Many of today's healthcare personnel find themselves in a double-bind. The question is how to remain connected, caring and compassionate with patients, while mitigating the impact of chronic workplace stress? Mindfulness is emerging as a means to address this dilemma; it has the potential to both reduce workplace stress and boost employee resilience, while enhancing the patient experience. This article describes the development of a unique collaboration between local hospitals, primary care teams and a university, aimed at bringing mindfulness to life in healthcare. This is a conventional story of program development and evaluation, as well as an unconventional story of personal discovery, community-building, and organizational transformation. Each section of the paper highlights a critical success factor that we have uncovered in our journey, and poses a series of questions for contemplation. This paper aims to fill a gap in the literature by describing the key ingredients for developing and sustaining collaborations aimed at integrating mindfulness into the healthcare system.

W hile contingency planning may provide a perspective for anticipating critical incidents, supply chain managers must develop competencies to address the long-term disruptions that stem from both natural and man-made disasters. The broad-reaching nature of disasters brings public and private entities together and often requires collaboration to revitalize disrupted supply chains. Leveraging supply chain governance logic through the dual lenses of resource management and competing values, a research framework is introduced to address the nature of public-private short-term collaboration and its influence on supply chain resilience. The largely unstudied concept of short-term collaboration is at the heart of a model focusing on the alignment and adjustment of potentially disparate organizational values (public/private) to establish collective responsiveness while facilitating the fulfillment of mutual goals for a single event and/or discrete repeat events. We offer research propositions pertaining to the model and conclude with a discussion of managerial implications and the dire need for future research.

Personal stress is a prevalent problem in a connected world. For salespeople, demands of a connected workplace have largely eliminated boundaries between personal and work life, allowing stress from personal issues to spill over into their work. Thus, problems of health, relationships, and finances are no longer "left at home" for salespeople. Rather, a less central workplace model (e.g., remote workplaces and mobile platforms) and 24/7 work expectations expand the workplace, which comingles personal and work demands. Utilizing a sample of 331 salespeople, we study personal stressors that cross boundaries into the workplace and find that they play a critical role in the formation of burnout across its dimensions, which leads to reduced salesperson performance. Our research contributes to the sales literature by investigating individual personal stressors via Job Demands and Conservation of Resources theories and offers insights for managers of salespeople that face both personal and work stress.

ABSTRACT

PurposeThis study seeks to: empirically measure relationship orientation along a continuum from operation to strategic; evaluate the impact of relationship orientation on the actual activities implemented within the relationship; and determine the impact of these relational activities on relationship effectiveness and business performance.Design/methodology/approachA survey research design following the total design method was used to collect the data. Multi‐item measures were developed to measure relationship orientation and relational activities while existing scales were used to measure competitive intensity and relationship outcomes. The study sampled purchasing managers and the unit of analysis in this research was the business relationship between a buying firm and supplier firm.FindingsThis study provides evidence that relationship orientation has a direct and positive influence on the manner in which buying firms execute relationships with supplier organizations. Additionally, the findings suggest firms with a strategic orientation would have a greater likelihood to implement the relationship in terms of utilization of interorganizational guidelines and resource commitment. Similarly, firms that have a more operational orientation would likely not expend as much effort in relationship implementation. Finally, the study demonstrates a positive relationship between the activities used in buyer‐supplier interaction and both relationship effectiveness and business performance.Originality/valueThis paper contributes to the understanding of relationship orientation and in particular on how variation in relationship orientation impacts the nature of relational activities deployed in buyer‐supplier interaction.

Purpose This study aims to examine the impact of stress as a result of adverse life events on a salesperson’s ability to effectively manage customer relationships. The framework identifies burnout as a key mediating variable and salesperson grit as a coping mechanism. Design/methodology/approach Survey data is gathered from 364 B2B salespeople and investigated using structural equation modeling in Mplus 8.2. Findings The findings reveal adverse life events and their corresponding stress diminish a salesperson’s ability to manage customer relationships effectively through the mediators of reduced personal accomplishment and depersonalization. Thus, negative events of a personal nature can have a significant impact on salesperson outcomes and should be taken with the same level of seriousness as job-related stress. Furthermore, results show that salesperson grit provides mixed results as a coping mechanism. Practical implications The findings indicate that practitioners should be mindful of the negative impact adverse life events can have on work-related outcomes. Organizations and sales managers must be intentional in managing relationships with their salespeople and strategic in the structure they use to manage customer relationships. Recommendations include the use of regular one-on-one meetings to open up a dialogue about work or personal issues the salesperson is experiencing and assigning multiple resources or staff to service valuable customers, thereby not relying on solitary salespeople. Originality/value Employee well-being contributes to firm value; yet, this is the first study in sales to explore the impact of adverse life events on salesperson outcomes.

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has done a great deal to address the problem of discrimination against individuals with disability. In fact it is considered to be the most influencing civil‐rights legislation to come down in the last 25 years. In the Fiscal Year 2002, the EEOC received 15,964 charges of disability discrimination. The EEOC resolved 18,804 disability discrimination charges in FY 2002 and recovered $50.0 million in monetary benefits for charging parties and other aggrieved individuals. While the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has had a positive effect since it was enacted in 1992: in 2000, 22 per cent of employed people with disabilities report encountering job discrimination as opposed to 36 per cent in 1996. This article examines what is Mental Disability and discusses what questions regarding mental disability can be asked when managers are hiring salespeople.

This learning innovation offers a model by which university faculty can increase community engagement, provide greater opportunities to under-served populations, and advance inclusive programming in entrepreneurship education. We present a learning innovation to enhance working with local K-12 focused nonprofit organizations to positively influence individuals, communities, and local entrepreneurship ecosystems.