Purpose This study aims to investigate the impact of responsible leadership (RL) on voluntary workplace green behavior (VWGB) in Turkish small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), focusing on the mediating role of perceived insider status (PIS) and the moderating role of green work climate (GWC). Grounded in social exchange theory (SET) and supported by self-determination theory (SDT), this study explored how leadership behavior fosters sustainable workplace actions through both relational and motivational mechanisms. Design/methodology/approach The research model was empirically tested using survey data from 375 employees across Turkish SMEs. Structural equation modeling and bootstrapping procedures were employed to examine direct, indirect, and moderated relationships. Findings The results reveal that RL positively influences VWGB, both directly and through the mediating role of PIS. GWC significantly strengthened the relationship between RL and both PIS and VWGB. However, when GWC is high, the positive relationship between PIS and VWGB is reduced, suggesting that strong external expectations may crowd out intrinsic motivation in line with SDT. Originality/value This study advances the green workplace literature by integrating SET and SDT to explain how leadership, employee inclusion and the organizational climate interact to shape sustainability outcomes. The findings provide practical insights for SMEs seeking to cultivate inclusive and motivational environments that support voluntary green behavior.

This study aimed to investigate the mediating role of perceived insider status and organisational identification between authentic leadership and job embeddedness among Chinese nurses. Previous studies have explored the influence of authentic leadership on job embeddedness in the nursing profession. However, the chain-mediating effect of perceived insider status and organisational identification between authentic leadership and job embeddedness has not been clarified among nurses. A cross-sectional study. A structural equation model was utilised to examine the proposed hypothesis regarding job embeddedness in Chinese clinical nurses and to investigate potential mediating factors influencing nurses' job embeddedness. There were positive correlations among authentic leadership, perceived insider status, organisational identification, and job embeddedness. Moreover, authentic leadership exerted a noteworthy influence on job embeddedness through three significant indirect pathways: the separate mediating effect of perceived insider status and organisational identification, and the chain mediating effect of perceived insider status and organisational identification. Nursing managers aiming to enhance nurses' job embeddedness. Recognising the crucial role of perceived insider status and organisational identification as mediators between authentic leadership and job embeddedness, our findings suggest actionable strategies. Elevating authentic leadership creates a supportive environment, positively impacting nurses' commitment and reducing turnover. We would like to thank the clinical nurses from three hospitals in Wuhan who participated in the study and the hospital managers who supported this study. This study distributed survey links in the WeChat groups of three hospitals, and collected research data under the principle of ensuring anonymity and informed consent.

Brands use factory tours, visitor centers, and other behind-the-scenes encounters to share their histories and operations. These backstory performances are fragile events that must balance revealing and concealing. This article defines brand backstories as selectively disclosive narratives offering a curated set of brand content, and conceptualizes brand backstory performances as spatially embedded enactments that invite consumers into a staged version of what feels like a backstage. Drawing on dramaturgical theory, we examine how brands negotiate the tension between showcasing transparency and retaining control during backstory performances. A multimethod investigation centered on four primary backstory sites identifies three interdependent dimensions of the backstory performance (staging performance elements, orchestrating the characters, and tailoring the script) that together modulate consumers’ experience of transparency. Backstory experiences must be skillfully delivered, stimulating, and safe to optimize perceived transparency. This research reframes brand transparency from a property that brands possess to a narrative experience they perform. It shows how contemporary brand storytelling depends on carefully curated and staged encounters that are calibrated to the optimal dosage of revelation to make insider status feel real without surrendering control.

Ethnographic scholarship increasingly recognizes the complexity of researcher positionality, yet often overlooks how visibility reshapes field relations. This article reconceptualizes positionality as a situational practice shaped by embodiment, recognition, and collective assessment. Based on seven months of fieldwork among diasporic Somalis in Turkey, it introduces two concepts: hypervisible insiderness and qowmiyadda . Hypervisible insiderness captures how presumed belonging whether through race, religion, or comportment intensifies scrutiny and compels performances of authenticity. Qowmiyadda , an emic Somali politics of conduct, regulates legitimacy, access, and ethical engagement through culturally legible practices. Together, these concepts advance a decolonial autoethnographic methodology that challenges epistemic erasure, reconfigures the understanding and enactment of insider status, and foregrounds emic knowledge and lived experience. As a result, they help reclaim epistemic space within Somali Studies and autoethnography.

This paper examines how an unplanned transformation from classical ethnography to institutional ethnography during my long-term research in a rapidly developing village in China reshaped my positionality, ethics, and methods. Initially positioned as a pure researcher, I became gradually embedded in a newly established institution tasked with local development and governance. I later came to understand this shift through institutional ethnography as a sensitising lens that attends to everyday work, texts-in-circulation, and ruling relations. Insider status was not a given but continually made through spatial, temporal, and emotional labour that enabled access while binding the researcher to institutional rhythms. This proximity altered the force of language: ordinary remarks could circulate as texts, acquire coordinating power, and generate new forms of accountability once participation had effects. These entanglements, in turn, demanded adaptive methods. What counted as data shifted toward documents, coordination routines, and tacit cues of institutional life, while inscription relied on retrospective fieldnotes and context-sensitive elicitation, tempered by conversations beyond the institution to maintain analytic distance. Rather than offering a blueprint, the paper treats this transformation itself as an object of methodological and ethical reflection and offers portable guidance for researchers working in China and other institution-driven settings. By specifying how ruling relations reorganise what can be known, what must be owned, and how positionality is continually remade when research and intervention are inseparable, this paper contributes to emerging conversations on institutional ethnography, insider research, para-/collaborative ethnography, and situated ethics.

BackgroundGrassroots government employees of the Chinese government are crucial for realizing Chinese-style modernization. However, the mismatch between governance resources and demands causes high burnout among them, impacting work efficiency and effectiveness. This study, based on expectancy disconfirmation theory (EXT) and self-regulation theory (SRT), constructs a moderated mediation model to show how psychological contracts (PC), perceived insider status (PIS), and bianzhi affect the burnout.ObjectiveThis study aims to explore the nonlinear relationship between PC and burnout among Chinese grassroots government employees, and reveal the mediating role of PIS and the moderating role of bianzhi.MethodsA total of 527 Chinese government employees was used. Data were analyzed using the stepwise regression method, the MEDCURVE plugin and the PROCESS macro bootstrap approach.Findings and conclusionThe results illustrated that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between PC and burnout. PC has an inverted U-shaped mediating effect via PIS. Bianzhi moderates both of them, and the mediating effect of PIS is affected by it.ImplicationsThis research findings are supported by the relevant conclusions of EXT and SRT, providing evidence for theory development. It also comprehensively explains relationships among PC, PIS, bianzhi and burnout. This study provides theoretical support and practical references for alleviating burnout of grassroots government employees and optimizing human resource management in public sectors. It innovatively verifies the inverted U-shaped relationship between PC and burnout of grassroots government employees, clarifies the moderating mechanism of bianzhi differences on the mediating path, and enriches the research perspective of occupational health in public sectors.

<p><span>Servant leaders prioritize the needs of their subordinates to help achieve individual and organizational goals. As has been typically shown in the literature, servant leadership is related to positive individual and group outcomes. However, there has not been a systematic attempt to empirically study the impact that these leaders have on follower social loafing. A two-wave online survey panel of 256 US-based, full-time employees was employed to assess the impact that perceived servant leadership has on followers self-rated social loafing. Surprisingly, when viewed as a multi-dimensional construct, servant leadership has both a positive and negative impact on social loafing. Specifically, emotional healing and ethical behavior decreases social loafing, whereas putting subordinates first increases social loafing. Additionally, the aggregate construct of servant leadership does not have a direct effect on social loafing, but the mediating mechanisms of psychological empowerment, perceived insider status, and perceived leader civility lead to a decrease in social loafing. Further, the findings highlight the importance of task visibility and task interdependence when examining social loafing. Future research would benefit from the necessary inclusion of social desirability and a more sensitive measure for social loafing. These results show that servant leadership has a nuanced relationship with social loafing and that this positive leadership style is not beneficial in all situations.</span></p>

In this era of constant change, how to motivate employees to innovate work methods, improve work efficiency, and promote the sustainable development of enterprises has become a hot topic for managers. Drawing on social cognitive theory, this study examines how employees' perception of relative leader-member exchange (RLMX) drives taking-charge behavior through the perspective of self-perception. We further investigate the mediating role of perceived insider status and the moderating roles of social comparison orientation and role-breadth self-efficacy, thereby clarifying the underlying mechanisms linking RLMX to taking-charge behavior. Using cross-sectional data from 381 employees across diverse industries in China, we test our moderated-mediation model with hierarchical regression analyses. The results show that: RLMX is positively related to taking charge behavior, perceived insider status plays a partial mediating role between RLMX and taking charge behavior, social comparison orientation moderates the impact of RLMX on perceived insider status, and role breadth self-efficacy moderates the relationship between perceived insider status and taking charge behavior. The study provides fresh empirical insights into the mechanisms linking RLMX to taking charge behavior from perspective of self-perception and suggests practical implications for enhancing employees' taking charge behavior.

This study investigates the mechanisms through which perceived control influences approach job crafting and the key factors involved. It also deepens understanding of the internal logic of the approach job crafting. Drawing on self-determination theory, a research model was developed that posits psychological authentic climate and perceived insider status serve as mediators, with informal leadership emergence functioning as a moderator. This study collected 532 valid samples from employed individuals in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen using purposive sampling. Results indicate that psychological authentic climate and perceived insider status partially mediate the relationships under examination. Additionally, the emergence of informal leadership positively moderates the relationships linking perceived control and perceived insider status to approach job crafting. This study extends the theoretical framework connecting perceived control with approach job crafting and offers practical guidance for organizations seeking to stimulate employee proactivity by fostering a psychological authentic climate and a supportive environment.

Studies investigating the political relevance of labor market dualization have gathered compelling evidence that labor market status shapes workers’ political preferences and their modes of participation, shedding significant light on shifts in partisan politics and socio-economic policies, as well as broader transformations to political systems. Yet, the study of labor market dualization in contexts of democratic transitions, and their role in shaping transitional processes, has been largely uninvestigated. In particular, two fundamental questions, lying at the nexus of labor market segmentation theory and democratic transition theory, remain unanswered: how does the context of democratic transition inform political participation of labor market insiders and outsiders, and what is the impact of their mobilization on transition processes? To answer these questions, the paper considers two instances of dualized labor market mobilization under democratic transition: the Union of Unemployed Graduates in Tunisia during the period 2011–2014, and industrial workers in Serbia in the early 2000s, who were under severe threat to lose their insider status with the shift to a liberalized economy. Drawing on Della Porta et al.’s (2016) theorization of the interactionist and relational dimensions of social movement action, democratization, and revolution, we posit that democratizing regimes are able to exploit demands for labor market insider status to stabilize transition processes. The paper finds that, despite many contextual differences between the two cases, the politics of labor market inclusion and exclusion displayed remarkable similarities. First, both cases show how organized actors in the field of labor contestation were channeled into modes of participation that acquiesced to the technocratic and procedural logic of the transition. Second, in both cases, contestation against the democratic transition’s political economy and its impact on labor market outsiders/future outsiders was able to be assuaged not through systemic change but rather through a strategy of fragmentation and limited concessions. As an implication, we find that while these strategies proved effective at reducing street level contestation they may have also reduced workers’ substantive evaluation of democratic transition, which in turn left Serbia’s and Tunisia’s democracies more vulnerable to the threat of future reversals by populist leaders.

ABSTRACT Research into university campuses and students’ use of space has rarely used place-based or longitudinal methods. To address this, student experiences were gathered via a novel combination of walking interviews, participant photography and mapping, from 2019 to 2022. The study adopted an online methodology during 2020/21 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This approach resulted in new spatial findings on how individuals and social groups use campus, the influence of the institutional structure and changes over time. This article reflects on the practice of participatory walking interview methods. Practicalities on how to carry out walking interviews, handle the participant-researcher dynamic and insider status, and respond to changes throughout a longitudinal study are shared. This article contributes to a spatial turn within educational and psychological research and shows the potential of place-based methods to explore people, social structures and place, in a moment and over time.

Purpose This study aims to ascertain the mechanism and boundary condition of the effect of leaders' negative emotions on employees' innovation performance in remote work. Design/methodology/approach The authors collected data from the National Bureau of Statistics of China and 269 Chinese firms to evaluate the relationship among the constructs using hierarchical regression analysis and moderated mediation approach. Findings The results reveal that leaders' negative emotions negatively influence employees' innovation performance in remote work settings. Notably, employees' perceived insider status (EPIS) fully mediates this negative relationship. Additionally, the regional digitalization level slightly moderates the positive effect of EPIS on employees' innovation performance and positively moderates the negative impact of leaders' negative emotions on employees' innovation performance via EPIS. Originality/value This study advances emotion research from the perspective of leader-employee interaction and provides strategies for enhancing employees' innovation performance in remote work scenarios.

Teacher innovation is critical for fostering student creativity, enhancing school effectiveness, and advancing national talent strategies. Grounded in the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions and social information processing theory, this study develops a moderated mediation model to explore the motivational mechanisms underlying teachers’ innovative work behavior. Using survey data from 508 teachers in mainland China, the analysis reveals that teacher well-being positively influences innovative work behavior, and this relationship is mediated by perceived insider status. Furthermore, principal authentic leadership enhances the impact of perceived insider status on innovation and strengthens the indirect effect of well-being through this mediator. These findings underscore the importance of both emotional pathways and contextual signals in shaping teacher innovation, offering theoretical contributions to education leadership and teacher work behavior research while providing practical implications for creating supportive and innovation-conducive school environments.

Purpose The study contributes to debates on reflexivity by emphasising the importance of self-awareness and critical engagement in insider research. It highlights the need for researchers to reflect on their positionality, biases, and power dynamics, offering practical recommendations such as transparent communication, ongoing self-reflection, and peer debriefing. By integrating the researcher’s presence into the analytical process, the study demonstrates how insider status can enhance rather than hinder research depth. These insights provide valuable guidance for future studies on marginalised communities, promoting ethical practices and fostering meaningful, impactful findings. Design/methodology/approach This paper explores the long-term effects of conducting research within one’s own community, focussing on the complexities of positionality, reflexivity, and power dynamics in native ethnography. Drawing on fieldwork experiences with homeless Polish migrants in two UK-based homeless support organisations, this paper examines how researchers’ insider status influences both the research process and its personal and professional consequences. Qualitative and ethnographic methods were employed to highlight the recurring power imbalances between service providers and homeless individuals, with specific attention to inequalities in accessing resources. Findings Findings indicate that researchers’ dual role as insiders and observers creates ethical and emotional tensions, shaping how participants and institutions respond to their presence. In this context, the challenge of balancing personal identity with professional objectivity underscores the deeply emotional and ethical stakes of reflexivity. Far from being a passive or detached exercise, reflexivity emerges as an active and continuous negotiation of power, emotions, and ethics—one that profoundly shapes the researcher’s insights and the broader significance of their work. Research limitations/implications While the study provided significant insights, it was not without limitations. One key limitation was the relatively small sample size, which may not be fully representative of the broader migrant homeless population. The research focused primarily on homeless Polish migrants in the UK, and thus, the findings may not be generalisable to other migrant communities or geographical locations. Additionally, the insider perspective, while valuable, may have introduced biases that influenced the interpretation of the data as this study reflects only my experiences as a researcher, which introduces the possibility that personal biases may have influenced both the findings and their interpretation. Practical implications This study underscores the need for researchers working within their own communities to actively engage in reflexivity, ethical self-awareness, and transparent communication. It highlights the importance of mitigating power imbalances between researchers, participants, and institutions through strategies such as peer debriefing, ongoing self-reflection, and critical engagement with positionality. By integrating reflexivity into the research process, insider researchers can enhance the depth and ethical integrity of their work. These insights offer valuable guidance for future studies on marginalised communities, encouraging more ethical, informed, and impactful research practices that prioritise participant agency and equitable knowledge production. Social implications This study highlights the broader social impact of research on marginalised communities, particularly homeless Polish migrants in the UK By exposing power imbalances within support services, it advocates for more inclusive and equitable approaches to homelessness intervention. The findings emphasise the need for service providers to recognise and address structural inequalities that limit access to resources. Additionally, the study challenges traditional notions of researcher neutrality, promoting a more engaged and ethical approach to knowledge production. Ultimately, it calls for policies and practices that prioritise dignity, agency, and meaningful participation for homeless individuals in shaping their own support systems. Originality/value This study offers a unique contribution by critically examining the long-term personal, ethical, and professional challenges of conducting research within one’s own community. By focussing on homeless Polish migrants in the UK, it provides new insights into power dynamics between researchers, participants, and institutions. The paper moves beyond traditional discussions of reflexivity, presenting it as an ongoing negotiation rather than a static concept. By demonstrating how insider status can enhance research depth rather than hinder objectivity, this study adds valuable perspectives to debates on positionality, ethical research practices, and the role of researchers in studying marginalised communities.

Abstract This article borrows from Ahmed’s ‘queer phenomenology’ together with postqualitative inquiry to reflect on how the agency of things frustrated and changed the researcher’s positionality in researching early childhood educators (ECEs). Making use of subversive feminist ideas arising from women’s textile work it is constructed as a piece of Honiton lace (bobbin lace) with the researcher as bobbin, crossing threads of thought and experience to follow an idea. This allows for reflection on the researcher’s inability to become an ‘insider’ with ECEs. Two threads that are crossed are that of the ‘visitor’s chair’ welcoming non-insiders, and the door code which gave limited insider status, both examples of Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of haecceity . The resultant gaps in knowledge based on being positioned as a researcher, not an insider, are another such haecceity, an assemblage of happenings that have resonance and produce affect. This assemblage of gaps is considered through lace-making epistemology, seeing the knowable as the threads making up the assemblage of gaps, of things that cannot be known or recorded. Such gaps might contribute to the way the work of ECEs, and the challenges of their work continue to be undervalued, with educators experiencing low pay and constraining conditions. Thinking of educational research as lace, with the gaps an intrinsic part of the weave, could point to a need for less rigid control over practice, in recognition that it is not possible for researchers or policy experts to see the conditions of educators’ work from the inside.

Most of the literature on power and positionality in qualitative, semi-structured interviews discusses research on either precarious, disenfranchised populations or influential elites. This paper focuses on interviewing social groups who have a similar societal status as academic researchers. By combining methodological literature on insider status and whiteness, the article interrogates how sameness unfolds in the research process. Based on two research projects with literary professionals and nightclub promoters respectively, the focus lies not on the fluid and context-dependent presence of symbolic power in the interview setting (for example, through discomfort), but rather reflects on casual research settings where power is experienced as absent (for example, through comfort). The paper proposes methodological strategies to attend to challenges brought about by sameness in advance , before the fieldwork starts: by utilising informality in gaining access (but doing so reflexively), by sampling outside of the somatic norm and by formulating specific forms of ‘how-questions’.

Abstract Understanding the development of newcomers' job future ambiguity is crucial for their adjustment, especially as the workforce becomes increasingly mobile. Based on Masterson and Stamper's (2003) framework of perceived organizational membership, we examined whether newcomers' experience of psychological contract breach affected their perceived insider status, which in turn influenced their job future ambiguity. We tested our hypotheses using data from a three‐wave panel design, involving a sample of 126 recent college graduates in China who had just joined the workforce. Cross‐lagged mediation panel analysis indicated that psychological contract breach had a negative effect on subsequent perceived insider status and job future ambiguity, and perceived insider status acted as the underlying mechanism through which psychological contract breach partially influenced subsequent job future ambiguity. Our cross‐lagged reciprocal analyses further supported that psychological contract breach preceded job future ambiguity and perceived insider status rather than the other way around. Our study contributes to the literature by identifying two untested antecedents of job future ambiguity and providing the first formal empirical testing of the conceptual linkage between psychological contract breach and perceived insider status in the newcomer context. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Team-based perceived insider status: Exploring the drivers and outcomes of freelancers' sense of belonging to their project teams

Purpose Guided by the norm of reciprocity, we examined the relationship between perceived supervisor’s remorse and employee knowledge sharing behavior via the mediating role of employees' perceived insider status. We further investigated how leader-follower value congruence indirectly moderates the path between perceived supervisor remorse and knowledge sharing through employees' perceived insider status. Design/methodology/approach Three-wave (i.e. time-lagged) data were collected from full-time employees in service sector organizations. We used Mplus to examine the proposed model. Findings The results indicate a positive relationship between perceived supervisor remorse and employee knowledge sharing. Additionally, employees' perceived insider status mediates the relationship between perceived supervisor’s remorse and employee knowledge-sharing. The indirect relationship between perceived supervisor remorse and knowledge-sharing, mediated by employees' perceived insider status, depends on leader-follower value congruence. The mediated relationship is more pronounced when leader-follower value congruence is high. Originality/value This study examines how supervisors' remorseful behavior affects employees' perceptions of insider status and their willingness to share knowledge. By integrating the concept of a remorseful supervisor and applying the Norm of Reciprocity, it offers insights into how fostering a culture of acknowledgment and apology can positively influence knowledge-sharing behaviors.

Purpose This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of the pay-for-performance scheme in enhancing emotional labor management in e-smile service, drawing on self-determination theory. The authors develop a moderated mediation model, with perceived insider status as the moderator and two performance indicators as the outcome variables. Design/methodology/approach Data were collected in two waves from 387 online customer service agents in China. Hypotheses were tested using path analysis conducted in Mplus 7.4. Findings The results indicate that pay-for-performance enhances both surface acting and deep acting in e-smile service. Surface acting positively impacts task performance, whereas deep acting enhances both task performance and proactive customer service performance. Furthermore, perceived insider status weakens the mediating effect of surface acting between pay-for-performance and task performance. Originality/value This study sheds light on how pay-for-performance influences surface acting and deep acting emotional labor strategies through the dual pathways of control and autonomy. It highlights the effectiveness of pay-for-performance in managing emotional labor and promoting performance in the online service context, offering fresh insights that contrast findings from traditional face-to-face service settings.