New career concepts, such as the Boundaryless Career, have been discussed for decades. In this context, an increasing role for secondary employment or multiple job holding can be expected. This might include some sideline activities or dual employment arrangements as well. The relevant state of research regarding dual employment remains very limited. By means of qualitative research, the structure and dynamics of dual employment careers can be understood and conceptually captured. Quantitative analyses using the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) for the years 1992 to 2020 provide an overview of some characteristics of dual employment and sideline activities over time. Furthermore, there is potential to identify a coherent pattern of dual employment in the German labour market via sequence pattern analysis. As a result, despite an increase in the number of cases, dual employment careers do not represent a relevant alternative to a professional trajectory oriented towards a main occupation. Dual employment is also unstable over time. However, there is a small cluster that exhibits a stable dual employment pattern. However, income compensation appears to play an important role.

This study investigates the potential functions of rituals in organizational and leadership settings, demonstrating that purposefully designed group rituals can foster feelings of togetherness, joy, and energy. However, the implementation of such rituals may encounter challenges, including feelings of awkwardness, which can hinder acceptance and diminish their positive effects. While rituals have likely played an important role in human survival and development, empirical research on their role in workplace settings is still in its early stages, often limited to laboratory experiments. This study employs a combination of qualitative questionnaires and group interviews and is guided by the hypothesis that workplace rituals significantly influence organizational culture and individual well-being, with potential positive and negative ethical implications for employee experience and organizational outcomes. In this article, rituals are examined longitudinally through a four-month-long experiment involving two groups of experienced leaders in a leadership program. The study found that a simple, predefined group ritual enhanced feelings of inner peace, readiness, and togetherness, whereas higher-arousal feelings of joy and energy were associated with a self-created ritual. The success of these rituals was contingent on the involvement of a “master of the ritual” and the avoidance of perceived awkwardness in the early stages. Finally, this study suggests that the effects of ritual-like activities may be comparable to those of rituals.

Digital transformation has the potential to fundamentally change organizations, to alter working conditions, and to redefine core employee competencies. Such changes may spark novel dynamics between employee groups. In this study, we focus on engineers as a professional group that is particularly affected by these changes and examine emerging group dynamics in response to digital transformation. Drawing on a qualitative case study, we investigate how engineers construct group identities and status in relation to the increasing importance of software experts. We show that engineers experience digital transformation as an identity threat that leads to a pronounced awareness of their professional habitus and an identity (re)negotiation. If not approached carefully, digital transformation may trigger adverse group dynamics and jeopardize the overall transformation process.

There are several well-established concepts that explain decision-making. The sociology of wise practice suggests that thinking preferences like the use of intuition form a cornerstone of administrators’ virtuous practice and phronesis is a likely candidate to explain this behaviour. This study uses conceptual and theoretical resources from behavioural sciences, management science, as well as philosophy to account for individual level differences in employees’ thinking preferences in administrative professions. The analysis empirically investigates the behavioural dimension of the preference for intuition versus the preference for deliberation by examining three different intuitive markers present among individuals who nonetheless prefer to use deliberation. We explore possible explanations for the differences and similarities within our global sample of 2227 workplace respondents who conceptually represent phronetic practitioners. The results show that many phronetic practitioners prefer the intuitive marker of unconscious thought in addition to deliberation.

Luhmann’s theory of ecological communication examines how modern society addresses climate and ecological challenges through its functionally differentiated structure. Even though the functionally differentiation enables society to manage complexity, it also leads to challenges in addressing cross-cutting issues like climate and ecological concerns. This has resulted in the neglect of such problems, as no single subsystem, neither functional nor organizational systems, is equipped to address ecological concerns comprehensively. Luhmann suggests that society’s response to ecological challenges depends on the ability of these subsystems to adapt their communication processes to resonate with ecological considerations. The article highlights the importance of the reflective capacity, linked to Luhmann’s concept of observation, semantics and communication. It discusses if the Twin Transition, since Luhmann passed away, has changed the recurrent criticism about modern society’s neglect, and what it means for organizations, especially small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The article finds that important issues related to observation, reflection and semantics have changed, but the theme regarding neglect is still relevant. The article also discusses an intervention strategy based on a digital learning platform and engaged scholarship in a regional polycentric network. The article finds that it demonstrates potential regional impact on inclusion of challenged SMEs, but to achieve broader European effects, such initiatives must, however, be scaled up and tailored to the specific contexts across Europe.

Creative self-evaluations are important determinants of future creativity. Despite extensive research that identifies antecedents of individual creativity, little is known about what determines individuals’ biases in self-assessing their own creative performance. In particular, we do not know how contextual factors may influence individual creative self-evaluations. As workplaces become increasingly multilingual in the wake of globalisation, the language in which work is being performed has become one of these factors. In an experiment with working professionals (N = 86), we assessed actual creative performance using established creativity (specifically, idea generation) tasks. Participants worked on these tasks in either their native or a foreign language and were asked to self-evaluate their creative performance afterwards. Results show that creative self-evaluations generally deviate from actual performance, such that high (low) performers tend to underestimate (overestimate) their creative performance. While actual creative performance is lower when using a foreign language, the creative self-evaluation bias tends to be higher in a foreign compared to a native language setting. Further, we find tentative evidence that individuals who work in a foreign language and who are highly proficient in this language may be less biased in their creative self-evaluations. Unlike proficiency, foreign language anxiety does not appear to affect this bias.

The purpose of this paper is to explore and understand how family firms manage a crisis by applying a processual perspective addressing the different phases of a crisis, including its origin, context and consequences. Drawing on a study of six family firms, we find that the leadership of the owning family signifies crisis management in family firms. Also, family firms rely on multiple crisis management practices and make use of their relationships and networks, which support crisis management at different stages. Socioemotional wealth can be both a trigger and a consequence of crisis management procedures. This study contributes to the literature by providing a more nuanced and developed crisis management model that accounts for the peculiarities of family firms. We argue that it is of the greatest importance to consider the consequences of a crisis whose origin stems from the owning family. In particular, such crises will trigger the owning family, as their socioemotional endowment would be at risk, which can free family resources for crisis management practices.

In this paper, welfare work at Olivetti, a former well-known Italian typewriter and office machines company, will be analysed. Welfare work at Olivetti had reached its peak in the 1950s. This was relatively late in comparison to other noteworthy enlightened welfare work initiatives in the industrialized West. The heyday of welfare work in Europe and the United States occurred during the period from 1880 until 1930. From World War II onwards, the extensive Olivetti welfare work programs were embedded in a deliberate and encompassing communitarian social philosophy. Adriano Olivetti’s main objectives were twofold: to prevent worker alienation at the shopfloor level in his factories and to resolve political and social conflict in post-war Italy. This plan was to be carried out in a sustainable way by means of strengthening regional development. Within quite a short time span, the country underwent a rapid and intensive transformation from being a traditional agrarian society into one of the leading industrialized nations of Europe. A response will be provided to the question concerning to what extent Olivetti’s experiment can be considered unique in comparison to other significant enlightened welfare work experiments that took place between 1880 and 1930. Finally, the topicality of the Olivetti experiment will be considered.