship, with its four dimensions—confidence, optimism, hope, and resilience—each playing distinct mediating roles. This research elucidates a critical psychological pathway through which ritualized organizational practices enhance safety performance. It provides empirical evidence that fostering safety rituals to cultivate employees’ psychological capital is an effective industrial-organizational psychology intervention, contributing directly to the development of safer, healthier, and more sustainable modern workplaces. Full article

Employee well-being in hospitality settings depends on how individuals shape their daily work experience under continuous service demands. This study examines whether job crafting is associated with workplace mindfulness, whether this association is statistically linked with meaningful work, and whether the strength of these relationships varies across levels of growth mindset. Data were collected from 553 frontline employees in five-star hotels in Antalya, Turkey, and analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling with bootstrapped conditional effects. The results indicate that job crafting was positively associated with workplace mindfulness, and that meaningful work accounted for part of this association. The findings also indicate that growth mindset strengthened the association between job crafting and workplace mindfulness and the indirect association through meaningful work. Rather than positioning the model as a radical theoretical departure, this study offers a contextual and mechanism-based refinement by showing how meaningful work and growth mindset jointly qualify the association between job crafting and workplace mindfulness in a highly standardized service setting. In this study, workplace mindfulness is treated as a distinct work state reflecting present-moment attentional focus, awareness, and emotional regulation during service delivery, which makes it especially relevant in frontline hospitality roles where service consistency depends on employees’ psychological presence during each guest encounter. The findings provide practical insight into how bounded work adjustments and development-oriented support may be linked with employee psychological functioning in luxury hospitality contexts. Full article

This study examines whether stricter enforcement of mandatory social insurance contributions affects corporate income tax behavior in China. In the Chinese institutional context, mandatory social insurance refers to payroll-based employer and employee contributions to five statutory programs: basic pension insurance, basic medical insurance, work-injury insurance, unemployment insurance, and maternity insurance. These programs are directly related to social sustainability because they finance old-age income security, medical protection, workplace injury compensation, unemployment support, maternity protection, and labor-market stability. Using China’s 2018 social insurance collection reform as a quasi-natural experiment, we analyze A-share listed companies from 2014 to 2024 through a difference-in-differences design based on differential exposure between private firms and state-owned enterprises. To assess the reliability of the identification strategy, we employ firm and year fixed effects, event-study analysis, placebo tests, alternative measures of tax avoidance, and propensity score matching difference-in-differences robustness checks. The findings show a tax-fee seesaw effect: private firms subject to extensive regulatory scrutiny respond to more rigorous enforcement of social insurance contributions by increasing corporate income tax avoidance. Analysis of the mechanisms shows that the Whited-Wu index of financial constraints partially explains this phenomenon. The effect is more pronounced in firms with higher labor costs and greater administrative expense intensity, indicating that the increased response is driven by labor cost exposure and organizational discretion. By contrast, the effect is weaker among firms audited by the Big Four accounting networks—Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young, and KPMG—indicating that high-quality external audits constrain aggressive tax planning. Regionally, the effect is most pronounced in eastern China, where markets, labor costs, and tax-planning services are more developed. The findings contribute to the sustainable development literature by demonstrating that reforms designed to strengthen social insurance sustainability can unintentionally weaken tax compliance if payroll contributions, tax administration, and corporate financial pressures are not coordinated. The study highlights the importance of integrated fiscal governance for achieving socially sustainable and fiscally balanced development. Full article

Background: Healthcare systems globally continue to experience persistent workforce and system-level challenges as increased workloads, lasting wellbeing impacts, and retention issues remain following the pandemic. To inform strategies and interventions to address these issues, this paper explored the workplace experiences of Victorian (Australia) frontline healthcare workers with parenting responsibilities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: A total of 39 frontline healthcare workers from a large metropolitan hospital were interviewed between October 2020 and February 2021. Reflexive thematic analysis was used to analyse transcripts. Results: Three superordinate themes and five subordinate themes were identified. Themes highlighted the significant pressure that rapid workplace changes placed on healthcare staff and leaders, affecting their physical, mental, and relational health. Support from peers and supervisors was protective, though this increased demands on supervisors themselves. While many staff reported pride in their work, some experienced reduced career satisfaction and concerns about lasting psychological impacts. Conclusions: This study identifies how workplace supports operate through communication transparency, leadership capacity, and protected peer-support space, translating to organisational priorities for the post-pandemic workforce. In the context of ongoing workforce shortages and heightened demands post-pandemic, these findings underscore the importance of strengthening leadership capacity, embedding sustainable workplace supports, and addressing the psychological needs of healthcare staff. Such system-level responses are essential for pandemic recovery, improving workforce retention and staff wellbeing in the modern healthcare environment. Full article