PurposeBased on the job characteristics theory (Oldham and Hackman, 2010), the authors highlighted the mediating role of job meaningfulness as a critical psychological state. Employees' positive perception of job meaningfulness could maximize organizational positive outcomes based on task orientation and trustful relationship-based satisfying behaviors. The purpose of this paper is to examine the structural relations among transformational leadership, job characteristics, job meaningfulness and task-related job performance. The conceptual model of this paper is developed based on the theoretical foundations for assessing mediating and moderating path relations among the exogenous and endogenous variables.Design/methodology/approachBased on the research questions with literature review, the research framework was developed to show the moderated mediating mechanism of the link between transformational leadership and in-role performance. Data analyses for hypothesis testing were conducted by Hayes' PROCESS macro-based hierarchical regression.FindingsUnderstanding how organizations can optimally design a job based on job characteristics and helping employees maintain psychological states having meaningfulness and responsibility for outcomes are critical. This paper calls attention to how job characteristics and an individual's meaningfulness of work embedded in a given job play a role in influencing job performance.Originality/valueThis study provides a snapshot for examining the job characteristic model on the link between leadership and job performance. By using process analysis (Hayes, 2013), this study examined the moderating role of job characteristics and mediating role of meaningfulness at work in the link of leadership–performance.

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This article addresses two key aspects of change management and the notional confusion that occurs resulting from two different uses of the term change management. The author proposes new terms—macro change management and micro change management—for the two uses of the term change management. He then compares these two terms based on their attributes, comprising definition, target, focus, and roles of change agents including required competencies. The article concludes with explanations as to why change management notional clarification and term elaboration are important for the human performance technology field.

Background: Engineering programs have increasingly incorporated design challenges into courses. These design challenges vary in the degree to which they present complex, ill-structured, and relevant problems, and therefore may vary in the degree to which they support students to learn to frame design problems.Purpose/Hypothesis: We characterized how first-year engineering students with little formal design training approach problem framing. We developed design challenges informed by funds of knowledge. We compared the development of problem framing skills in first-year students who completed these challenges to students who completed more traditional challenges and to students in capstone design.Design/Method: Students completed a pre/post performance-based assessment of problem framing skills. We analyzed student responses in terms of design requirements, design practices, and design styles. We used descriptive statistics and correlations to characterize how students initially approached problem framing and repeated-measures ANOVA to compare groups of students. Results: First-year students approached framing a design problem in one of four primary ways. Compared to students in the original course, they showed growth in attending to an underlying need, considering contexts of use, and depicting design function. Compared to capstone students, they also showed growth in considering stakeholder roles and planning the next steps. Conclusions: Funds of knowledge can provide a means to evaluate possible design challenges as authentic yet accessible for first-year students, in turn, providing opportunities to support the development of the design problem framing ability.

Purpose The purpose of this study is to investigate the link between informal learning and employees’ in-role performance and whether the mechanism through informal learning mediates the relationships between self-efficacy, job characteristics, trust and in-role performance. Design/methodology/approach Based on data (n = 294) obtained from the firms with the Work–Learning Dual System in South Korea, a structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis was conducted. Findings The findings indicated that trust and job characteristics affected informal learning and informal learning mediates the relationships of trust and job characteristics with job performance. Originality/value The significant contributions of this study to the extant literature on informal learning are as follows: first, the present study investigates a mechanism and a mediating role of informal learning using SEM, while most previous studies in literature have employed qualitative research in informal learning. Second, this study explores the mediating role of informal learning between personal/job-related determinants of informal learning and in-role performance, which has not yet been examined in existing literature. Finally, this study provides practical implications regarding how organizations can facilitate more informal learning among employees to enhance their performance.