Volume 40 (2021): Issue 1 (July 2021)

The Irish Academy of Management (IAM) launched the Distinguished International Scholar Series in 2020, under the leadership of IAM Chair, Dr Felicity Kelliher. This award honours the achievements of outstanding individuals from the international management education and research community, whose work has significantly impacted the field. Our inaugural Scholar is Professor Tom Kochan of MIT Sloan School of Management, who in conversation with Professor Bill Roche in October 2020 encapsulates the Academy's core principles of respectful debate in stimulating the exchange of ideas.

The promotion of practices supporting positive mental health at work is increasingly important on employers’ agendas. However, within the HRM literature there is a relative dearth of research on how employers can facilitate reintegration into the workplace or first-time employment for employees with mental health issues. Publicly funded supports are emerging as a strategy that can provide targeted supports to both workers and employers. This paper aims to investigate the effectiveness of this approach by undertaking triadic research with employers, healthcare professionals, and workers using the service in the Irish context. We make recommendations regarding the enhancement of opportunities currently available to those with a mental health difficulty to return to and remain in employment. The paper contributes to our understanding of the nature of supports required to successfully facilitate employing or re-integrating those with a mental health disability or history of mental health problems into the workplace.

This research focuses on (non-)compliance with unethical requests in the context of external recruitment specialists and their susceptibility to the ‘loyal matchmaker’ dilemma. A total of 176 Israeli recruitment specialists were presented with ethical dilemmas in which a client makes an unethical request. The focal point of ethical obligation was measured based on the Basic Human Values theory. Results indicated direct and indirect connections with the readiness to comply with unethical requests. Conformism with agency rules exhibited a positive connection with compliance. Benevolence and universalism led to decreased readiness to comply with unethical requests, although this behaviour was contingent on the particular situation. Recruitment specialists who are high in self-direction altered their readiness to comply based on the stakeholders. By highlighting the difficulties faced by recruitment specialists vis-à-vis rooting their obligations to clients and job-seeking candidates in ethical standards, the results of this study have important theoretical and practical implications.

Solo or ‘freelance’ self-employment is becoming a more popular form of self-employment in the labour market. In some jurisdictions such as the UK, this growth is being attributed to rising numbers of women – and women with children in particular - seeking the flexibility and autonomy of freelance work as a response to shortages of flexibility in wage-and-salaried employment. Yet little is known about how these trends might be occurring in Ireland and who might be represented in this small but growing cohort of workers. This research uses Labour Force Survey data to explore trends in female solo self-employment in Ireland between 2003 and 2019 and key variables are drawn upon to develop a profile of this underexplored labour market group. The analysis highlights that while growth in solo self-employment rates has been slow and numbers still relatively small, it is increasingly made up of highly educated and professional women in relatively high-paid sectors opting for flexible working arrangements.

Self-efficacy is an individual's confidence in the personal ability to complete a task under specified conditions. Game self-efficacy is the belief of game players that they would win in a business simulation game competition. To understand the composites of such belief, an instrument of 30 statements was developed and statistically tested on 227 undergraduate students at the end of a business simulation game competition. The factor analysis produced eight factors of perceived game self-efficacy, namely, innovation, experimentation, conviction, openness, focus, proactivity, conceptualisation and determination. These factors have significant research implications for goal-oriented behaviour, goal setting and performance enhancement at work and in games and competitions, and in developing simulation games.