Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate how people cope with boredom at work, and whether differences in “boredom coping” effectiveness are associated with differences in employee well‐being, and safety behaviour. Design/methodology/approach: The authors used two methods to gather information for this paper. Employees in a chemical processing organisation (n=212) completed a survey of individual boredom coping levels, self‐reported safety compliance, and a range of well‐being variables. Also, critical incident interviews with a sub‐sample of survey respondents (n=16) elicited strategies that employees use to cope with boredom at work. Findings: High boredom‐copers reported better well‐being and greater compliance with organisational safety rules compared with low boredom‐copers. Relative to low boredom‐copers, high boredom‐copers tended to cope with boredom in ways that were more functional for themselves and the organisation. Research limitations/implications: Because the research was exploratory and cross‐sectional conclusions are necessarily tentative. However, the findings add to the scant body of knowledge about workplace boredom and serve as a useful guide to future research. Practical implications: This approach offers new insights into how the negative effects of boredom might be managed in future, both individually and organisationally. Training in boredom coping skills, in conjunction with job redesign initiatives, may help to reduce the frequency and impact of boredom at work. Originality/value: Boredom at work is an important yet neglected area of human resource management research. The present study is the first to examine the construct of “boredom coping” at work and to demonstrate a potential link between differences in boredom coping tendency and employee health and safety outcomes

The reasons why supervisory/line management relationships are one of the most frequently cited causes of workplace negative emotions are poorly understood. Existing research on emotions at work provides some clues but largely omits the role of relational context. Drawing on attachment theory, the present research develops a model suggesting that employees hold differing relational models of their supervisory relationship in conjunction with global relational models that they bring with them to the workplace. Together, these relational models are associated with different interpretations of supervisor behaviour, which in turn are associated with differences in emotional reactions. The model was tested with a survey of 174 nurses employed in a UK NHS Trust. Some support was found for the propositions. The research highlights that in order to understand why negative emotions occur in supervisory relationships it is important to examine affective events within the historical relational context in which they occur.K E Y WO R D S attachment theory emotions leadership relational models supervisors Negative emotions at work have potentially innumerable sources (Fisher, 2000) but working relationships, and supervisory or line management relationships in particular, are one of the most frequently cited causes (e.g.

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HRM and Migration scholars increasingly employ Bourdieu's concepts of capitals, fields and habitus to explain the interrelationships between migrant careers and context. Both literatures employ a Bourdieusean framework to examine devaluation of migrant capitals in host nations and migrant responses to such devaluation. However, their explanations are based on different assumptions of context. HRM literature regards migrants as confined to the host nation context, whereas Migration literature places them in a transnational context, spanning both originating and host nations. In this conceptual paper, we argue for integrating transnational perspectives into HRM literature to offer a more accurate portrayal of contemporary migrant lives, and to capture greater nuance in migrant career experiences. We seek to expand the conceptual lexicon to support new conceptualisations of transnational context, and to explore how locating a Bourdieusean framework in transnational contexts enhances its ability to explain migrant career experiences.