Human Resources Management Commons^™

J Mich Dent Assoc August 2026

The Journal of the Michigan Dental Association

Each month, the Journal of the Michigan Dental Association delivers news, information, and features about Michigan dentistry to our state's oral health community and the MDA's 6,200-plus members. It remains the main publication reaching Michigan dentists and is available worldwide through ADA Commons.

The August 2026 (Volume 108, No. 8) issue of the Journal is published in print format to provide updates and insights for Michigan's oral health community and MDA members. Print editions occur every other month beginning with January.

The August 2026 issue of the Journal of the Michigan Dental Association explores clinical, professional, legal, leadership, and public …

Staff Matters: Is Our Dental Practice's Culture As Strong As We Think It Is?, Jodi Schafer Sphr, Shrm-Scp

The Journal of the Michigan Dental Association

This article explores how workplace culture influences employee retention, team morale, and patient experience in dental practices. The author discusses indicators of healthy and unhealthy workplace cultures, leadership behaviors that shape organizational climate, and practical strategies for gathering employee feedback, improving communication, and reinforcing accountability. Small, consistent actions are presented as effective tools for building a positive work environment.

The Invisible Work: On Expertise, Showmanship, And The Trust That Makes Surgery Work, Anish Gupta D.D.S.

The Journal of the Michigan Dental Association

This commentary examines how clinicians can make their expertise more visible to patients through communication, education, and clinical narration. Drawing parallels to surgical checklists and professional mastery, the author argues that trust is built not only through excellent outcomes but also through helping patients understand the complexity and judgment behind treatment. The article emphasizes communication, transparency, education, and mentorship as important elements of patient-centered care.

The Back Page: A Toast To The Future: From Boomers To Gen Z Zoomers, George T. Goodis Dds, Gerald J. Halk Dds

The Journal of the Michigan Dental Association

This article highlights a leadership brunch that brought together multiple generations of dental leaders to encourage engagement in organized dentistry. The gathering emphasized mentorship, leadership development, and the transfer of institutional knowledge to younger dentists. Participants celebrated the future of the profession while discussing the importance of community involvement, leadership participation, and professional growth.

Mda Insurance: Voluntary Benefits Help With Employee Recruitment, Satisfaction, Retention, Craig Start

The Journal of the Michigan Dental Association

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This article discusses how voluntary employee benefits can strengthen recruitment, retention, and employee satisfaction in dental practices. Topics include health insurance, disability coverage, life insurance, critical illness protection, accident insurance, vision plans, and cafeteria plans. The author explains how benefit offerings can improve workplace competitiveness while helping employees manage financial risks and healthcare costs.

Transnational Social Protections And The Market: Seeking Support From The Global Cruise Industry, Yasmin Y. Ortiga

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Migration studies have mostly portrayed employers as paternalistic or exploitative, creating the very conditions that make migrants’ lives insecure and unstable. This paper challenges this view by showing how the market can also be an unlikely source of protections, where extractive work conditions co-exist with a certain degree of social support. Drawing on interviews with 45 Filipino cruise workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, I discuss how migrants used a logic of employee rights to claim benefits such as food, housing and insurance. Cruise lines willingly provided such protections, but only while workers maintained active contracts onboard their ships. Rather than …

Navigating The Dark Side: Emotional Labor's Impact On Hr Professionals' Wellness, Esmeralda Amelia Rendón

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This qualitative descriptive study was designed to document and describe how female-identifying human resource (HR) generalist practitioners serving as sole or primary employee relations practitioners in small- to medium-sized organizations across the United States experience and manage emotional labor in their roles, cope with its demands, and how these experiences impact their wellness and perceptions of organizational support. Despite the centrality of emotional labor (EL) in human resource professionals’ (HRPs) roles, little was known about how HRPs in these underresourced environments cope with these demands. Data were collected through semistructured virtual interviews with eight participants and analyzed using Braun and …

From The Editor's Desk, Heather S. Mcmillan

Journal of the North American Management Society

No abstract provided.

Charismatic Leaders Role And Challenges During Crises, Tamer Hassan Abutahoun Phd

Journal of the North American Management Society

Since the first article about charismatic leadership by Weber was issued in 1946, numerous pieces of research have been published discussing several aspects of charismatic leadership. One of these aspects is the role of the charismatic leader during crisis and whether it is being impacted by crises or emerged during crises. Several articles have been published to investigate the role of charismatic leadership during crises along with how individuals perceived charismatic leadership during crises. Most of these articles utilized case studies to investigate the former mentioned relationship. However, each of these studies investigated the relationship between crises and charismatic leadership …

Navigating Ai Landscape In Management Education Through Wu-Wei (無為), Maria Ll Lam

Journal of the North American Management Society

Artificial intelligence (AI) is challenging how knowledge is produced, validated, and taught in higher education. This creates both new opportunities and acute tensions in management education. While management educators aim to foster critical thinking and character development, many students are increasingly relying on AI tools and focusing on developing AI-related skills for the labor market. The required market skills often exceed what current business curricula provide. As higher education seeks to cultivate transferable habits of critical reflection, a central question arises: How can management educators prepare students to engage in ongoing moral reflection about their experience with evolving AI systems …

Potential Discriminatory Practices Related To Working Remotely, David M. Savino, Danielle C. Foster

Journal of the North American Management Society

There are numerous implications of the recent "return to the office" push, including evolving influences on corporate culture, job redesign, the role of technology, and the significant potential for unequal treatment and discrimination. Recent research and studies indicate that the workers involved in remote work are most likely to be women, workers of color, and the disabled. While remote work is not a protected classification under state or Federal law, these individuals are members of protected classes as determined by fair employment law. Therefore, disputed and evolving policies regarding the use of remote work related to these individuals could easily …

Gig Workers' Identity Construction In Pakistan's Platform Economy, Zubair Ahmed Pirzada, Shoukat Ali Mahar, Muhammad Haneef Gambhir

Business Review

The rapid expansion of Pakistan’s platform economy has introduced digitally mediated labor arrangements that fundamentally restructure occupational identities and the meanings workers attach to their work. Based on constructivist grounded theory, this study delves into the process of gig workers' self-negotiated and self-built occupational identities in the gig economy in the city of Karachi in Pakistan. Through in-depth interviews with 43 platform workers in Karachi (25 ride-sharing drivers and 18 food delivery riders), the analysis produced the Adaptive Identity Construction Framework, theorizing identity construction as a simultaneous process across temporal, algorithmic, and sociocultural dimensions. Four types of identity were formed: …

The Tragedy Of The Cognitive Commons: How Ai Could Disrupt The Regeneration Of Professional Expertise, Nolan C. Lovett

Educational Leadership & Workforce Development Faculty Publications

Artificial intelligence is reshaping cognitive work, but Human Resource Development scholarship has treated this transformation as an organizational training challenge, leaving the collective regeneration of professional expertise unexamined. This conceptual paper introduces the Cognitive Commons framework, integrating commons theory, HRD scholarship, and distributed cognition to explain how rational AI adoption decisions can deplete the shared expertise pool professions require for renewal. The framework distinguishes Internalized Mastery (deep domain knowledge from sustained practice) from Distributed Mastery (orchestrating human-AI systems), and develops the Validation Tether: effective AI oversight depends on the expertise AI adoption may undermine. Early labor market and clinical evidence …

From Pensions To Portfolios: How Retirement Financialization Reshapes Women's Retirement Security In The United States, Elena Lam, Evelyn Williams, Raylynn Miller

Scholarly Horizons: University of Minnesota, Morris Undergraduate Journal

This paper examines how the financialization of retirement has reshaped women’s retirement security in the United States. Rather than focusing primarily on the gender wage gap, the paper argues that the shift from defined-benefit (DB) pensions to defined-contribution (DC) retirement accounts has transformed retirement from a system based on institutional guarantees into one that depends on uninterrupted employment, regular contributions, financial knowledge, and market performance. Through a review of existing literature and U.S. retirement data, the paper shows how retirement risk has increasingly been transferred from employers and collective institutions to individual workers. The analysis identifies several mechanisms through which …

Are Hotels Ready For Flooding? Improving Employee Preparedness, Ahmin Kwon, Marketa Kubickova, Swechchha Subedi

ICHRIE Research Reports

Focusing on the experiences of 500 current hotel employees in the United States, this report evaluates current levels of flood preparedness and the role of organizational support in shaping employee proactive response. Findings indicate that most employees have experience with flooding and rely on multiple information sources, yet trust in government response remains moderate. Clear disparities emerge across hotel segments, with significantly higher preparedness commitment and proactive behavior among employees in luxury hotels and those with longer tenure. Importantly, prior experience does not necessarily translate into effective preparedness. Although many respondents perceive existing information as sufficient, there is a continued …

The Strategic Role Of Frontline Sales Personnel In Semiconductor Manufacturing Markets, Daisuke Yahiro

Jesselton Journal of Educators and Scholars

This study examines the strategic role of frontline sales personnel within semiconductor manufacturing environments characterized by technological volatility, operational interdependence, and evolving customer demands. Drawing upon emergent strategy, strategy-as-practice, and organizational sensemaking perspectives, the study explores how frontline personnel contribute to organizational responsiveness and strategy formation beyond conventional execution-oriented roles. A qualitative interpretive research design grounded in pragmatism and symbolic interactionism was adopted. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews involving 12 participants engaged in semiconductor manufacturing sales, customer coordination, and managerial activities in Japan. The findings reveal that frontline personnel function as strategically embedded organizational actors who contribute to operational …

The Impact Of Leadership Communication And Organizational Trust On Psychological Safety And Employee Voice In Healthcare Organizations, Crystal D. Smith

M.S. in Leadership

Healthcare organizations operate in increasingly complex environments where effective communication, employee engagement, and patient safety are essential to organizational success. Despite the importance of employee voice, many healthcare professionals hesitate to express concerns, report errors, or share ideas for improvement because of perceived interpersonal and organizational risks. This study examines how leadership communication and organizational trust influence psychological safety and employee voice within healthcare organizations. Using a qualitative literature review, the study synthesizes scholarly research from healthcare leadership, organizational behavior, organizational psychology, healthcare management, and patient safety. The review explores major themes, including psychological safety, leadership communication, organizational trust, employee …

Beyond The Romance Of Leadership: Shackleton, Self-Inflicted Crisis, And The Values Of Recovery, Carl Lee Tolbert

The Journal of Values-Based Leadership

Two men answered to the name Ernest Shackleton. One belonged to the ice, where he was pioneering, inspirational, and heroic. The other belonged to dry land, where he was restless, indebted, and unfulfilled (Smith, 2014). The 1914 to 1916 Endurance expedition has become the most celebrated leadership case study of the past century, a status the 2022 discovery of the ship's preserved wreck has only hardened. Public and scholarly sentiment runs overwhelmingly positive. This article reads that sentiment as a late expression of what Meindl and colleagues named the Romance of Leadership, the disposition to attribute outcomes to dramatic individual …

The Character Fractal: A Theory Of Virtue Replication In Organizations, Kevin Davis, Scott Kozlak, Matthew M. Orlowsky, David Levy

The Journal of Values-Based Leadership

Organizational ethics has long been treated as an individual problem requiring individual solutions: the right traits, the right training, the right people in the right roles. This paper argues that framing is fundamentally insufficient. While character and virtue ultimately reside in persons, character development within organizations emerges through recursive ethical interactions shaped by incentives, narratives, feedback loops, and habituation structures cultivated by systems leaders. It replicates, or fails to, across every scale of human interaction, from the unobserved micro-decision of a single employee to the macro-level architecture of executive leadership. Drawing on Mandelbrot's fractal geometry, Lorenz's chaos theory, Kauffman's complexity …

The Power And Peril Of Awe In Leadership: Transforming Follower Identity And Behavior, Jack Mcguire, Daniel Mcallister, Jochen Menges, David De Cremer

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Awe is a profound emotion that has captured significant attention within psychological research. While the potential for leaders to inspire awe in followers has received some recognition, systematic research on the nature and effects of awe in leadership—and within organizational contexts more broadly—remains limited. In this article, we offer a conceptual framework that explains the multifaceted and transformative nature of leadership through the power of awe. Specifically, we identify four leader behaviors—charismatic leadership tactics, exceptional performance, problem reframing, and self-sacrificial behavior—that elicit awe among followers. We further propose three variants of awe-inspiring leaders, describing how variation in a leader’s self-construal …