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The case data are from a mix of secondary sources, which included company documents, webpages and blogposts, autobiographies co-written by Schultz, newspaper stories, news media and other publicly available videos, magazine articles, photographs of signed unionization statements, and webinar interview.

In late autumn 2021, the global retail coffee and foodservice company Starbucks dealt with employees at a few USA stores who initiated unionization efforts in an attempt to change their workplace. Their actions triggered a wave of similar attempts at Starbucks stores across the USA over the next few years. Employees amplified their voices on social media, stating both their love for the company and their disenfranchisement. They claimed to have little input about policies and workplace decisions that affected them and that leadership had not heard or adequately responded to concerns with staffing, safety, equipment, and abusive customers. Walkouts were staged and employees at numerous stores pursued unionization. In 2023, Laxman Narasimhan replaced Howard Schultz as CEO. His tenure started with the challenge of reengaging employees who claimed their collective voice was unheard by leadership Readers will consider what employee voice means in the context of baristas working for a large corporation, and how their emotions, commitment to and respect for the organization, and their desire to be heard, related to efforts to unionize and maintain employment.

This case can be used as a unit review to cover several organizational behavior topics or can be used with specific concepts for graduate or undergraduate students. The placement within the semester plan depends on which unit/concepts the instructor will pair with it, such as emotions in the workplace, a module on loyalty, voice and exit, or the introduction of employee voice and engagement. It can also be used in conjunction with cross-level concepts such as trust and leadership. For courses focused on talent management, employee relations, or human resource development, the case could be used to introduce multiple concepts or as a concluding assessment. It would best pair with topics such as employee satisfaction, exit, voice and loyalty, inclusive decision-making or emotions in the workplace. For a course in labor relations, the case could introduce the idea that employees’ experiences, emotions, and perceptions may be related to efforts to unionize.

Purpose – To be the first study to consider the difference between men's and women's perceptions of most important mentoring functions. Design/methodology/approach – Survey recipients identified the three most important things that mentors can do for their protégés. Two independent coders categorized the behaviors listed by the 637 respondents. Findings – There was little difference between men's and women's perceptions of important mentoring behaviors. Women more than men reported championing and acceptance and confirmation behaviors to be in what they consider the top three for importance. Additionally, the lists respondents generated under‐represented the mentoring behaviors commonly identified in the extant literature, whereas some of the behaviors most frequently identified are not well represented in the mentoring literature. Research limitations/implications – Respondents were graduates of a top‐tier MBA program, although from multiple years. Future research should examine perceptions of mentoring behaviors by employees with different educational backgrounds and across cultures, particularly to explore perceptions of mentoring behaviors where cultural and gender stereotypes are present. Practical implications – The design of mentoring programs and fostering of cross‐sex mentoring are discussed in lieu of managing protégé expectations and educating mentors about actual expectations versus the expectations they might associate with the other sex. Originality/value – The findings here extend existing research by first asking men and women to generate a list of what they perceive to be the three most important mentoring behaviors and then showing that, for MBAs at least, there is little difference across the sexes.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the trust repair efforts of top management within an organization specifically focusing on the impact of perceived organizational support and issue‐selling success. Building on the theoretical trust repair literature, the authors bridge the gap between the laboratory dyad trust repair settings and the severe organization‐wide trust repair settings.

The authors focus on one organizational context that experienced competency‐ and integrity‐based trust violations between managers and top management. Surveys and interviews were conducted with 32 managers to capture trust in top management, issue‐selling success rate, and perceived organizational support.

Results demonstrate that perceived organizational support is significantly and positively related to trust in top management. In contrast, issue‐selling success rate is negatively related to trust in top management above and beyond the impact of perceived organizational support.

Trust repair approaches should include demonstrations of organizational support of employees by showing care and concern along with engaging employees in a change process that demonstrates top management commitment to repairing trusting relationships. In addition, top management trust repair efforts should focus on providing managers with the opportunity to engage in multiple issue‐selling episodes.

The paper contributes to an existing research base by extending the approaches to repairing trust in organizational settings to specifically examine the impact of perceived organizational support and issue‐selling.

A key challenge facing organizations today is sustainability in economic, environmental, and social arenas. The purpose of this paper is to examine flexible work arrangements (FWAs) a source of social sustainability.

Drawing from theoretical explanations of social sustainability, the authors explored opportunities and challenges of FWAs as social sustainability in the American workforce.

While FWAs allow organizations to “sustain” their workforce, diverse employees face challenges in accessing them, particularly across dimensions of gender, race, and class. The paper offers guiding principles for organizational leaders, including making flexibility an organizational norm, better understanding employees' lives outside of work, and creating metrics of social sustainability.

To extend knowledge on FWAs as a source of social sustainability, researchers should focus beyond managerial, professional, and mostly White women in America. What can be learned about employees of color, of lower socioeconomic levels, and those in location‐dependent jobs? What can be learned from companies and countries, who are leaders in providing flexible options?

Given the potential for FWAs to minimize tensions from conflicting demands of work and life, efforts to employ FWAs should be directed at the entire organization. This paper discusses the differential impact of FWAs across different groups of women and questions current organizational responses.

The paper expands the understanding of social sustainability to include an organization's human resources by examining the use of FWAs for diverse women, and by offering suggestions for practitioners and researchers interested in social sustainability.

Purpose: In this chapter we examine the emotional experience and identity of sustainability change agents and advance understanding of their emotion management strategies. We explore how sustainability change agents experience, manage, and respond to the negative emotions that arise in the course of their jobs. Study Design: We took a mixed-method and multimodal approach to answer our research questions. Using a narrative approach, we collected data using in-depth narrative interviews and supplemented this with quantitative measurement of participants' heart rate and sweat response during the interviews. Findings: Our results confirm that sustainability change agency is an emotionally laden profession. Furthermore, we found that sustainability change agents use three different coping mechanisms including emotion-focused coping (EFC) (“rational avoiders”), problem-focused coping (PFC) (“committed go-getters”), and meaning-focused coping (MFC) (“green philosophers”). Originality: Our research shows that sustainability change agents experienced strong negative emotions in relation to their jobs and they employed one of the three coping styles: EFC, PFC, or MFC. We found that MFC was an isolated cognitive appraisal style, rather than a form of EFC. These findings provide a starting point for further work to help sustainability change agents avoid potential burnout and continue to contribute to the future health of the planet while at the same time maintain their personal well-being.

Barriers to employment are a significant issue in the United States and abroad. As civil rights legislation continues to be enforced and as employers seek to diversify their workplaces, it is incumbent upon the management field to offer insights that address obstacles to work. Although barriers to employment have been addressed in various fields such as psychology and economics, management scholars have addressed this issue in a piecemeal fashion. As such, our review will offer a comprehensive, integrative model of barriers to employment that addresses both individual and organizational perspectives. We will also address societal-level concerns involving these barriers. An integrative perspective is necessary for research to progress in this area because many individuals with barriers to employment face multiple challenges that prevent them from obtaining and maintaining full employment. While the additive, or possibly multiplicative, effect of employment barriers have been acknowledged in related fields like rehabilitation counseling and vocational psychology, the Human Resource Management (HRM) literature has virtually ignored this issue. We discuss suggestions for the reduction or elimination of barriers to employment. We also provide an integrative model of employment barriers that addresses the mutable (amenable to change) nature of some barriers, while acknowledging the less mutable nature of others.

There have been many research studies on students’ satisfaction of services in universities in developed countries. However, students’ expectation and satisfaction of public and private higher education institutions (HEIs) with regard to service quality in Eastern Europe have been under-researched. Therefore, this study aims to offer an empirical examination of student satisfaction of the service quality of public and private HEIs in Albania by evaluating the gap between students’ expectation and perception and the effect of student satisfaction on retention in HEIs.

The survey instrument used in this study was the student satisfaction inventory in the USA. Primary data were collected from a survey of students in two private and four public HEIs in Albania. A total of 554 valid responses were collected from the survey.

The findings suggested that there were performance gaps between public and private HEIs. Public universities performed well in terms of concern for the individual, campus support services, student-centeredness and instructional effectiveness. Private HEIs scored well in terms of concern for the individual, academic advising effectiveness, instructional effectiveness and safety and security (parking). There is a significant difference in students’ perception of the overall satisfaction of HEIs. Students’ overall satisfaction positively impacts their retention.

Overall, this study provides valuable insights to private and public HEIs’ administrators regarding to student satisfaction and retention. The findings will have far-reaching managerial implications for all groups of stakeholders in terms of the service delivery by universities in Albania and Eastern Europe.