Participation in Micro-Finance Programmes and Women’s Mental Health in South Asia: A Modified Systematic Review

Micro-finance provides financial services to poor women from developing countries where cultural and social constraints limit their opportunities for economic advancement. Using Forbes’s process of conducting systematic review, 12 quantitative studies from South Asia reporting on the impact of micro-finance on women’s mental health outcomes were analysed. Overall, studies revealed that the duration and depth of involvement in micro-finance activities would make a difference in women’s mental health and not just receiving loans; however, rigorous programme evaluation is needed. Collaborative actions by micro-finance and health care practitioners to recognise women’s mental health needs and to strengthen measures to optimise the beneficial effects of micro-finance must be considered.     

Assessing Best Practice as a Means of Innovation

This paper argues that Best Practice and innovation are different, if related activities, with Best Practice being just one of the means by which organisations can innovate. After reviewing the literatures on innovation diffusion and policy transfer, this paper reports the findings of two surveys of Best Practice in English local authorities on, respectively, regeneration and community safety. The paper finds that innovation is related to the CPA, but use of Best Practice is not; that greater capacity affects both innovation and the use of Best Practice; and that there is little link within authorities in the degree of innovation between policy sectors. In evaluating the use of Best Practice, the paper finds that local authorities encounter problems with assessing whether Best Practice is appropriate for their authority and judging whether Best Practice is in fact best practice. With Best Practice guides, the key problem is the difficulty in assessing whether the practice is as effective as the guides suggest and whether it would really work in a particular authority. The paper concludes that more effort could be made to ensure that readers of Best Practice guides can find out how the innovations really work and how they can be adapted to local needs.     

Reflective and decisive supervision: The role of participative leadership and team climate in joint decision-making

Supervisory bodies can intervene in organizational practices that may harm society, but their effectiveness to do so depends on their ability to make decisions reflectively and decisively. Are these tendencies incompatible with each other or can they go together? Can empowering leadership (i.e. participative, coaching, informing behaviors) stimulate reflectiveness and decisiveness? A 10-item Joint Decision-Making Questionnaire was developed and tested among supervisory officers (N = 87) and supervisory board members (N = 158). Reflectiveness and decisiveness were positively correlated, indicating that these tendencies can be reconciled in joint decision-making (Study 1). An examination of 44 supervisory teams further revealed that participative leadership relates to more reflectiveness and decisiveness, via cooperative trust and goal commitment (Study 2). Moreover, teams that experienced this team climate prior to COVID-19 reported that they acted more reflectively and decisively during this crisis (Study 3). Hence, participative leaders can foster reflectiveness and decisiveness, by promoting cooperative trust and goal commitment.