Elgar Research Agendas outline the future of research in a given area. Leading scholars are given the space to explore their subject in provocative ways, and map out the potential directions of travel. They are relevant but also visionary. This insightful Research Agenda presents the foundations of employee engagement, providing a framework for future research to serve as an evidence-based guide to practice. Offering an overview of contemporary engagement theory and research, it addresses important new directions for expanding our current understanding of the meaning, focus, development and outcomes of engagement. Chapters consider the future impact of a constantly changing landscape of work on employee engagement, addressing the growing prevalence of casual and contract forms of labour and the introduction of work automation technology. International contributors explore innovative methods for engagement research, including novel approaches in data gathering, qualitative and quantitative research methods and data analytic techniques that can be applied to answering a variety of different engagement questions. Setting out key research directions for the future of the field, this book will be essential reading for academic scholars and researchers of organizational psychology and organizational behaviour. In addition, researchers in business and industry will find new ways to think about, study, and evaluate the impact of engagement policies and practices.

The fields of organizational climate and organizational culture have co-existed for several decades with very little integration between the two. In Organizational Climate and Culture: An Introduction to Theory, Research, and Practice, Mark G. Ehrhart, Benjamin Schneider, and William H. Macey break down the barriers between these fields to encourage a broader understanding of how an organization's environment affects its functioning and performance. Building on in-depth reviews of the development of both the organizational climate and organizational culture literatures, the authors identify the key issues that researchers in each field could learn from the other and provide recommendations for the integration of the two. They also identify how practitioners can utilize the key concepts in the two literatures when conducting organizational cultural inquiries and leading change efforts. The end product is an in-depth discussion of organizational climate and culture unlike anything that has come before that provides unique insights for a broad audience of academics, practitioners, and students.

"This book is not a 'one-minute' guide for managers in search of alleged quick-fixes of service quality. Instead, it is thirty years of accumulated theory and research that can help serious students understand and analyze this complex phenomenon. The book succeeds in embedding the often overlooked customer within organization studies, using the interdisciplinary approach that scholars preach but seldom practice, and closing with an agenda for future research that others might even find worth pursuing."
--Dr. David E. Bowen, Professor of Management and Dean of Faculty and Programs, Thunderbird

"Schneider and White promise to deliver insight into the intriguing intricacies of providing excellent services. They deliver sagacity, the intelligent application of knowledge. They do this by being eclectic, disciplined, and thoughtful... Facts about service ? what it is, how it happens, what is required to make it better ? thankfully dominate this book, supported by good thinking and good methods. No one interested in service quality should miss this book. There is no other book like it."
--Rick Guzz, Ph.D., Mercer Human Resource Consulting

"The coverage is excellent. Among other things, it does a nice job of providing a rationale for why researchers and managers need to understand the perspectives of their customers."
--Susan E. Jackson, Ph.D., Rutgers University

The last three decades have seen a dramatic increase in the attention businesses devote to their quality of service. Scholars and researchers in a number of disciplines, including marketing, human resources I/O psychology, sociology, and consumer behavior, have all made substantial contributions to understanding what service is, how service and service delivery quality are experienced by customers, and the role of employees and their organizations in service delivery. Service Quality: Research Perspectives presents a comprehensive overview and analysis of the field and its research, including its growth, emerging trends, and debates.

Authors Benjamin Schneider and Susan S. White cover the diverse conceptual and empirical approaches that characterize thinking and research on service quality, especially service delivery. It introduces the concept of service and the important ways service production can differ from goods production. It also presents a history of the concept of product quality and the emergence of concern for service quality.

Key Features

- Summarizes conceptual and empirical research from the marketing perspective on the measurement of service quality and customer satisfaction

- Deals with concepts and approaches to service characteristic of operations management, especially the role of customer variability in service production

- Introduces research promoting the linkage of service climate experienced by employees to the service quality experienced by customers

- Presents several HR/OB approaches to organizational design and useful frameworks for integrating ideas from marketing and operations management into HR/OB research

- Offers six key research questions that integrate three different perspectives and provide important avenues for additional analysis and research

Personality has always been a predictor of performance. This book of original chapters is designed to fulfill a need for a contemporary treatment of human personality in work organizations. Bringing together top scholars in the field, this book provides a comprehensive study of the role of personality in organizational life. Utilizing a personality perspective, scholars review the role of personality in groups, job satisfaction, leadership, stress, motivation, organizational climate and culture, and vocational interests. In addition, the book looks at more classical topics in personality at work, including the measurement of personality, personality-performance linkages, faking, and person-organization fit. Complete in both conceptual material and reviews of the literature across the variety of domains in which personality plays a role at work, this handbook borrows the idea that personality plays out in many ways in organizations and not just a correlate of task performance. The editors believe that this book supports this belief--that personality in its many conceptualizations is a useful lens through which to shed understanding on the broadest array of contemporary topics in industrial/organizational psychology and organizational behavior. Graduate students and researchers interested in the contributions of personality to almost any topic in which they may have interest will find it valuable.

The fields of organizational climate and organizational culture have co-existed for several decades with very little integration between the two. In Organizational Climate and Culture: An Introduction to Theory, Research, and Practice, Mark G. Ehrhart, Benjamin Schneider, and William H. Macey break down the barriers between these fields to encourage a broader understanding of how an organization's environment affects its functioning and performance. Building on in-depth reviews of the development of both the organizational climate and organizational culture literatures, the authors identify the key issues that researchers in each field could learn from the other and provide recommendations for the integration of the two. They also identify how practitioners can utilize the key concepts in the two literatures when conducting organizational cultural inquiries and leading change efforts. The end product is an in-depth discussion of organizational climate and culture unlike anything that has come before that provides unique insights for a broad audience of academics, practitioners, and students.

"Staffing Organizations: Contemporary Practice and Theory," the new third edition of a classic in the field, shows how organizations of all sizes can use effective staffing procedures as a source of sustained competitive advantage. Practically, the book shows how to choose, develop, and administer effective staffing procedures, including conducting job analyses, defining and measuring job performance, identifying predictors of performance that are both valid and legally defensible, and using this information to make sound hiring decisions. All three authors are active practitioners and recommendations based on their experiences are interwoven throughout the chapters. The authors are also grounded in a scientific, conceptual perspective that informs what they say and do in the staffing area. They review cutting-edge theory and research in diverse areas of importance to the practice of staffing, and identify scientific advances as well as areas that should be informed by additional research.
Examples of such cutting-edge issues include:
*multilevel staffing models linking individual, group, and organizational levels;
*comprehensive consideration of diversity and cross-cultural challenges;
*the opportunities and challenges of the use of information technology in staffing;
*the legal, professional, and ethical challenges facing staffing practitioners;
*modern statistical approaches (e.g., structural equation modeling, item response theory, hierarchical linear modeling); and
*integrated models of staffing predictors and frameworks for understanding predictor and criterion spaces.
Each chapter contains real-world examples and illustrations, a discussion of bestpractices, practical recommendations, and directions for future research. In doing so, "Staffing Organizations: Contemporary Practice and Theory" is a modern version of a genuine classic.

Personality has always been a predictor of performance. This book of original chapters is designed to fulfill a need for a contemporary treatment of human personality in work organizations. Bringing together top scholars in the field, this book provides a comprehensive study of the role of personality in organizational life. Utilizing a personality perspective, scholars review the role of personality in groups, job satisfaction, leadership, stress, motivation, organizational climate and culture, and vocational interests. In addition, the book looks at more classical topics in personality at work, including the measurement of personality, personality-performance linkages, faking, and person-organization fit. Complete in both conceptual material and reviews of the literature across the variety of domains in which personality plays a role at work, this handbook borrows the idea that personality plays out in many ways in organizations and not just a correlate of task performance. The editors believe that this book supports this belief--that personality in its many conceptualizations is a useful lens through which to shed understanding on the broadest array of contemporary topics in industrial/organizational psychology and organizational behavior. Graduate students and researchers interested in the contributions of personality to almost any topic in which they may have interest will find it valuable.

"Staffing Organizations: Contemporary Practice and Theory," the new third edition of a classic in the field, shows how organizations of all sizes can use effective staffing procedures as a source of sustained competitive advantage. Practically, the book shows how to choose, develop, and administer effective staffing procedures, including conducting job analyses, defining and measuring job performance, identifying predictors of performance that are both valid and legally defensible, and using this information to make sound hiring decisions. All three authors are active practitioners and recommendations based on their experiences are interwoven throughout the chapters. The authors are also grounded in a scientific, conceptual perspective that informs what they say and do in the staffing area. They review cutting-edge theory and research in diverse areas of importance to the practice of staffing, and identify scientific advances as well as areas that should be informed by additional research.
Examples of such cutting-edge issues include:
*multilevel staffing models linking individual, group, and organizational levels;
*comprehensive consideration of diversity and cross-cultural challenges;
*the opportunities and challenges of the use of information technology in staffing;
*the legal, professional, and ethical challenges facing staffing practitioners;
*modern statistical approaches (e.g., structural equation modeling, item response theory, hierarchical linear modeling); and
*integrated models of staffing predictors and frameworks for understanding predictor and criterion spaces.
Each chapter contains real-world examples and illustrations, a discussion of bestpractices, practical recommendations, and directions for future research. In doing so, "Staffing Organizations: Contemporary Practice and Theory" is a modern version of a genuine classic.

The Oxford Handbook of Organizational Climate and Culture presents the breadth of topics from Industrial and Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior through the lenses of organizational climate and culture. The Handbook reveals in great detail how in both research and practice climate and culture reciprocally influence each other. The details reveal the many practices that organizations use to acquire, develop, manage, motivate, lead, and treat employees both at home and in the multinational settings that characterize contemporary organizations. Chapter authors are both expert in their fields of research and also represent current climate and culture practice in five national and international companies (3M, McDonald's, the Mayo Clinic, PepsiCo and Tata). In addition, new approaches to the collection and analysis of climate and culture data are presented as well as new thinking about organizational change from an integrated climate and couture paradigm. No other compendium integrates climate and culture thinking like this Handbook does and no other compendium presents both an up-to-date review of the theory and research on the many facets of climate and culture as well as contemporary practice. The Handbook takes a climate and culture vantage point on micro approaches to human issues at work (recruitment and hiring, training and performance management, motivation and fairness) as well as organizational processes (teams, leadership, careers, communication), and it also explicates the fact that these are lodged within firms that function in larger national and international contexts.

Die vorliegende Arbeit besch ftigt sich mit der Synthese und Charakterisierung homometallischer (insbesondere Eisen(II, III)) und heterometallischer (Eisen(II, III), Kupfer(I, II), Silber(I)) Gitterkomplexe. Derartige als funktionelle Bausteine f r die molekulare Elektronik diskutierten Molek le wurden mit vielf ltigen Methoden (SQUID-Magnetometrie, Cyclovoltammetrie, M bauer-Spektroskopie) hinsichtlich ihrer Multistabilit t untersucht. Drei neue Liganden und zw lf neue mehrkernige Komplexe werden vorgestellt, einige von diesen zeigen faszinierende Eigenschaften in der Redoxchemie und dem Spin bergangsverhalten und sind geeignete Kandidaten f r die Verwendung in z. B. QCA. Dar ber hinaus wurden erste anwendungsbezogene Experimente in Richtung funktionelle Oberfl chen mit Hilfe von STM durchgef hrt.

"This book is not a 'one-minute' guide for managers in search of alleged quick-fixes of service quality. Instead, it is thirty years of accumulated theory and research that can help serious students understand and analyze this complex phenomenon. The book succeeds in embedding the often overlooked customer within organization studies, using the interdisciplinary approach that scholars preach but seldom practice, and closing with an agenda for future research that others might even find worth pursuing."
--Dr. David E. Bowen, Professor of Management and Dean of Faculty and Programs, Thunderbird

"Schneider and White promise to deliver insight into the intriguing intricacies of providing excellent services. They deliver sagacity, the intelligent application of knowledge. They do this by being eclectic, disciplined, and thoughtful... Facts about service ? what it is, how it happens, what is required to make it better ? thankfully dominate this book, supported by good thinking and good methods. No one interested in service quality should miss this book. There is no other book like it."
--Rick Guzz, Ph.D., Mercer Human Resource Consulting

"The coverage is excellent. Among other things, it does a nice job of providing a rationale for why researchers and managers need to understand the perspectives of their customers."
--Susan E. Jackson, Ph.D., Rutgers University

The last three decades have seen a dramatic increase in the attention businesses devote to their quality of service. Scholars and researchers in a number of disciplines, including marketing, human resources I/O psychology, sociology, and consumer behavior, have all made substantial contributions to understanding what service is, how service and service delivery quality are experienced by customers, and the role of employees and their organizations in service delivery. Service Quality: Research Perspectives presents a comprehensive overview and analysis of the field and its research, including its growth, emerging trends, and debates.

Authors Benjamin Schneider and Susan S. White cover the diverse conceptual and empirical approaches that characterize thinking and research on service quality, especially service delivery. It introduces the concept of service and the important ways service production can differ from goods production. It also presents a history of the concept of product quality and the emergence of concern for service quality.

Key Features

- Summarizes conceptual and empirical research from the marketing perspective on the measurement of service quality and customer satisfaction

- Deals with concepts and approaches to service characteristic of operations management, especially the role of customer variability in service production

- Introduces research promoting the linkage of service climate experienced by employees to the service quality experienced by customers

- Presents several HR/OB approaches to organizational design and useful frameworks for integrating ideas from marketing and operations management into HR/OB research

- Offers six key research questions that integrate three different perspectives and provide important avenues for additional analysis and research