Organisations and associated management practices are generally considered responsible for promoting employees' enjoyment of work. Our study, on the other hand, seeks to examine the capacity of individual workers to regulate their own experience of fun. We interviewed eight ‘remarkable’ workers who claimed to always (or nearly always) have fun at work. We utilised a critical realist approach in the analysis that enabled the consideration of both structure and agency in the experience of workplace fun. A key research finding was that participants possessed a strong sense of control over their own happiness at work, demonstrated in four ways: (1) a priority placed on fun, (2) a sense of responsibility for fun, (3) a positive orientation to the world and (4) a sense of mastery and challenge in work tasks. Research findings may inspire both individual workers and organisations to adopt an agentic outlook in the workplace, implementing strategies that enhance employee control.

The compassion of healthcare workers towards patients is widely recognized, but research suggests a dearth of compassion among co-workers. Indeed, workplace bullying and negative employee outcomes are over-represented in the healthcare sector (including burnout and substantial staff turnover). In this paper, we discuss the cultivation of compassion for healthcare workers, using the lens of positive organizational scholarship. Our concern is not only with the individual level compassion (i.e. between employees), we also consider how compassion can be cultivated systemically across healthcare institutions at the organizational level. More specifically, we present a proposed Noticing, Empathising, Assessing and Responding Mechanisms Model of Organizational Compassion as a tool for consciously cultivating workplace compassion in healthcare organizations.

This paper examines one type of negative work behaviour, work harassment, using two theoretical frameworks: Social Exchange Theory (SET) and Similarity-Attraction (SA). SET explains work harassment as a product of poor management practices, whereas using SA theory explains it as a result of the growing normalisation of high workloads. The study undertakes latent mean and path model comparison analysis using structural equation modelling of data from 189 nurses in the UK and 401 nurses in the USA. The findings indicate a good model fit showing a significant path from Leader Member Exchange (LMX) to work harassment, wellbeing and subsequent turnover intentions, with LMX fully mediating the path from LMX to wellbeing for UK nurses, but only partially mediating the same path for nurses in the USA. The findings suggest SET provides a better explanation for work harassment for UK nurses, whereas SA theory better explains the US nurse experience.