Across occupations, people contend with the difficult task of managing time between their work and other aspects of life. Previous research on stigmatized industries has suggested that so-called ‘dirty workers’ experience extreme identity segmentation between these two realms because they tend to cope with their occupational stigma by placing distance between their work and personal lives. Through a qualitative study of Nevada’s legal brothel industry, this article focuses on the prevalence of boundary segmentation as a dominant work–life management practice for dirty workers. Our analysis suggests that work–life boundaries are disciplined by legal mythologies and ambiguities surrounding worker restrictions, occupational ideologies of ‘work now, life later,’ and perceived and experienced effects of community-based stigma. These legal, occupational and community constructs ultimately privilege organizations’ and external communities’ interests, while individual dirty workers carry the weight of stigma.
This article investigates the role of ‘truth’ as an object of contention within organizations, with specific reference to the ‘politics of truth’ in the WikiLeaks case. For an empirical illustration of a ‘truth game’, this article draws on varied accounts of the WikiLeaks whistle-blowing website. The article shows how different ‘truth games’ are mobilized by different organizational actors engaged in a politics of truth. The article demonstrates the existence of different truth games at work in the WikiLeaks case. It shows WikiLeaks’ profound challenge to hegemonic games of truth in terms of a ‘networked parhessia’, which entails a radical transformation of the process of truth-telling in support of whistle-blowers and in pursuit of an explicitly emancipatory, anarchist political agenda. Networked parhessia provides a new infrastructure to enable a ‘parhessia of the governed’. This article demonstrates how WikiLeaks is of singular importance as a case study of organizational resistance in the way it moves beyond micropolitical acts of resistance, such as whistle-blowing, towards an engagement with wider political struggles.
This article examines the emergence of informal leadership in multinational teams. Building on and extending status characteristics theory, the article proposes and tests a model that describes how global inequalities reproduce in multinational teams, and accounts for who gets to lead these teams. It is argued that an individual’s language (i.e. a specific status characteristic) and nationality (i.e. a diffuse status characteristic) predict deference received from peers (i.e. leadership status). However, individuals enhance and/or compensate for the effects of their status characteristics by virtue of their core self-evaluations. A study of over 230 individuals from 46 nationalities working in 36 self-managing teams generally supports the expected main and moderation effects. Individual core self-evaluations enhance an otherwise weak effect of English proficiency, but compensate for low levels of national development. The article concludes with implications for practice, and linking micro- and macro-level theories of status and global inequality.
Brokers are expected to be more creative than employees embedded in closed social structures because they occupy a position in the social space that provides them with access to non-redundant knowledge. However, the extant research provides partly inconsistent findings on the creative implications of brokerage, which raises important questions about when and how brokering between otherwise disconnected colleagues leads to individual creativity. We advance the relational perspective on individual creativity by adopting a contingency view, and showing that a curvilinear (inverted U-shape) specification of the relationship between brokerage and creativity applies particularly when brokers work in research and development, as they are more likely to intensively exploit their structural opportunities. In addition, we show that brokers who work in research and development are more sensitive to work environments that protect their cognitive resources, such that they exhibit greater creativity when the work environment is free from environmental stressors, such as noise and disturbances. Thus, environmental stressors are particularly harmful for those employees who are most likely to exploit the opportunity to broker across otherwise disconnected colleagues.
This article explores how postfeminist and prosperity gospel discourses intersect in an organizational context to produce a particular ideal of feminine subjectivity that reproduces a neoliberal agenda. We focus on narratives written by female national vice presidents in a multi-national network marketing organization headquartered in America. Network marketing tends to attract a vast number of women who are enticed by grand messages of material and spiritual riches; however, such messages are often at odds with the precarious and uncertain working conditions. We contribute to gender and organization scholarship by introducing the concept of evangelical entrepreneurial femininity to explore the tensions and demands that are placed on women in an organizational context where postfeminism and prosperity gospel discourses intersect. In doing so, we question the expectations and constraints that many working women negotiate in this neoliberal age of alleged ‘freedom’ and ‘equality,’ and raise a number of concerns for feminist critique.
Systematic research considering job context as affecting ethnic discrimination in hiring is limited. Building on contemporary literature on social categorization and cognitive matching, the interactive effect of context characteristics (client contact; industry status) and person characteristics (i.e. ethnic cues: Maghreb/Arab vs Flemish-sounding name; dark vs light skin tone) were investigated using an experimental field study among 424 white majority HR professionals. Findings showed that equally qualified applicants with a dark skin tone received lower job suitability ratings than applicants with a light skin tone, particularly when they were screened for high client contact/low industry status positions and low client contact/high industry status positions. It is concluded that some ethnic cues (such as skin tone) may be more salient compared with other cues and that job context may influence the salience of ethnic cues and steer hiring discrimination in subtle ways. Implications of these findings for hiring discrimination research and organizations are discussed.
The concept of authentic leadership rose to prominence through its idealization as an inherently moral and universally desirable trait. We problematize this romantic notion by exploring how the ‘authenticity’ of the CEOs of four major Australian banks was discursively constructed before and during the global financial crisis (GFC). Using multimodal discourse analysis of media texts, we show how what it meant to be an ‘authentic leader’ was co-constructed differently by the CEOs and the media. We also highlight the dynamic nature of context, where the GFC was variously framed by and for each of the CEOs. Our study challenges the acontextual notion of authentic leadership by showing how a discursively constructed context can reinforce or undermine leaders’ narratives of authenticity.
This article elaborates the organizational literature’s process theory of compassion – an empathic response to suffering – which falls short of adequately explaining why and how compassion unfolds readily in some workplace situations or settings but not in others. We address this shortcoming by calling attention to the basic uncertainty of suffering and compassion, demonstrating that this uncertainty tends to be particularly pronounced in organizational settings, and presenting propositions that explain how such uncertainty inhibits the compassion process. We then argue that understanding the accomplishment of compassion in the midst of uncertainty necessitates regarding compassion as an enactment of courage, and we incorporate insights from the organizational literature on everyday courageous action into compassion theory. We conclude with a discussion of implications in which we underscore the importance of organizational support for the expression of suffering and the doing of compassion, and we also consider directions for future research.
Meta-analysis (the statistical combination of a set of studies in a given area, with the aim of establishing an overall or average effect of something) is increasingly common in work and organization studies. Critiques of meta-analysis are now common. There is also a well-known alternative based in realism. The purpose in bringing together the two papers by Nielsen and Miraglia and by Vincent and colleagues is not to rehearse the critiques or simply explain realism or realist evaluation. The two papers certainly perform these functions in setting out problems with meta-analysis and also identifying when and to what extent it remains valid. The goal, however, is to move forward by showing what a realist synthesis would look like and illustrating how it works. Vincent and colleagues lay out the principles, while Nielsen and Miraglia take the case of intervention studies to show how realist evaluation works.
This article analyses the ethno-cultural identities of Chinese Australian professionals through a postcolonial lens. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 21 participants, it explores how they engaged in self-Orientalism; casting themselves as exotic commodities for the benefit of white people and institutions. In particular, they enacted Chinese stereotypes through ‘mythtapping’ and ‘mythkeeping’ in order to secure recognition under the white gaze. As mythtappers, professionals presented themselves as custodians of an ancient and mysterious culture that offered organizational wisdoms for ‘the West.’ As mythkeepers, the professionals allayed white anxieties by surrendering themselves to white Australians as pathways into their communities. However, the professionals’ Orientalized identities are not passively determined, but are in some cases tactically and strategically resisted through ‘mythbusting.’ The article contributes to postcolonial theorizing by demonstrating how imperialist ideologies constrain the lives of people beyond the colonizer/colonized dichotomy and by illuminating the potential for their resistance against Orientalization.
Meta-analysis has proved increasingly popular in management and organization studies as a way of combining existing empirical quantitative research to generate a statistical estimate of how strongly variables are associated. Whilst a number of studies identify technical, procedural and practical limitations of meta-analyses, none have yet tackled the meta-theoretical flaws in this approach. We deploy critical realist meta-theory to argue that the individual quantitative studies, upon which meta-analysis relies, lack explanatory power because they are rooted in quasi-empiricist meta-theory. This problem, we argue, is carried over in meta-analyses. We then propose a ‘critical realist synthesis’ as a potential alternative to the use of meta-analysis in organization studies and social science more widely.
A debate has arisen out of the need to understand true intervention outcomes in the social sciences. Traditionally, the randomized, controlled trial that answers the question of ‘what works’ has been considered the gold standard. Although randomized, controlled trials have been favoured in organizational intervention research, there has been an increasing interest in understanding the influence of context and intervention processes on the outcomes of such interventions. In the present critical essay, we question the suitability of trials and meta-analyses to evaluate the effectiveness of organizational interventions and we suggest that realist evaluation that seeks to answer the questions of what works for whom in which circumstances may present a more suitable framework. We argue that examining the content and process mechanisms through which organizational interventions are effective, and the conditions under which these are triggered, will enable us to better understand how interventions achieve the desired outcomes of improved employee health and well-being. We suggest that organizational intervention content and process mechanisms may help bring about the desired outcomes of improved employee health and well-being and that contextual factors determine whether these mechanisms are triggered.
The impact of work–family conflict on well-being outcomes is well established, as is the role of social support in buffering perceptions of conflict. What is less well understood is how these relationships vary for different groups of respondents. Using a two-wave longitudinal design with a 12-month time lag and samples of employees (total N = 2183) from Australia, New Zealand, China and Hong Kong, the present research investigated whether the mediating relationships between social support, work–family conflict and well-being outcomes were moderated by gender, geographical region and the presence of dependants in the household. Supervisor support and family support were associated with lower work–family conflict, and hence reduced psychological strain and increased job and family satisfaction, for women and for employees in China and Hong Kong, but not for employees in Australia and New Zealand. However, the presence of dependants was not a significant moderator. Our findings illustrate the importance of exploring gender and national differences in work–family conflict research, particularly the investigation of cross-domain effects.
The extent of recent misconduct in retail financial services questions assumptions that mis-selling is perpetrated by rogue traders dealing in sub-prime markets. Yet we know little about the organizational dimensions of mis-selling and specifically how new employees are introduced to and subsequently enact mis-selling behaviour when not explicitly encouraged to do so. This article seeks to understand the mechanics of mis-selling through an ethnographic account of the opening of a new retail financial services call centre, and analysis of the ritual nature of the sales interaction. The study documents the training, induction and initial work of direct sales agents to better understand the complexity, social relations and organization of mis-selling, together with the way in which regulation and management regimes shape sales practice and consequent employee behaviour. The critical analysis of sales rituals allows us to explain how mis-selling becomes embedded in organizational practice and contributes to our understanding of the everydayness of mis-selling in contrast to approaches that focus either on individual decision-making or on cultural explanations.
This study, based on in-depth interviews with 45 practitioners in the emerging field of environmental sustainability, argues for a more nuanced approach to studying the meaningfulness of work. Drawing from the tension-centered approach, we posit that sustainability practitioners derived meaningfulness in tensional ways from circumstances and factors that were both enabling and constraining, stemming from various organizational, professional and political structures. This occurs through ongoing negotiation that spans everyday work processes, the perceived impact of such work, and participants’ career positioning. In addition to examining meaningfulness as a dynamic and contested negotiation, rather than a purely positive outcome, the political implications of such meaning-making are traced. We close by discussing some implications for future research on meaningfulness of work.
Because job crafting research proposes that individuals alter jobs on their own, there is an open debate on how others influence an individual’s job crafting. Whereas previous research has recognized that incumbents engage in job crafting depending on the characteristics of their own job, this study shows that job crafting depends on the job characteristics of the incumbents’ network contacts, meaning all employees in the organization with whom the incumbents frequently communicate about task-related issues. Applying role theory, the article theorizes that network contacts act as role senders who affect job crafting because they communicate role expectations that vary as a function of their own task activities. Key empirical findings show that contacts’ autonomy and contacts’ feedback from the job positively affect job crafting, whereas contacts’ task significance exercises a negative effect. The findings further show that the effect of job crafting on performance depends on the central position occupied by the incumbent in the network of relationships. When designing jobs, managers should therefore not only consider the tasks of each single incumbent but also the tasks of the people connected to him or her.
This organizational life history documents how the founder of an elite gymnastics training organization led her organizational members to resist what she deemed to be unethical institutional influences prior to working toward changing those institutional practices. The study contributes the idea that institutional resistance leadership at the team and organizational levels can precede disruptive institutional entrepreneurship activities at the institutional level. The diachronic analysis describes the micro, local, historical, intra-organizational work that serves as a proving ground for generating resistance before proceeding to institutional level work; in doing so, the article explores how leadership activities can be ‘scaled up’ to affect institutions through the intermediary of an organization. Identity violations triggered a founder’s sensemaking and moved her to lead others to resist institutional forces on her own organization’s training practices. The founder used the rhetorical strategy of narrative to create sensebreaking to help members make sense of the dominant institutional influence, articulate an alternative philosophy, translate the alternative into practices, and acquire material resources for undertaking resistance at the local organizational level. Finally, in attempting to scale up to institutional entrepreneurship, the institutional resistance leadership then struggled with defining success for the organization in the view of dominant institutional actors.
In recent years, Michael Burawoy has sparked a discussion about the role of social sciences in society. He calls for an increased interaction between different value spheres in social science, because ‘the flourishing of each depends on the flourishing of all.’ To ensure this interaction, he proposes that we pay better attention to the micro-politics of academic lives, not least their historical, geographical and biographical specificity. The current article contributes to this agenda, contextualized in the field of Organization Studies. It analyzes the vocational micro-politics of organization scholars, especially with a focus on historical and biographical specificity. Based on in-depth interviews with 15 senior scholars, many considered founding figures of Organization Studies, I analyze how they navigate value tensions in different historical periods. To understand historical differences, the article draws on a combination of Burawoy and Boltanski and Chiapello. To understand individual navigation of value spheres, I apply terms such as selective incorporation, decoupling, antagonism and double attribution. In the end, I discuss how some scholars navigate spheres to ensure mutual correction while others navigate them to enable opportunism. The latter is a tempting strategy for young scholars trying to survive extreme performance pressures today.
In this article, we develop the founding elements of the concept of Communities of Practice by elaborating on the learning processes happening at the heart of such communities. In particular, we provide a consistent perspective on the notions of knowledge, knowing and knowledge sharing that is compatible with the essence of this concept – that learning entails an investment of identity and a social formation of a person. We do so by drawing richly from the work of Michael Polanyi and his conception of personal knowledge, and thereby we clarify the scope of Communities of Practice and offer a number of new insights into how to make such social structures perform well in professional settings. The conceptual discussion is substantiated by findings of a qualitative empirical study in the UK National Health Service. As a result, the process of ‘thinking together’ is conceptualized as a key part of meaningful Communities of Practice where people mutually guide each other through their understandings of the same problems in their area of mutual interest, and this way indirectly share tacit knowledge. The collaborative learning process of ‘thinking together’, we argue, is what essentially brings Communities of Practice to life and not the other way round.
This article explores the intersection of branding, identity and control. It develops the notion of identity-incentive branding and links research on the collective-associative construction of occupational identities with work on identity incentives as an engaging form of control. Empirically, we draw on a case study of a North American grocery chain that is known for employing art-school graduates and other creative talents in creative (store artist) and non-creative shop-floor positions. The study shows that the brand is partly built outside–in through association with employees who embody brand-relevant characteristics in their identities and lifestyles. In return, those employees receive identity opportunities to validate their desired sense of self as ‘creative subject’. We discuss the dual nature of identity-incentive branding as neo-normative control and outline its implications for the organization and the employees.
This article aims to move sensemaking theory forward by exploring a post-humanist view of how sense is made in material-discursive practices. Answering recent calls for novel theoretical views on sensemaking, we adopt a relational ontology, assuming subject and object to be ontologically entangled, and viewing agency as a circulating flow through material-discursive practices. Employing this perspective, we study how sensemaking unfolds at the emergency ward of a Nordic university hospital. By working through the concepts of material-discursive practices, flow of agency and subject positions, we produce an account of sensemaking that decenters the human actor as the locus and source of sensemaking, and foregrounds the performativity of practices through which certain ways of acting become enacted as sensible. This allows us to propose an alternative to the traditional view of sensemaking as episodic, cognitive-discursive practices enacted within and between separate human actors. With this view, what makes sense is understood as a material-discursive practice and related subject positions, which owing to their specific positioning in the circulating flow of agency emerge as sensible. Consequently, every actor is not just making sense, but is also already being made sense of; positioning and being positioned in the flow of agency.
Scholars have called repeatedly for more nuanced understandings of power and organizational knowledge, but researchers have yet to integrate available critical frameworks that could link these concepts. Moreover, existing analyses of power in organizational knowledge tend to focus on role differences but do not yet consider how social differences – including gender, race and sexuality – shape knowledge. Working from a practice-based approach, I draw upon standpoint theory and intersectionality to show how whiteness, masculinity and heteronormativity are embedded in organizational knowledge. I construct this argument using a case study at a US university known for having some of the best systems for building organizational knowledge about sexual violence on campus. I argue that the university’s practices – specifically those related to interpretation and definition – mask heterogeneity in knowledge across the university. I also show how practices give the university’s knowledge the appearance of neutrality and, subsequently, can unintentionally defer important organizational actions.
Employee safety citizenship behaviors are crucial to risk management in safety-critical industries, and identifying ways to encourage them is a priority. This study examines (i) whether safety citizenship behaviors are a product of social exchanges between employees and organizations, and (ii) the organizational exchanges (i.e. actual activities to support employees) that underlie this relationship. We studied this in the offshore oil and gas industry, and investigated whether organizational activities for supporting workforce health are a signal to employees that the organization supports them, and an antecedent to safety citizenship behaviors. Using questionnaires, we collected data from employees (n = 820) and medics (n = 30) on 22 offshore installations. Multi-level path analysis found that where activities to support workforce health were greater, offshore employees were more likely to perceive their organization to support them, and in turn report more commitment to the organization and safety citizenship behaviors. This indicates safety citizenship behaviors are a product of social exchange, and provides insight on how organizations can influence employee engagement in them. It also suggests social exchange theory as a useful framework for investigating how organizational safety is influenced by workforce relations. We contributed to the social exchange literature through conceptualizing and demonstrating how organizational exchanges lead to reciprocal employee citizenship behaviors.
This article investigates the interactive effects of extrinsic value orientation and competence supportive feedback on the work outcomes of in-role and extra-role performance, and employees’ subjective well-being at work. Two studies are presented with samples consisting of a cross-section of employees and, for Study 1, their managers. In keeping with established theory and findings, competence supportive feedback demonstrated positive and significant main effects. In support of this article’s unique predictions, these relationships were amplified (in-role and extra-role performance) and attenuated (subjective well-being) at higher levels of individual extrinsic value orientation. Findings for well-being were more closely examined with the second sample, and an underlying mechanism of experienced work demands was identified. Thus, it seems that motivational sensitivity to the instrumental value of competence supportive feedback, in addition to its recognized psychological value, may drive work engagement all too well. Implications for future research and performance management are discussed.
Recent literature suggests that elites are increasingly fragmented and divided. Yet there is very little empirical research that maps the distinctions between different elite groups. This article explores the cultural divisions that pertain to elite factions in two distinct but proximate Strategic Action Fields. A key insight from the article is that the public sector faction studied exhibits a much broader, more aesthetic set of cultural dispositions than their private sector counterparts. This permits a number of inter-related contributions to be made to literature on both elites and field theory. First, the findings suggest that cultural capital acts as a salient source of distinction between elite factions in different Strategic Action Fields. Second, it is demonstrated how cultural capital is socially functional as certain cultural dispositions are strongly homologous with specific professional roles. Third, the article demonstrates the implications for the structure of the State when two culturally distinct elites are brought together in a new Strategic Action Field.
This article critically analyses the manner in which intersectionality and related social positionality shape digital enterprise activities. Despite popular claims of meritocratic opportunity enactment within traditional forms of entrepreneurship, ascribed social characteristics intersect to influence the realization of entrepreneurial potential. However, it is purported that the emerging field of digital entrepreneurship may act as a ‘great leveller’ owing to perceived lower barriers to entry, disembodiment of the entrepreneurial actor and the absence of visible markers of disadvantage online. Using an interpretivist approach, we analyse empirical evidence that reveals how the privileges and disadvantages arising from intersecting social positions of gender, race and class status are experienced by UK women digital entrepreneurs. This analysis challenges the notion that the internet is a neutral platform for entrepreneurship and supports our thesis that offline inequality, in the form of marked bodies, social positionality and associated resource constraints, is produced and reproduced in the online environment.
The quality of working life became an important topic in the 1960s and 1970s, helping to stimulate an early approach to evidence-based policy advocacy drawing on interdisciplinary research by social scientists. Over the years it fell out of the limelight but much relevant, albeit fragmented, research has continued. We present a case for rekindling an integrated and normative approach to quality of working life research as one means of promoting workers’ well-being and emancipation. We outline an updated classification of the characteristics of quality of working life and a related analytic framework. We illustrate how research and practice will benefit from following this renewed quality of working life framework, using work design as an example. Concluding, we aim to stimulate debate on the necessity and benefits of rebuilding a quality of working life agenda for marrying academic rigour and practical relevance in order to support interventions aimed at fostering worker emancipation and well-being.
Whereas historically the UK television industry has been characterized by hierarchy and vertical integration of programme production within a few large broadcasters, new neo-bureaucratic temporary organizational forms have proliferated in the industry in the past 20 years. This has been a product of a variety of factors, including globalization, technological change in the industry, deregulation and cost-cutting. This article draws on research involving 75 participants working in the large broadcasters, independents and as freelancers. The temporary form in the industry is an extreme case, in that they can be of very short duration (under a week). This has far-reaching implications for industry coordination and control. However, these forms are far from ‘one-offs’ and they are continuously reinvented and recast. This neo-bureaucratic form is controlled and regulated by the major producers through a set of powerful normative methods, based partly on an evolving custom and practice, but also in the extreme familiarity of people in the industry, across the large broadcasters, the independents and freelancers. The article evaluates how the structures, processes and coordination of these organizations through the manipulation of social capital in the industry are used to regulate and control a set of confused and ‘messy’ temporary arrangements.
This article uses systems psychodynamic concepts to explore the creation and reproduction of gendered inequality within the New Zealand film industry. The article focuses on the ways in which senior film production workers’ anxieties about hiring, or working with, women influence the process of assembling project teams. It suggests that the process of choosing team members creates considerable anxiety for both senior film production workers with responsibility for hiring and lower-status team members who need to rely on them to create high-functioning teams. The industry ideal of the autonomous creative worker is implicitly gendered, conforming more closely to traditional concepts of the unencumbered male worker than traditional ideals of femininity and motherhood. The antithesis between these representations creates anxiety, raising unconscious fears that women as a category are less trustworthy workers. Consequently, discriminatory hiring practices that diminish these anxieties become collectively accepted as rational responses to organizational problems and embedded within the social system as collectively endorsed defences against anxiety. Given that project-based employment is temporary, this pattern of discrimination against women is regularly repeated and contributes to entrenched gender inequality within the film industry. Qualitative data from interviews with 12 male and 13 female film production workers is presented to illustrate this analysis.
Whereas tensions arising from the pursuit of ambidexterity have been documented, how these are interpreted and managed by actors themselves remains largely unexplored. Based on in-depth case research in a large Scandinavian-based telecommunications organization pursuing ambidexterity, we identify a path-dependent process of tension interpretation and tension management at different levels of the organization. Our findings suggest that, in the context of an ambidextrous strategy, actors are actively involved in managing arising tensions based on their differing interpretations of these tensions (where ambidextrous demands are seen as complementary, conflicting or interrelated). We find that these interpretations are influenced by actors’ strategic orientation and organizational level. Our study extends understanding of the pursuit of ambidexterity in practice, offering a pluralist, path-dependent perspective of how actors perceive and deal with ambidexterity tensions.
Reviewer of the Year Award 2015 and thanks to our reviewers. Human Relations 68(12): 1937–1947.
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Drawing on ethnographical work at the Swedish Public Employment Service, this article contextualizes functional stupidity in relation to other types of organizational compliance. Rather than seeing stupidity as a personality trait, I argue that it should be regarded as a transient unreflective mode of compliance one may yield to for a number of reasons but also reflect on in hindsight. Based on the empirical material, I distinguish 10 ‘stupidity rationales’ emanating from reflective types of compliance with which employees can motivate the practice of functional stupidity. Functional stupidity can be seen as the modus operandi of ego-dystonic compliance we enter in order to endure long hours of imposed work assignments we would rather not perform.
Giving the crucial role of organizational context in shaping individual attitudes and behaviors at work, in this research we studied the effects of collective work-unit perceptions of social context on individual work resilience and two key individual outcomes: job satisfaction and job performance as rated by the supervisor. We theorized that collective perceptions of social context act as antecedents of individual variables, and that individual job satisfaction mediates the relationship between collective perceptions of social context and job performance, and between work resilience and job performance over time. A sample of 305 white-collar employees, clustered in 67 work-units, participated in the study. Hierarchical linear modeling highlighted that collective perceptions of social context are significant related to individual work resilience. Moreover, results showed that individual job satisfaction fully mediates the relationship between collective perceptions of social context and individual job performance and the relationship between individual work resilience and individual job performance. At a practical level, results suggest that interventions on collective perceptions of social context may increase work resilience, job satisfaction and job performance over time at the individual level.
This article examines how tensions in institutional logics, created in the formation of hybrid organizations, are played out, and partially resolved, through micro-level interactions within everyday work. Drawing on the negotiated order perspective, our research examined how the ‘context’, ‘processes’ and ‘outcomes’ of micro-level negotiations reflect and mitigate tensions between institutional logics. Our ethnographic study of a public–private partnership within the English healthcare system identified tensions within the hybrid organization around organizational goals and values, work activities, hierarchies and the materials and technologies of work. We also identified processes of negotiation between actors, which contributed to negotiated settlements, at times combining elements of parent institutional logics, and at other times serving to keep parent logics distinct. The article demonstrates the relevance of negotiated order perspective to current institutional logics literature on hybrid organizations.
This article explores the methodological possibilities that Butler’s theory of performativity opens up, attempting to ‘translate’ her theoretical ideas into research practice. Specifically, it considers how research on organizational subjectivity premised upon a performative ontology might be undertaken. It asks: What form might a Butler-inspired methodology take? What methodological opportunities might it afford for developing self-reflexive research? What political and ethical problems might it pose for organizational researchers, particularly in relation to the challenges associated with power asymmetries, and the risks attached to ‘fixing’ subjects within the research process? The article outlines and evaluates a method described as anti-narrative interviewing, arguing that it constitutes a potentially valuable methodological resource for researchers interested in understanding how and why idealized organizational subjectivities are formed and sustained. It further advances the in-roads that Butler’s writing has made into organization studies, thinking through the methodological and ethical implications of her work for understanding the performative constitution of organizational subjectivities. The aim of the article is to advocate a research practice premised upon a reflexive undoing of organizational subjectivities and the normative conditions upon which they depend. It concludes by emphasizing the potential benefits and wider implications of a methodologically reflexive undoing of organizational performativity.
Person–environment fit has been found to have significant implications for employee attitudes and behaviors. Most research to date has approached person–environment fit as a static phenomenon, and without examining how different types of person–environment fit may affect each other. In particular, little is known about the conditions under which fit with one aspect of the environment influences another aspect, as well as subsequent behavior. To address this gap we examine the role of leader–member exchange in the relationship between two types of person–environment fit over time: person–organization and person–job fit, and subsequent turnover. Using data from two waves (T1 and T2, respectively) and turnover data collected two years later (T3) from a sample of 160 employees working in an elderly care organization in the Netherlands, we find that person–organization fit at T1 is positively associated with person–job fit at T2, but only for employees in high-quality leader–member exchange relationships. Higher needs–supplies fit at T2 is associated with lower turnover at T3. In contrast, among employees in high-quality leader–member exchange relationships, the demands–abilities dimension of person–job fit at T2 is associated with higher turnover at T3.
Recent conceptual work suggests that the sense of identity that employees develop vis-vis their organization goes beyond the traditional notion of organizational identification and can also involve conflicting impulses represented by ambivalent identification. In this study, we seek to advance this perspective on identification by proposing and empirically examining important antecedents and consequences. In line with our hypotheses, an experimental study (N = 199 employees) shows that organizational identification and ambivalent identification interactively influence employees’ willingness to engage in organizational citizenship behavior. The effect of organizational identification on organizational citizenship behavior is significantly reduced when employees experience ambivalent identification. A field study involving employees from a broad spectrum of organizations and industries (N = 564) replicated these findings. Moreover, results show that employees’ promotion and prevention focus form differential relationships with organizational identification and ambivalent identification, providing first evidence for a link between employees’ regulatory focus and the dynamics of identification. Implications for the expanded model of organizational identification and the understanding of ambivalence in organizations are discussed.
The meaningfulness of the physical place within which resistance is nurtured and enacted has not been carefully considered in research on space and organizations. In this article, we offer two stories of middle managers developing resistance to managerial policies and decisions. We show that the appropriation and reconstruction of specific places by middle managers helps them to build autonomous resisting work thanks to the meanings that resisters attribute to the place in which they undertake resistance. We contribute to the literature on space and organizations by showing that resistance is a social experience through which individuals shape physical places and exploit the geographical blurring of organizations to develop political efforts that can be consequential. We also suggest the central role played by middle managers in the subversion of these meaningful places of resistance.
What follows examines the shifting nature of work to argue that we need to look beyond the employment relationship and the work organization to understand labour. It suggests one tendency in capitalism is to generate ‘all labour as productive of value’ (Harvie, 2005: 161), so that we subsume life to work. The article also suggests that, rather than being new, this development is an intensification of the past. Indeed, by returning to early management writers, it asserts that we can see the scale of management’s political ambition to subsume life to work. As such, to understand labour we need to comprehend the broader issue of capitalism’s social reproduction and the manner in which it recalibrates the subject as a ‘subject of value’.
In this article we explore how elite actors respond to a field-wide crisis. Drawing from a study of CEOs of large US banks in the immediate aftermath of the global financial crisis, we show how elite actors use rhetorical strategies to defend their dominant position in the field. Specifically, we show how actors strengthen their epistemic authority – the perceived expertise and trustworthiness of an actor – through four distinct but interwoven rhetorical strategies. Actors used two internally-directed means of strengthening epistemic authority by providing rational guarantees and expressing normative responsibilities, and two externally-directed strategies that sought to strengthen their own epistemic authority by lowering the epistemic authority of others through critiquing judgments and questioning motives. We contribute to research on defensive institutional work by highlighting how elite actors rhetorically defended their position following a field-wide crisis.
British employers, under increasing competitive pressures, and applying new technology and work organization, have sought to reduce labour costs, resulting in work intensification and precarity. Older employees as a result are exposed to work demands that conflict with expectations of favourable treatment in late career. National survey data for Britain in the years 1992, 2001, 2006 and 2012 demonstrate a decline in overall job attitude among older employees following the changed conditions of the 1990s and across the major recession that began in 2008. To assess whether this decline is unequally distributed, decomposition by socio-economic class is carried out. This shows that older employees in the ‘service class’ of managerial and professional employees are affected at least as much as older employees in intermediate and less-skilled classes, thus underlining the age effect and showing that ‘service-class’ employees are not invulnerable to a changing economic environment.
In this article, we focus on the organizing practices of a community-based, not-for-profit, social justice organization. We investigate how organizational participants interweave bundles of practices involving food and music to choreograph the affective relations that bring forth a sense of belonging, participation, recognition and respect between diverse people, thereby enacting social justice. This article examines the everyday, organizing practices associated with food and music and shows how not only are food and music excellent entrances to understanding organizational practices but they are also instrumental in constituting and reconstituting the performance of social justice. In this way, our article brings attention to the dimensions of knowing which are not primarily about representing but about affecting. In particular, practices of respect, recognition and belonging are rendered communicable across the boundaries of difference, dependency and inequality, forming platforms for solidarity and the understanding of differences. The article illustrates how organizing practices involving food and music play important roles in creating the conditions of possibility for diverse people to work collaboratively and respectfully together. We contend that the lived experience of organization cannot be understood without attentiveness to affect and affective relations.
This study unpacks the construct of theorization – the process by which organizational ideas become delocalized and abstracted into theoretical models to support their diffusion across time and space. We adopt an institutional work lens to analyse the key components of theorization in contexts where institutional work is in transition from changing institutions to maintaining them. We build on a longitudinal inductive study of theorization by the Fair Labor Association – a private regulatory initiative that created and then enforced a code of conduct for working conditions in apparel factories. Our study reveals that when institutional work shifts from changing to maintaining an institutional arrangement of corporate social responsibility, there is a key change in how the Fair Labor Association theorizes roles and practices related to this arrangement. We observe that theorization on key practices largely remains intact, whereas the roles of different actors are theorized in a dramatically different manner. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of the work involved in the aftermath of radical change by demonstrating the relative plasticity of roles over the rigidity of practices.
Members of teams are often prone to interpersonal communication patterns that can undermine the team’s capacity to engage in self-learning processes that are critical to team adaptation and performance improvement. We argue that team leader coaching behaviors are critical to ensuring that team discussions that may foster learning new teamwork skills and strategies are unfettered by the tendency of two or more members to exhibit contentious interpersonal communications. We accordingly test a model in which team contentious communication moderates the mediated relationship of team leader coaching behaviors on team innovation effectiveness and team task performance. In a study of 82 work teams, team leader coaching behaviors exhibited indirect, positive relationships with both team innovation effectiveness and team task performance through team learning, but only among teams with an average or higher level of contentious interpersonal communication. We discuss theoretical and practical implications for the leadership of teams.
The current study utilizes attachment theory to understand how leader–follower relationships impact emotional and behavioral outcomes in the workplace. Specifically, we examine the roles of two dysfunctional attachment styles – anxious and avoidant attachment – as determinants of trust in leaders, stress and citizenship behaviors. Results showed that followers with anxious attachment orientations reported experiencing more stress, whereas followers with avoidant attachment orientations were less likely to engage in organizational citizenship behaviors. Moreover, we found that the relationship between attachment orientations and workplace outcomes are mediated by affective and cognitive trust. However, these negative outcomes only occur when the follower has a leader with an avoidant attachment orientation. Implications for training, selection, job design and understanding leader–follower dynamics are discussed.
Very little is known about the linkages between expatriation and objective measures of career success. In this field study we address the expatriation–compensation attainment relationship, after controlling for different kinds of international experience, among 440 graduates of elite MBA programs from around the world. The results suggest that a positive compensation return only accrues to repatriates who have experienced more than one expatriate assignment, perceived acquired knowledge and skills to be utilized during post-repatriation periods, and who are working at higher organizational levels. These findings, along with a supplementary analysis, support an explanation of the results based on human capital theory. That is, expatriation relates to compensation attainment because it is an intense developmental experience, and not merely a selection or signaling mechanism. Furthermore, by incorporating the concepts of value of human capital, richness of human capital, and opportunity to display human capital, we provide a stronger test of when and for whom completing expatriate assignments is positively associated with compensation. The results also suggest that there are currently few readily available substitutes for expatriation.
In this article we provide a critical analysis of the role of market-based approaches to poverty reduction in developing countries. In particular, we analyse the role of microfinance in poverty alleviation by conducting an ethnographic study of three villages in Bangladesh. Microfinance has become an increasingly popular approach that aims to alleviate poverty by providing the poor new opportunities for entrepreneurship. It also aims to promote empowerment (especially among women) while enhancing social capital in poor communities. Our findings, however, reflect a different picture. We found microfinance led to increasing levels of indebtedness among already impoverished communities and exacerbated economic, social and environmental vulnerabilities. Our findings contribute to the emerging literature on the role of social capital in developing entrepreneurial capabilities in poor communities by highlighting processes whereby social capital can be undermined by market-based measures like microfinance.
We draw on gender role theory to examine the relationships among employee-rated work–family conflict, supervisor perceptions of employee work–family conflict, employee gender and supervisor-rated job performance. We found that the relationship between employee-rated work–family conflict and supervisor perceptions of employee conflict varied based on both employee gender and the direction of conflict under consideration. Specifically, the relationship between the two rating sources (employee and supervisor) was stronger for male employees when conflict was considered. However, the relationship between the two rating sources was stronger for female employees when family-to-work conflict was considered. Supervisor perceptions of employee work–family conflict were negatively related to employee job performance ratings. More generally, we found support for a moderated mediation model such that the relationship between employee-rated work–family conflict and job performance was mediated by supervisor perceptions of employee work–family conflict, and the effect was moderated by employee gender. Implications for research and practice are discussed.
Issues relating to litigation and other forms of employee legal claiming are at the forefront of the practice of human resource management. However, organizational scholars have paid scant attention to this important aspect of organizational life. Underrepresented in this collective research have been investigations into how social influence variables impact the legal claiming process. We add to the understanding of legal claiming by evaluating how perceived levels of accountability, reputation and political skill affect individuals’ willingness to engage in contentious and non-contentious legal claiming. We also investigate the impact that social influence has on individuals’ advice to other potential claimants. This study employed a longitudinal design utilizing both scenarios and survey data collection. Results from our study partially support the conclusion that individuals are more risk-averse in their own legal claiming considerations than they are in the advice they offer to similarly-situated others. Furthermore, accountability, reputation and interpersonal influence (one aspect of political skill) were found to significantly influence the likelihood of legal claiming. The pattern of results indicates that social influence variables play a role in determining whether legal claiming will be pursued and what type of claiming will be chosen.
Based on a case study of a large consulting firm, this article makes two contributions to the literature on reputation and identity by examining how an organization responds when its identity is substantially misaligned with the experience and perceptions of external stakeholders that form the basis of reputational judgments. First, rather than triggering some form of identity adaptation, it outlines how other forms of identity can come into play to remediate this gap, buffering the organization’s identity from change. This shift to other individual identities is facilitated by a low organizational identity context even when the identity of the firm is coherent and strong. The second contribution concerns the conceptualization of consulting and other professional service firms. We explain how reputation and identity interact in the context of the distinctive organizational features of these firms. Notably, their loosely coupled structure and the central importance of expert knowledge claims enable individual consultants both to reinforce and supplement corporate reputation via individual identity work.
Following social identity theory, the way in which individuals appraise stressful encounters and cope with them is influenced by their membership of social groups, which presumes self-categorization as a group member. To date, the impact of self-categorization on stress has mainly been studied for low-status groups. This article uses an interview study among management consultants to explore how self-categorization in terms of occupational identity impacts work stress in a high-status occupation. Adding to previous research, we find that not only low-status but also high-status groups benefit from self-categorization when coping with stressful situations. In line with prevailing theoretical assumptions, we even empirically find an ‘upward spiral’. We illustrate how consultants’ social identity as high-performing professionals helps them cope with stress, which in turn creates a feeling of social inclusion. However, we also find a ‘downward spiral’, where social identity provokes work stress among management consultants who cannot meet the high occupational standards. They cope less effectively and fear social exclusion from the group. These new findings relate to the specifics of our research context, including high status and increased stress. We thus argue for a research agenda that includes such context characteristics when further developing self-categorization models of stress.
Although sociologists and psychologists have documented various motivations for working, the concept of work as essentially disutility or undesirable retains broad resonance among influential economists and social theorists. These concepts imply that workers will tend to avoid or ‘shirk’ their work task unless subjected to management controls. Yet emerging counter-narratives have sought to retrieve and develop alternative concepts of work as craft, where workers are motivated to work well or be recognized for doing so. On these approaches, management controls can decrease the quality of the final outputs. This article uses a case study of cleaners in Australia to challenge influential representations of workers as prone to ‘shirking’ and the interpretation of management control to which these perspectives lead. The article argues that craft concepts of work derived from Richard Sennett and contemporary recognition theory provide alternative narratives of how workers can derive satisfaction from working well even in ‘menial’ tasks, and how craft motivations can drive workers to subvert management controls to uphold rather than diminish service quality. In this way, craft theories reveal limitations of overly instrumental concepts of work, and also help conceptualize how workers’ attachment to their tasks can drive resistance to management control.
This study examines the alleged organization of violence by Coca-Cola through a field study conducted in a village in India. It draws on the works of Judith Butler to show how subaltern groups are derealized and made into ungrievable lives through specific, yet recurrent, practices that keep violence unchecked. Many participants attempt to resist derealization through protest activities that showcase their vulnerability. However, the firm appropriates their claims to vulnerability through a paternalistic discourse that justifies intensified violence and derealization. This research offers insights into accumulation through derealization and on the effects of resistance to it.
This study examines how occupational future time perspective (OFTP) affects organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB) and job satisfaction. OFTP reflects how much time and how many opportunities people perceive themselves as having left in their occupational future. OCB comprises extra-role behaviours that aim to support other individuals in the organization (OCBI) and the organization as a whole (OCBO). Socioemotional selectivity theory posits that people with an open-ended OFTP strive for knowledge-oriented goals (i.e. OCBO). In contrast, people with a constrained OFTP strive for emotion-oriented goals (i.e. OCBI). Thus, the more people perceive their OFTP as open-ended, the more they should show OCBO rather than OCBI. Applying a motivational OFTP approach to job satisfaction, the greater the open-ended people’s OFTP, the more they should be satisfied with their job if they show more OCBO than OCBI because they can pursue their own goals. Findings support our hypotheses for people’s perceived remaining opportunities in their occupational future. Herein, we discuss theoretical and practical implications of these findings.
This article explores the embodied compositions of professionalism in the context of the counselling psychology profession in Russia. Specifically, we develop an embodied intersectionality framework for theorizing compositions of professionalism, which allows us to explain how multiple embodied categories of difference intersect and are relationally co-constitutive in producing credible professionals, and, importantly, how these intersections are contingent on intercorporeal encounters that take place in localized professional settings. Our exploration of how professionalism and professional credibility are established in Russian counselling shows that, rather than assuming that a hegemonic ‘ideal body’ is given preference in a professional context, different embodied compositions may be deemed credible in various work settings within the same profession. An embodied intersectionality framework allows us to challenge the notion of a single professional ideal and offer a dynamic and contextually situated analysis of the lived experiences of professional privilege and disadvantage.
A widely-cited proposition in boundary theory states that it is difficult for individuals to transition between roles, especially when these roles are highly segmented. Surprisingly, this hypothesis has not been directly tested. We provide an empirical test of these propositions and draw from the self-regulation literature to expand boundary theory in exploring how episodes of cognitive role transitions impact job performance. We propose that cognitive role transitioning is cognitively demanding, which consumes the limited executive control resources that facilitate effective job performance. In a multilevel study of 619 employees providing 4371 episodes, we observed that work-to-family cognitive role transitioning was negatively related to job performance, and this effect was mediated by self-regulatory depletion. Although individuals with greater role integration were somewhat more likely to experience cognitive role transitions than those with segmented roles, these individuals were also buffered from the self-regulatory depletion that impairs effective job performance. Overall, these findings suggest that integration, rather than segmentation, may be a better long-term boundary management strategy for minimizing self-regulatory depletion and maintaining higher levels of job performance during inevitable work–family role transitions.
Although workplace policies are written in neutral terms that give the appearance of rationality, research shows that policy meanings are in fact constructed and negotiated through discursive practices. Sexual harassment policies illustrate this phenomenon. Sexual harassment is a highly complex and fluid phenomenon that is dependent on context and culture for its meaning. Although sexual harassment policies tend to use language that appears to lie outside of the interpretive stream, these policies are in fact always subject to discursive interpretation. One particularly powerful form of discursive interpretation lies in the interplay between binary logics and binary language. This study explored the interplay between macro-level binary logics, mezzo-level sexual harassment policy and micro-level binary language during organizational members’ discussions about their organization’s sexual harassment policy. Our analysis of focus group and interview data revealed that participants discursively produced what we have termed a complex binary web that reshaped the meaning of the policy, such that usage of the policy contradicted organizational norms and values. Understanding sexual harassment policy discourse as constructed in a binary web reveals that rational assumptions underlying sexual harassment policy may be inconsistent with the lived experiences in organizational cultures.
This qualitative study reports on how pregnant women integrate their future maternal identity with their existing work-related identity. Twenty-four women were interviewed at three times during their pregnancy: during the first, second and third trimesters. A grounded theory approach was used to analyse the data and social learning theory was adopted as a theoretical framework to assist in interpreting the findings. The findings suggest that the availability or lack of realistic and attainable role models influences the degree to which the transition to motherhood during pregnancy was successful. When role models were readily available, the transition went well, but, when role models were absent, two less successful strategies were identified, leading to negative psychological outcomes. The study also stresses the importance of other contextual factors, such as the gender composition of organizations and the educational attainment of the individual pregnant women, in the way women perceive their transition to motherhood while working.
Despite the rising interest in the intertwining of individuals, organizations and institutions in innovation research, scant attention has been paid to the ways that their relations produce and reproduce specific gender dynamics throughout the innovation process. Innovation research has been characterized by a gender blindness that conceals the gendered nature of innovation processes. This article draws on the material collected through an ethnographic investigation conducted in two research organizations to illustrate how innovation processes are gendered when specific forms of masculinities and femininities are constructed, enacted and resisted by men and women. This article contributes towards developing a gendered understanding of innovation by introducing the term ‘positions of displacement’ to signal the fluidity and messiness of doings and undoings of femininities and masculinities through innovation practices.
This article examines the operation of flexible scheduling in practice through a case study of a large retail firm in the United Kingdom. It includes analysis of 39 semi-structured interviews, participant observation of shop floor work and non-participant observation of union organizing as well as analysis of key documents. The findings highlight the high level of generalized temporal flexibility across employment statuses. This temporal flexibility enables firm flexibility without necessitating a reliance upon contingent workers. Temporal flexibility is found to entail manager-control of flexible scheduling and is shown to be damaging to perceptions of job quality as it acts as a barrier to work-life balance. Union presence and collective bargaining at the firm are found to be ineffective at influencing flexible scheduling so as to improve job quality. This ineffectiveness can be explained by the union operating in an employer-dominated industrial relations environment in which its associational power is unable to compensate for a lack of institutional and structural economic power.
Organizational support theory (OST) suggests that employees develop a general perception of the extent to which the organization values their contributions and cares about their well-being (perceived organizational support – POS), and respond to that support through attitudes and behaviors that are beneficial toward the organization. Although OST emphasizes both social exchange and self-enhancement processes, most accounts of POS’s effects are rooted in social exchange. For example, POS’s linkages with commitment and retention have been explained as an exchange of support for positive attitudes and continued employment. This research sheds light on self-enhancement’s less-understood role in fostering these reactions by demonstrating the influence of social comparison effects. Drawing on a sample of 342 employees nested in 82 work-units of a US hospitality company, our analysis demonstrates that favorable POS comparisons with peers in one’s work-unit are positively associated with commitment and retention, whereas unfavorable comparisons are negatively related. Results also show that comparisons taking place in less-supported work-units have stronger impact than comparisons made in those with better support. Our findings extend OST by revealing the importance of social comparisons in engendering responses to organizational support, and in so doing potentially explicate the differential ways social exchange and self-enhancement operate with regard to POS.
We examine how both automatic and motivated modes of categorization are integral to understanding momentary perceptions of organizations, including perceptions of organizational identity and legitimacy. We begin by discussing how extant organizational research has relied, primarily, on single modes of categorization to describe how we form momentary perceptions of organizations. These ‘single-mode’ frameworks have explained momentary organizational perceptions as the result of either automatic categorization (i.e. driven by unconscious cognitive processes) or motivated categorization (i.e. driven by individual needs and desires). While these frameworks explain much about momentary organizational perceptions, we provide some notable examples that do not follow the paths they predict. To more fully explain momentary organizational perceptions, we present a framework grounded in psychological research that considers how both motivated and automatic modes of categorization influence these perceptions. In doing so, we illustrate how such a ‘dual-mode’ framework might better account for organizational perceptions that seem counter-intuitive when viewed through a single-mode lens. We conclude by outlining some theoretical and practical implications of our framework, and presenting an agenda for future research on organizational categorization and perception that may capitalize on our dual-mode framework.
As a social theory of organization, it is unsurprising that institutional theory draws upon the profound and ambitious work of the late anthropologist Mary Douglas. One of the foundational concepts of organizational institutionalism, institutional logics, directly draws upon her work. Yet, in recent times this foundational role has faded from view. This is unfortunate for there is much continuity in current work with that of Douglas, it now being 50 years and 30 years respectively, since the publication of two of her formative works. The deep analogies that underpin classificatory systems and the processes by which they are sustained remain significant areas under continued investigation by institutional theorists. Thus, in this article we revisit Douglas’ core arguments and their connections to institutional theorizing. We specifically explore her contribution of ‘naturalizing analogies’ as a way of accounting for the unfolding of change across levels of analysis, extending, modifying and enriching explanations of how institutional change is reified, naturalized and made meaningful. We do this by providing empirical descriptions of meta-organizing analogies and field-level applications. We explain how Douglas’ major theoretical works are of considerable relevance for current institutional theorizing, particularly in informing accounts of institutional logics.
Lindebaum, D (2015). Critical Essay: Building new management theories on sound data? The case of neuroscience. Human Relations 69(3): 537–550. DOI:
The following corrections apply:
Dirk Lindebaum’s affiliation is Cardiff Business School, UK.
Dirk Lindebaum’s mailing address is Cardiff Business School, College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences, Cardiff University, Aberconway Building, Colum Drive, Cardiff CF10 3EU, UK.
Email: mail@dirklindebaum.eu
Dirk Lindebaum’s bio note is as follows:
Dirk Lindebaum obtained his PhD from Manchester Business School, and he is now a Professor in Management at Cardiff Business School. One stream of his research activities pertains to organizational phenomena that involve emotional processes broadly defined. Another stream that he has pursued of late concerns the increasing visibility of neuroscientific theories and methods in the study of organizational behavior. Further details on publications, media engagement, online talks and other issues can be obtained from his website (
Findings from prior research on the relationship between functional diversity and team innovation have been inconclusive. This study aims to reconcile the mixed findings in the literature by investigating how functional diversity may influence team innovation and when such influence may or may not occur. The view of teams as information processors suggests that functionally diverse teams may capitalize on their knowledge benefits to produce innovations through knowledge sharing. However, knowledge sharing and subsequent team innovation do not necessarily occur in functionally diverse teams. Drawing on the motivated information processing in groups theory, we propose that affect-based trust in a team moderates the effects of functional diversity on team innovation (via knowledge sharing). The results based on a sample of 96 research and development teams indicate that functional diversity had a negative indirect relationship with team innovation via knowledge sharing when affect-based trust in a team was low, and this relationship became less negative as the level of affect-based trust in a team increased. The relationship was not significant when affect-based trust in a team was high.
We advance the literature on the demographic factors that shape organizational outcomes by analyzing the impact of the gender composition of firm leadership on the likelihood that a firm will adopt lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT)-friendly policies. Drawing on social role and token theory, we test the relative impact of CEO gender and the gender composition of the board of directors separately and together in order to identify the effects of gender diversity at the top of the organization. We rely on a unique data set that includes corporate policies (gender identity and sexual orientation non-discrimination policies, domestic-partner benefits, and overall corporate equality index scores) as well as the gender of the CEO and board of directors among Fortune 500 firms over a 10-year period. Our findings suggest that firms with gender-diverse boards are more likely than other firms to offer LGBT-friendly policies, whereas findings for firms with women CEOs offer mixed results.
Employees’ psychological contracts comprise their beliefs about what they have to contribute to their organizations and what inducements they will receive in return. One recommended approach to attract and retain employees is to design psychological contracts that allow them to contribute in desirable ways and receive attractive inducements. However, we know little about the factors that affect psychological contract preferences. We present a qualitative study on the preferred psychological contracts of employees who are in different career stages. Our findings reveal that the roles and self-concepts that employees take on at a particular career stage may shape preferences for stage-relevant contributions and inducements. These findings advance psychological contract theory by highlighting the plausible link between employees’ career stages and their psychological contract preferences.
This article explores contrasting forms of ‘knowledge leadership’ in mobilizing management research into organizational practice. Drawing on a Foucauldian perspective on power–knowledge, we introduce three axes of power–knowledge relations, through which we analyse knowledge leadership practices. We present empirical case study data focused on ‘polar cases’ of managers engaged in mobilizing management research in six research-intensive organizations in the UK healthcare sector. We find that knowledge leadership involves agentic practices through which managers strive to actively become the knowledge object – personally transposing, appropriating or contending management research. This article contributes to the literature by advancing the concept of knowledge leadership in the work of mobilizing management research into organizational practice.
Although the resurgence of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has been described as the development of ‘markets for virtue’, little is known about the social construction of CSR markets. Prior works either focus on the economic potential of these markets or criticize the social commodification they reflect, denying them any virtue other than generating profit or maintaining the capitalist status quo. This article uses the case of the market for CSR consultancy in Québec to make ‘visible’ the hand of management consultants in the creation of markets for virtue. Building on interviews with 23 consultants and secondary data, we relate three narrative accounts that highlight complementary facets of the construction of the market for CSR consultancy. Our narratives shed light on three distinctive roles of CSR consultants as social and environmental issues translators, market boundary negotiators and responsive regulation enactors. These roles clarify the regulative dynamics underlying CSR commodification and advance our understanding of consultancy work in the CSR domain.
Transformational leadership has consistently been argued to enhance diverse team outcomes, yet related research has generated ambiguous findings. We suggest that effectiveness is enhanced in interprofessional teams when transformational leaders engender dynamics that are characterized by interprofessional motivation and openness to diversity. Drawing on the mood-as-information perspective, we argue that negative affective tone moderates the impact of these mediators on team effectiveness. Further, we suggest that this moderating role is such that conditions of high negative affect enhance the mediating role of interprofessional motivation, while low negative affect strengthens the mediating role of openness to diversity. In order to investigate these divergent effects, the current study develops a model of leadership and interprofessional team effectiveness through two pathways reflecting the parallel mediating effects of interprofessional motivation and openness to diversity, and a moderating role for negative affect. Findings from a survey-based study of 75 healthcare teams support the utility of this model.
How people talk about their work and careers matters. Desiring meaningful work, people increasingly describe work and careers as a calling. Such callings may be secular or sacred. Popular ways of talking about calling often create problematic, rather than positive, career and life outcomes. In this article, we examine five common, historically influenced assumptions underlying contemporary talk about secular and sacred callings: necessity; agency and control; inequality; temporal continuity; and neoliberal economics. We showcase some of the likely downsides of calling as these underlying assumptions interact with people’s everyday lives. We suggest possible solutions for rehabilitating calling to help people find some of the career and quality-of-life benefits that calling promises. In sum, this essay contributes to a more nuanced understanding of calling and agency in contemporary careers while also offering a framework and direction for developing research and practice on calling.
The present research examines the relationships between ethical leadership and unit-level organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB) and individual-level job satisfaction. In addition, this study tests the proposition that the impact of ethical leadership on these outcomes is moderated by leader role modeling strength, a unit-level construct that captures within-group consensus regarding the extent to which unit members perceived the leader as a role model of ethical behaviors at work. To these ends, the article draws on social learning theory (Bandura, 1977) and social identity theory (Ashforth and Mael, 1989). The results provide support for the proposed theoretical model in a sample of 297 employees nested in 58 work units. Specifically, ethical leadership was more strongly and positively associated with unit-level OCB and individual-level job satisfaction in work units reporting higher (versus lower) leader role modeling strength. This research highlights the importance of studying leader role modeling perceptions in order to better understand the boundary conditions of the impact of ethical leadership on employee attitudes and behaviors.
Responding to calls to incorporate a more dispersed and localized conceptualization of power in the study of strategy as discourse, in this article we illustrate that while investing senior managers with the authority to speak and enact strategy, at one and the same time strategy discourse renders this group highly visible and vulnerable. Using a Foucauldian-inspired discursive psychology approach to provide a critical analysis of brief stretches of talk in a research interview, we expose the inherent instability and contingency of strategy discourse as it is used to construct and reconcile contradictory accounts of corporate success, failure and senior manager subjectivity. Our core contribution is to show that resistance to strategy discourse is discernible not only through how lower level or other actors contest or undermine this discourse but also by observing the efforts of corporate elites to manage temporary breakdowns (Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2011) that disrupt the background consensus that ordinarily provides strategy discourse with its ‘taken-for-granted’ quality. Resistance, we argue, is not only an intentional and oppositional practice but also inheres within the fine grain of strategy discourse itself, manifested as a ‘hindrance and stumbling block’ (Foucault, 1978) in the highly occasioned and local level of mundane interaction.
Realistic evaluation emphasizes the importance of exploring the mechanisms through which organizational interventions are effected. A well-known mechanism in organizational interventions is the screening process. Standardized questionnaires, in popular use, neither consider individuals’ appraisals of working conditions nor the specific context of the workplace. Screening with items tailored to intervention contexts may overcome the limitations of standardized questionnaires. In the present study, we evaluate an approach to develop a tailored questionnaire to measure employees’ appraisals of their specific working conditions. First, we interviewed 56 employees and 17 managers and, later, developed tailored items focused on the working conditions in a postal service. In follow-up interviews, we explore participants’ experiences with the tailored questionnaire, including the development of initiatives, compared with their previous experiences with the company’s annual attitude survey that used standardized scales. Results indicated that participants felt the tailored questionnaire highlighted issues that had previously been ignored, that initiatives were easier to develop owing to its specificity and that the feedback strategy was useful in prioritizing questionnaires. Overall, it can be concluded that tailored questionnaires may be appropriate for use in organizational intervention research and more broadly that evaluations of organizational interventions need to be contextually grounded.
With the changing demographics of the labor force, management of work and family role boundaries has become an important area of research. However, the literature surrounding boundary theory – one of the most prevalent theories of work–family role management – has evolved too narrowly. Although early boundary theory development acknowledged the importance of higher level social institutions, they have been largely omitted from the current research, which is predominantly individual-focused. The present article further develops the role of international regulative institutions in managing work and family role boundaries, including the consequences of their omission in the current literature for individual employees, organizations and the fit between them.
That leadership development is a contested terrain, like any organizational terrain, can scarcely be considered a new idea, yet research into the intricacies of resistance in this context is very much in its infancy. This article takes recent critical scholarship on resistance as its starting point to explore the interdependencies of power, resistance and struggle in a leadership development environment. Drawing on extensive online interactions collected from an 18-month, cross-sector programme with emergent leaders, this article asks whether the different stakeholders in leadership development could benefit from a more open exploration of power and resistance. Such dynamics offer new insights into the relationship between participants and facilitators and raise a series of alternative questions, challenges and strategies for leadership development.
Despite the disappointing performance of international mergers and acquisitions and the widespread recognition that their success depends at least partly on how employees are managed during and after an acquisition, very few studies draw on employee accounts of how they are affected by ongoing restructuring and how much influence employees themselves have over this process. The omission is especially important because of the likely role that national institutions play in conditioning the way employees are affected by organizational change in the post-acquisition period. This article investigates employees’ perceptions of whether they experience voice and representation opportunities following an acquisition through analysis of a unique longitudinal and cross-national dataset that demonstrates national differences in this respect. Moreover, there are also national differences in how these perceptions change over time. We highlight the utility of drawing on employee accounts in longitudinal and comparative perspective, suggesting that this represents a fruitful way of breathing fresh life into the debate about convergence and divergence in HRM and employment relations.
This article considers how and why people work with difficult emotions. Extending Hughes’ typology of the physical, social and moral taints that constitute ‘dirty work’, the article explores the nature of a previously neglected and undefined concept, emotional dirt. Drawing on data from a situated ethnographic study of Samaritans, we consider how the handling of difficult and burdensome emotions, which are often written out of rational accounts of work, is outsourced to others who act as society’s agents in the containment of emotional dirt. We provide the first explicit definition of emotional dirt, and contribute an extension to the existing tripartite classification of occupational taint. Moreover, in naming emotional dirt we seek to open up a sphere of research dedicated to understanding its emergence, nature and relational effects. To this end, we demonstrate how taint emerges as a sociological consequence of the performance of emotional labour as emotional dirty work, while considering how management of the difficult, negative or out-of-place emotions of others can be framed as a positive experience such that it can be good to feel bad when handling emotional dirt.
This study examines the mediating role of affective and continuance commitment in the relationship between pay satisfaction and voluntary turnover, and the moderating role of negative affectivity. Drawing from data collected at two points in time from a sample of human resource management professionals (N = 509), we found that affective and continuance commitment mediated the negative relationship of pay satisfaction to turnover. Moreover, pay satisfaction’s indirect negative relationship with turnover via affective commitment was weaker among respondents high in negative affectivity, while its indirect negative relationship with turnover via continuance commitment was stronger among those with high negative affectivity. Finally, the residual negative relationship of pay satisfaction to turnover was stronger at high levels of negative affectivity. We discuss the implications of this study for our understanding of the role of affective commitment, continuance commitment and negative affectivity in the pay satisfaction–turnover relationship.
Middle managers occupy a central position in organizational hierarchies, where they are responsible for implementing senior management plans by ensuring junior staff fulfil their roles. However, explorations of the identity of the middle manager offer contradictory insights. This article develops a theory of the identity of the middle manager using a theoretical framework offered by the philosopher Judith Butler and empirical material from focus groups of middle managers discussing their work. We use personal pronoun analysis to analyse the identity work they undertake while talking between themselves. We suggest that middle managers move between contradictory subject positions that both conform with and resist normative managerial identities, and we also illuminate how those moves are invoked. The theory we offer is that middle managers are both controlled and controllers, and resisted and resisters. We conclude that rather than being slotted into organizational hierarchies, middle managers constitute those hierarchies.
In this article, we study emotional processes associated with the project management discourse. Employing a constructionist approach where emotions are experienced within an ordering discursive context, the study identifies four distinct emotional processes associated with the invocation of the project management discourse in daily work practices. From a study of theatre and opera house employees, we suggest that the project management discourse tends to normalize feelings of rigidity and weariness in project-based work, while emphasizing projects as extraordinary settings creating thrill and excitement. Moreover, we argue that this discourse is invoked in ways that lead individuals to internalize emotional states related to chaos and anxiety, while ascribing feelings of certainty and confidence to external organizational norms and procedures. The study highlights how employees construct project-based work as a promise of exciting adventures experienced under conditions of rational control, but also how the negative and suppressed aspects of project-based work are constructed as inevitable and to be endured. Through these emotional processes, the project management discourse is sustained and reinforced.
This article explores the cultural narratives through which members of organizations define legitimacy during prolonged periods of change. We view legitimacy work as a cultural practice and interpretive process that takes the form of organizational narratives. We show how the shifting configurations of internal power relations shape both the choice and the meaning attached to the varied legitimacy narratives. We investigate the construction of legitimacy through a longitudinal case study based on participant observation of Gamma, a government Research and Development (R&D) organization, during a process of intense change. We provide theoretical insights into the construction and deconstruction of the legitimacy by analyzing the narratives in play during a process of planned change. We claim that legitimation narratives not only evolve in accordance with functional need or, in a sense, that older narratives give room to newer, more updated or relevant narratives, but also that multiple narratives are used by different organization actors alternately and interchangeably as part of internal contestation over legitimation of change.
There is increasing recognition in management and organization studies of the importance of materiality as an aspect of discourse, while the neglect of materiality in post-structuralist management and organization theory is currently the subject of much discussion. This article argues that this turn to materiality may further embed gender discrimination. We draw on Luce Irigaray’s work to highlight the dangers inherent in masculine discourses of materiality. We discuss Irigaray’s identification of how language and discourse elevate the masculine over the feminine so as to offer insights into ways of changing organizational language and discourses so that more beneficial, ethically-founded identities, relationships and practices can emerge. We thus stress a political intent that aims to liberate women and men from phallogocentrism. We finally take forward Irigaray’s ideas to develop a feminist écriture of/for organization studies that points towards ways of writing from the body. The article thus not only discusses how inequalities may be embedded within the material turn, but it also provides a strategy that enriches the possibilities of overcoming them from within.
Despite the growing number and importance of service occupations, we know little about how jobholders’ perceptions of societal stigmas of service jobs influence their identification with and attitudes towards work. The present study presents a framework that accords key roles to research on occupational stigma consciousness and the verification of employees’ self-views (i.e. core self-evaluations) to understand employees’ responses to occupational stigmatization. Survey responses from call center employees revealed a negative relationship between occupational stigma consciousness and occupational identification and work meaningfulness and a positive relationship between occupational stigma consciousness and organizational production deviant behaviors for employees who have a positive self-view. Opposite patterns of results surfaced for employees who have a lower positive self-view.
Organizations face the reality of needing to work with other organizations to share resources and responsibilities in pursuit of common goals. However, there is limited research regarding the complex nature of meta-organizations. Our purpose is to identify how a meta-organization team operates. We define a meta-organization team and rely on complexity theory to explain the dynamics within the meta-organization team we observed. Based on our analysis, this team was exposed to competing tensions that forced the team into a far-from-equilibrium state and allowed the team to be effective. We propose two types of tensions on complex systems: destabilizing and stabilizing. These tensions keep a system between the boundaries of equilibrium and chaos. As a result of this study, we provide details of key findings and implications of these tensions.
The aim of this article is to examine target responses to workplace mistreatment and to analyze factors that affect the degree of discrepancy between actual and ‘ideal’ (i.e. desired) responses. Two-hundred and seventeen faculty members at a major research university in North America reported their actual and ideal responses to mistreatment. The most common responses involved passive and social support-seeking strategies. Respondents generally wished they could have been more assertive. The size of the discrepancy between actual and ideal responses to mistreatment was predicted by the perceived severity of the behavior, the coping strategy chosen and a difference in organizational status and gender between the perpetrator and the target of mistreatment. While our findings show that status differences were associated with a larger discrepancy regardless of the direction of the status differences, our results indicate that the mechanisms behind the discrepancy differed. Despite being a relatively high status population, faculty at a prestigious university responded more passively to mistreatment than desired, primarily due to situational constraints. Because the reasons for this discrepancy were often structural (i.e. based on organizational or social status structures), this research highlights the need for organizations to address mistreatment proactively, even in the absence of formal complaints.
A central debate in critical management studies (CMS) revolves around the concern that critical research has rather little influence on what managers do in practice. We argue that this is partly because CMS research often focuses on criticizing antagonistically, rather than engaging with managers. In light of this, we seek to re-interpret the anti-performative stance of CMS by focusing on how researchers understand, conceptualize and make use of the performative effects of language. Drawing on the works of JL Austin and Judith Butler, we put forward the concept of progressive performativity, which requires critical researchers to stimulate the performative effects of language in order to induce incremental, rather than radical, changes in managerial behaviour. The research framework we propose comprises two interrelated processes: (i) the strategy of micro-engagement, which allows critical researchers to identify and ‘ally’ with internal activists among managers, and to support their role as internal agents of change; and (ii) ‘reflexive conscientization’ – that is, a dialogic process between researchers and researched that aims to gradually raise the critical consciousness of actors in order to provide spaces in which new practices can be ‘talked into existence’ through the performative effects of language.
This study meta-analytically examines correlations between dimensions of work–nonwork conflict (work-to-nonwork and nonwork-to-work conflict) and burnout subscales (exhaustion, depersonalization/cynicism), with a special emphasis on the role of moderating variables. The meta-analysis is based on 220 coefficients from 91 samples with a total of 51,700 participants and employs a random-effects model. Primary studies relied on samples of working adults from different cultural backgrounds. Our results revealed that both directions of work–nonwork conflict were strongly related to emotional exhaustion as well as to cynicism ( between .34 and .61). The correlations were shown to be moderated differentially by gender, age, marital and parental status as well as by cultural background. Meta-analyses based on primary studies with multi-wave designs indicated that work interfering with nonwork and exhaustion have equal reciprocal effects when considering zero-order correlations. However, within meta-analytical structural equation modeling, cross-lagged relations between work-to-nonwork conflict and exhaustion across time did not improve the prediction of outcomes at Time 2 above the influence of stability coefficients.
This article presents empirical evidence from household and firm survey data collected during 2009–2010 on the implementation of the 2008 Labor Contract Law and effects on China’s workers. The Government and local labor bureaus have made substantial efforts to enforce the provisions of the new Law, which has likely contributed to reversing a trend toward increasing informalization of the urban labor market. Enforcement of the Law, however, varies substantially across cities. The article analyzes the determinants of worker satisfaction with the Law’s enforcement, workers’ propensity to have a labor contract, their awareness of the Law’s content and their likelihood of initiating disputes, and finds that all are highly correlated with education level, especially for migrants. Although higher labor costs may have had a negative impact on manufacturing employment growth, this has not led to an overall increase in aggregate unemployment or prevented the rapid growth of real wages. Less progress has been made in increasing social insurance coverage, although signing a labor contract is more likely to be associated with participation in social insurance programs than in the past, particularly for migrant workers.
Emotions have a pervasive impact on organizational behavior. They do not just influence people’s own actions; when expressed, emotions may also exert influence on other organization members who perceive the expressions. Sometimes emotional expressions have ‘symmetrical’ effects, in that positive expressions yield advantageous outcomes for the expresser, while negative expressions produce disadvantageous outcomes. In other cases effects are ‘asymmetrical’, such that negative emotional expressions generate beneficial outcomes for the expresser, while positive expressions produce detrimental outcomes. Drawing on Emotions as Social Information (EASI) theory, I develop a theoretical analysis of when and how expressions of anger and happiness generate symmetrical versus asymmetrical effects. I support my analysis with a review of empirical research on the interpersonal effects of anger and happiness in negotiations and leadership. This review permits two general conclusions: (1) symmetrical effects of anger and happiness are mediated by affective reactions of perceivers, whereas asymmetrical effects are mediated by inferential processes in perceivers; (2) the relative strength of affective reactions versus inferential processes (and thereby the likelihood of symmetrical versus asymmetrical effects) depends on the perceiver’s information processing motivation and ability and on the perceived appropriateness of the emotional display. I discuss theoretical implications and future directions.
We explore the influence of hierarchy on workers’ identification and well-being. Specifically, we hypothesize that the accessibility of different identity targets will vary according to the distinct priorities and perspectives found at different hierarchical levels, and that this will have implications for the identification and well-being of workers operating in these different positions. Testing our predictions in a sample of 789 naval personnel we find strong support for our hypotheses. Specifically, we find that individuals in operational positions identify strongly with their career and functional workgroups and that these attachments are important in predicting their affective well-being. In contrast, the identifications and well-being of personnel in mid-level and strategic positions are more strongly tied to career and organizational identities respectively. This research provides new insights into the nature and impact of patterns of identification in the workplace, with important theoretical and practical implications for the affective well-being of workers.
This article aims at gaining a better understanding of how, in a market environment, categorized actors construct their identity in relation to the category to which they are assigned. Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted at eBay, we consider how the newly categorized ‘business sellers’ connected eBay’s framing of the category (categorical framing) to their subjective interpretations of it (categorical self). We find that business sellers perceived varying levels of discrepancy between categorical framing and categorical self, which led them to engage in processes of identification, identity work and disidentification. Based on our findings, we present a framework relating the level of perceived discrepancies to distinctive paths of identification and we draw implications for understanding the interaction of categorization and identification. The framework highlights how feelings of self-enhancement, injustice and alienation intervene in orienting individuals’ paths of identification.
This study examines the role of within-team competition (i.e. team hypercompetition and team development competition) in a team process. We developed and tested a model that associates team collectivism as the antecedent of within-team competition, and knowledge sharing and team flexibility as the outcomes. The model was empirically tested with data from 141 knowledge-intensive teams. The empirical findings showed that team collectivism had a positive relationship with team development competition and a negative relationship with team hypercompetition. Regarding the outcomes, team development competition and team hypercompetition had an indirect relationship with knowledge sharing and team flexibility through team empowerment. We offer a number of original contributions to the team effectiveness literature, especially by showing that team hypercompetition and team development competition have different impacts on team knowledge sharing and team flexibility.
Are internal migrant workers who have contributed so much to contemporary Chinese economic growth forming a distinct, impoverished underclass (Chan, 2010; Solinger, 2006) or are they slowly merging into the Chinese working class? In this article sociological theory is employed to develop the distinction between underclass and working class, including the conditions and criteria that enable these social categories to be distinguished theoretically and empirically. Drawing on a large range of survey data, including our own analysis of a recent Chinese migrant worker survey, we examine relevant aspects of work and city experience in order to assess the underclass thesis. In addition, we evaluate the argument that younger migrant workers are significantly different in work orientation and strategies for work-life improvement compared with their more experienced counterparts. We conclude that evidence for the underclass thesis is less compelling than an interpretation that views most migrant workers as transitioning into the working class. In addition, although younger workers are more intrinsically oriented than older migrants, both groups concur that labor law enforcement is critical for work-life improvement while simultaneously developing their own collective capacity to influence labor relations outcomes.
Extending the growing body of research on fun in the workplace, this article reports on a study examinining the relationship between fun and employee turnover. Specifically, this research focused on the influence of three forms of fun on turnover – fun activities, coworker socializing and manager support for fun. With a sample of 296 servers from 20 units of a national restaurant chain in the US, coworker socializing and manager support for fun were demonstrated to be significantly related to turnover. In addition, constituent attachment was found to mediate the relationship between each of the three forms of fun and turnover. This research highlights that not all types of fun are equal and demonstrates that one of the key means through which fun influences retention is by facilitating the development of high quality work relationships.
The goal of this study is to develop a theoretical framework in order to illuminate the cues involved in real life work–family conflict resolution within dual-earner couples. We draw on episodic and longitudinal data from qualitative diaries kept for a one-month period by both members of 24 dual-earner couples (48 participants) with child dependants, as well as from introductory and subsequent in-depth qualitative interviews with the couples, both together and apart. Two distinct types of work–family decision making: a) anchoring decisions and b) daily decisions were revealed, each of which were differentially impacted by enabling and constraining cues, considerations of fairness and equity, and beliefs, values and preferences. The findings suggest that the decision-making process engaged in by couples in incidents of work–family conflict does not progress in a logical sequence, but instead involves numerous complex negotiations and interactions. A decision-making framework encapsulating these findings is reported, highlighting the cues considered when making both types of work–family conflict decisions, and the relationships between them.
To make the combination of breastfeeding and work feasible, women who return to work full time in the USA need some measure of organizational breastfeeding support. Yet, many organizations do not have lactation policies in place, co-worker and supervisor communication can be discouraging, and predominant cultural Discourses in the US position breastfeeding at odds with organizational values, often requiring women to define and negotiate support themselves. Drawing upon Structuration Theory, we analyzed interviews conducted with US women who breastfed and worked to illuminate the meanings they held for breastfeeding and organizational breastfeeding support and how those meanings challenge and reproduce social systems that make breastfeeding and working a potentially difficult combination. We argue that their construction of breastfeeding support as a privatized privilege re/produces cultural Discourses that marginalize women’s bodies in organizations. In order to engender support for all bodies that challenge the borders between public/private, feminine/masculine and personal/professional, meanings must be changed at both macro and micro levels of communication.
This review article suggests the English publication of Foucault’s lectures on biopower, The Birth of Biopolitics (2008), might be useful for extending our understandings of how organizational power relations have changed over the last 20 years. Unlike disciplinary power, which constrains and delimits individuals, the concept of biopower emphasizes how our life abilities and extra-work qualities (bios or ‘life itself’) are now key objects of exploitation – particularly under neoliberalism. The term biocracy is introduced to analyse recent reports on workplace experiences symptomatic of biopower. Finally, the conceptual weaknesses of biopower for organizational theorizing are critically evaluated to help develop the idea for future scholarship.
Drawing on recent critical debates concerning the ontology of leadership, this article outlines a radical rethinking of the concept – not as the study of heroic individuals, skilled practitioners, collaborators or discursive actors – but as the marker of a fundamental and productive lack; a space of absent presence through which individual and collective desires for leadership are given expression. Where current critical debates tend to oscillate between variants of the physical and the social in their analyses, this article considers the potential for a negative ontology of leadership; one in which absence, ideological practices and the operation of empty signifiers form the basis for empirical investigation and critical reflection.
‘Partnership’ is a buzzword for agents delivering policy solutions, funding and implementation strategies for effective international development. We call such an ensemble of policies and practices the ‘partnership discourse’. We explore the value of the term ‘partnership’ in international development with an empirical focus on the African context and issues of equality in relations between international and national non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that are routinely characterized as partnerships. The results of our research in Uganda indicate that a hiatus exists between the rhetoric and reality of such partnerships. Partnerships on the ground reproduce relations of inequality characterized by subordination and oppression. The retroductive explanation we offer for such an emergent picture is to recast partnerships not as neutral management tools, but as political processes actualized in a terrain that is contested and uneven. Our theoretical contribution is to develop a political theorization of inter-organizational relations that allows us to explore the social consequences, specifically on inequality, associated with the partnership discourse. Our substantive contribution is to elaborate the value of the term ‘partnership’ in the international development domain. Its value is to smooth over antagonism and co-opt dissent by proposing a solution to effective development that is both ethically and managerially good.
This article contributes to the literature on identity work and small business studies, by identifying various forms of identity work of female business owners of Turkish and Moroccan descent in the Netherlands, in relation to two sets of identity regulations stemming from their families, regarding the norms of ‘being a good woman’ and ‘dealing with family support’. Identity work refers to the way subjects form, maintain, strengthen or revise constructions of self in relation to the claims and demands issued on them. Our analysis, which is based on McAdams’s life-narrative approach, demonstrates in detail how social actors perform identity work in continuous interplay with their family environment when powerful, multiple, and even contradictory normative demands are made on those identities. We have demonstrated how these migrant female business owners use various cultural repertoires to negotiate and manipulate the family norms and values in order to seek and hold their position in the public domain effectively. Our research has revealed a variety of identity work manifestations, all strategically maneuvering between conflict and compliance.
Call center agents located in India present themselves at work in a manner that stands in stark contrast to their non-work identities. The impression management tactics they use include using Western names, foreign accents, and scripts that convey physical proximity to customers. This study examines the cognitive demands placed on call center agents as they manage such impressions. The data show that the cultural differences between customers and agents and the use of a telephone as a communication medium intensified demands on agents. In coping with these demands, the agents reassessed their work and non-work identities. At one end of the continuum, some of the call center agents segmented their non-work identities from their work identities. At the other end, call center agents chose to experiment with and incorporate parts of their work identities into their non-work identities, thereby creating hybrid identities. This article discusses implications of these findings for impression management and identity exploration.
The article examines the relationship between community embeddedness and work outcomes (e.g. job motivation, networking behavior, and organizational identification) and the mediating role that organizational embeddedness plays in those relationships. We draw upon conservation of resources theory to explain this mediating effect. Data were collected from 338 employees from multiple organizations at three points in time over a ten-month period; this design allowed us to use latent growth modeling to examine the relationships among changes in the independent, mediating, and outcome variables over time. Results from latent growth modeling analyses generally supported the proposed model. Although community embeddedness has been somewhat marginalized in recent empirical research on organizational embeddedness, this article highlights that it is indeed relevant in predicting job attitudes and job behaviors.
Women physicians are confronted with incompatible gendered role prescriptions, whereby the role of the ‘ideal’ mother contrasts sharply with that of the ‘ideal’ physician. This study introduces four goal frames that reflect how women physicians internalize these conflicting role prescriptions and investigates the relationship between women’s goal frames and their career motivation. It also examines the relationship between gender-equality arrangements – inspired by the same underlying ideals – and women physicians’ career motivation, and whether these arrangements moderate the relationship between goal frames and career motivation. Cross-sectional data on 1070 Dutch women physicians collected in 2008 indicate that women physicians with switching goal frames (i.e. those who want to live up to both ideals) are no less career-motivated than women with one dominant goal frame. However, gender-equality arrangements mainly seem to support women physicians who prioritize one role over the other. No evidence was found that gender-equality arrangements support those who try to combine conflicting role expectations.
This article examines how demographics (gender) and cultural values (power distance) differentially moderate the relationship between mentoring (mentor presence) and career attainment (compensation and organizational position) among 390 managers and professionals in two contrasting cultures (Taiwan versus the USA). The four-way interaction of gender x mentor x power distance x country was significant for both dependent variables, supporting our hypotheses based on theories of power distance and gender egalitarianism. In hierarchical cultures such as Taiwan’s, mentored women with high power distance reported higher career returns than did mentored women with low power distance. In contrast, in egalitarian cultures such as the USA’s, mentored women with low power distance reported higher career returns than did mentored women with high power distance. Our findings demonstrate variation in mentoring outcomes, not just across, but also within, cultures for men and women. We discuss results along with implications for mentoring and cross-cultural theory, research, and practice.
Relational resources are now recognized as significant factors in workplaces and increasing attention is being given to the motivational impact of giving, in addition to receiving social support. Our study builds on this work to determine the role of such relational mechanisms in work engagement, a concept that simultaneously captures drive and well-being. Data from 182 midwives from two maternity hospitals revealed a best-fit model where perceived supervisor support, social support from peers, prosocial impact on others and autonomy explained 52 percent of variance in work engagement. Perceived prosocial impact acted as a significant partial mediator between autonomy and work engagement. This study provides evidence for the importance of perceived prosocial impact and the role of immediate supervisors in facilitating work engagement in midwifery. Results highlight the value of relational resources and suggest their explicit inclusion in current models of work engagement.
This article critiques the international development sector by questioning the role of western reporting practices in establishing accountability between non-western stakeholders. Homi Bhabha’s theoretical framework on translation and hybridity is applied to understand how recipient NGO workers experience western forms of accountability, such as English-written reports. Drawing on ethnographic research carried out in an Indian NGO, three key findings are outlined. First, reporting subjugates local knowledge leading to workers experiencing disempowerment. Second, reporting in English can give workers a sense of accomplishment precipitating more positive associations with accounting in a western language. Third, workers produce hybrid accounts in response to top-down reporting practices that intermingle donor and local trust-building practices. These hybrid accounts are constituted within multifarious power dynamics, including caste, gender and social status. In conclusion, reporting is highlighted as reflecting far more complex power relations between actors than current understandings of postcolonial stakeholder relations suggest.
This article analyses the work of issuing tickets to queuing customers, thereby contributing to the literature on interactive service work. It draws analytical attention to artful practices through which employees infer ticket orders from local configurations of talk, gesture and bodily movement. It reveals not only the practical reasoning deployed by the service worker, but also the agency of the customer in the course of encounters. Drawing upon video recordings of over 200 separate transactions, the demands of remedying problem orders are analysed to reveal how staff infer and clarify social ‘facts’, such as the customer’s age, their nationality, employment status and willingness to pay the higher ‘Gift Aid’ price. An image of interactive service work emerges that emphasizes the peculiar and skilful articulation of sociological categories in the course of apparently routine low-level work. The concept of ‘inferential labour’ is introduced to capture these processes, which resonates with studies of categorization and emotional labour in interactive service work.
We contribute to research on institutional complexity by acknowledging that institutional logics are not reified cognitive structures, but rather are open to interpretation. In doing so, we highlight the need to understand how actors engage with institutional logics and the creativity that such engagement implies. Using an inductive case study of the Ontario wine industry, we rely on the notion of scripts to explicate how actors engage with the aesthetic and the market logics that are entrenched in their field. Our findings reveal two scripts that are used to adhere to the aesthetic logic (farmer and artist) and one that is used to adhere to the market logic (business professional). We find that not only can actors enact two different scripts to adhere to an institutional logic, but also that flexible script enactment takes place within interactions with specific audiences. Thus, we found no unique match between particular logics and specific audiences, but rather that the aesthetic and the market logics, and their underlying scripts, are relevant in the interactions with each of the audience groups, albeit to varying degrees. These findings have important implications for research on institutional complexity.
This article develops theory about the perspectives through which expatriate managers and their employees socially construct differences in a cross-cultural context. On the basis of qualitative research on three kinds of organizations – multinational corporations, small and medium-sized enterprises and start-up companies – we identify three perspectives on differences in a cross-cultural context: the national distance perspective, the social differentiation perspective and the functional distinction perspective. Each perspective relates to a specific basis for categorization (nationality, status and function), focus of attention (values, attitudes and expertise) and definition of diversity (separation, disparity and variety). We find that international experience and country experience on one side, and the purpose of business (business development, business creation or business turnaround) on the other side, explain why some expatriate managers and their employees adopt one perspective or another, sometimes as default. The passing of time, as reflected in growing country experience, growing work experience and growing company tenure, can be the motor of transition from one perspective to another. Our findings contribute to cross-cultural and diversity studies, to social constructionism, and have consequences for international human resource management research and practices.
Organizational scholars have invoked the concept of respect and relegated it as a common sense, under-specified construct. This article analyzes the notion of respect by drawing on philosophy and defines respectful behavior as the manifestation of believing another person has value. Two types of respect are identified: appraisal respect is based on individual characteristics, and recognition respect is based on being human and having rights. In the organizational context, appraisal respect is acknowledgement of work performance and recognition respect is the quality of interpersonal treatment. This article presents a new theoretical framework that juxtaposes these two types of respect to model how they have different effects on self-esteem and therefore affect attitudes and behaviors differently. This model allows future research in the organization sciences to invoke respect more precisely, especially organizational justice and leadership research that explicitly or implicitly use concepts of respect.
Feminist organizations today must maintain their distinctive organizational identities in a competitive marketplace in which feminism has become one choice amidst many social change causes. Alignment among organizational identity, stakeholder images, and organizational culture can give feminist organizations a competitive advantage. However, feminist theory and practice have surfaced alignment challenges that can undermine organizational success. This article extends understandings of identity, image, and culture alignment by accounting for the role of ideology. In particular, this article explores how an independent media business that publishes a feminist popular culture magazine localizes feminist ideology discursively to enable alignment and satisfy diverse stakeholders. In doing so, this article fills a gap in feminist organization research by looking at how and where ideological lines are drawn by an organization trading in the economies of popular culture, image, and branding. Lessons for organizations faced with similar identity challenges are offered.
Healthcare environments have become increasingly complex, especially around the end of life. As they become more complex, organizational members are often pulled in competing directions as they manage to bring order to what otherwise would be a disorderly world. This extensive ethnographic study of a hospice and an emergency department (ED) critically analyzes the nature of discourse and its resulting accomplishments. I use the notion of ‘taming’ to describe the way providers talk about and make sense of their work and work environment, and the consequences it has for their own personal well-being, as well as for care around the end of life. The goal is to elucidate how reclaiming struggle and choice over meaning production is needed for healthcare challenges of the 21st century.
In recent years, research on mindfulness has burgeoned across several lines of scholarship. Nevertheless, very little empirical research has investigated mindfulness from a workplace perspective. In the study reported here, we address this oversight by examining workplace mindfulness – the degree to which individuals are mindful in their work setting. We hypothesize that, in a dynamic work environment, workplace mindfulness is positively related to job performance and negatively related to turnover intention, and that these relationships account for variance beyond the effects of constructs occupying a similar conceptual space – namely, the constituent dimensions of work engagement (vigor, dedication, and absorption). Testing these claims in a dynamic service industry context, we find support for a positive relationship between workplace mindfulness and job performance that holds even when accounting for all three work engagement dimensions. We also find support for a negative relationship between workplace mindfulness and turnover intention, though this relationship becomes insignificant when accounting for the dimensions of work engagement. We consider the theoretical and practical implications of these findings and highlight a number of avenues for conducting research on mindfulness in the workplace.
Space has become a key analytic concept for the study of organization. While much emphasis has been placed upon the role of designed spaces within the existing literature, as yet there has been little attention paid to the sociality of space and the spatial practices that people employ to enact workspaces. This inquiry provides an ethnographic study of the work of street artists at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. We investigate the spatial tactics that artists employ to create hybrid workspaces within public spaces. We reveal how these spatial tactics are linked to the politics of space by investigating how the artists negotiate the use of public spaces with other users of the space. The study finds that artists employ a distinctive set of spatial tactics to create ‘smooth spaces’ to appropriate and socialize a hybrid workspace. The conceptual contribution of this article develops a processualist account of how hybrid workspaces are created by artists through embodied spatial tactics and how these tactics exploit ambiguities in the spatial boundaries of the existing urban landscape.
While knowledge theorists give attention to knowing in practice, two common habits in the empirical literature, which we call knowledge inherency and skepticism, serve to re-center certain practitioners. The sites in which we study knowing thereby remain limited, hindering a fuller practice turn. We argue that this enduring tendency is problematic because it inhibits our understanding of ‘communicative knowledge’ – a form of knowing central to the contemporary economy. Yet communicative knowledge is persistently relegated to secondary status through a logic that is simultaneously gendered and classed. We thus suggest a more thorough shift toward the study of ‘knowledge in work’ (Thompson et al., 2001), wherein such a priori associations are suspended, and all practitioners de-centered, in the interest of understanding specific forms, systems, and relations of knowledge entailed in situated practices of knowing. The second half of the article develops specific empirical strategies for doing so. The strategies are meant to enable grounded analysis of knowing practices in various lines of work to interrogate how these may be different to practices with which we are more familiar, as well as inquiry into similarities between these familiar practices and new ones in order to destabilize the link between knowledge and certain practitioners.
Given corporate scandals, organizational crises, and accounting irregularities (e.g. Citigroup, BP oil spill, Enron, Arthur Andersen), leadership ethics has grown in relevance. The current study takes a discursive approach to engage in a multimethod case study of a consulting and leadership development firm that takes Conscious Capitalism as the impetus for, and target of, leader development. Using constructivist grounded theory and critical discourse analysis, we reveal themes and ‘best practices’ voiced by consultants and clients for cultivating mindfulness and developing ethical leaders, as well as micro- and macro-level paradoxes, tensions, and challenges: structuring-releasing; expanding-contracting; opening up-closing; and collaborating-competing. Our critical approach contributes (a) a critique of Conscious Capitalism as a Discourse that appears to offer hope for business ethics and societal transformation and (b) a critique of ethical leadership development through embedded power relations and the complex discursive processes within and driven by leadership development and ethics at the intersection of various d/Discourses. This research helps explain some of the challenges involved in developing ethical leaders. We reveal that although Conscious Capitalism appears to offer solutions to many of today’s social problems, including leadership ethics, developing ethical leaders ironically leads to problems that are ‘wicked.’
In this article, we propose that age similarity preference (ASP) among employees increases workplace difficulties in an age-diverse environment. Individuals use social categorizations such as age groupings to help minimize uncertainty, cope with change, and deal with complexity. When placed in an age-diverse work environment, intergroup comparisons regarding age become more salient. We suggest that when a preference exists among employees to work and interact with those similar in age to themselves in an age-diverse workplace, this will lead to an increase in uncertainty, perceived workplace challenges, and subsequently conflict. Data were collected from 262 employees of an organization in the US Midwest to test our hypotheses. Using multiple mediation modeling, our results suggest that ASP influences the degree of conflict reported, and that uncertainty and perceived work-related challenges mediate the relationship between ASP and conflict. A post-hoc ANOVA analysis of our data also showed a significant relationship between employee age and ASP, indicating that this preference was more likely to be reported by individuals younger in age.
This article is a follow-up of Alvesson and Kärreman (2011a), which was in itself a follow-up of Alvesson and Kärreman (2000), and a response to a critique of the former by Hardy and Grant (2012). The critique is addressed directly and the logic behind it investigated critically. The article also addresses wider concerns regarding the politics of research and publishing and the conditions of critique at the present time. The pressure and eagerness to get published lead to strong subspecialization and an inclination to build research approaches within which authors are inclined to reproduce shared assumptions and be unwelcome to critical explorations. The article points to the risk of assumption-challenging work being marginalized through the anticipation of critique leading to hostile reactions and specialized, politically motivated reviewers blocking the publication of far-reaching critique.
Drawing on new institutionalism theory, this study examines the influence of institutional logics, the belief systems that direct decision-makers’ attention to particular sets of issues, on human resource (HR) adaptation to demographic changes. We argue that the prevalence of age-neutral HR management and of age-related HR practices such as age assessment and older worker-targeted practices, are shaped by the strength of the strategic (business case), benchmarking (comparing one’s set of policies with peers’) and compliance (laws and regulations) logics. In a sample of 420 US organizations, a strong strategic logic was associated only with greater prevalence of age-neutral HR management. A strong benchmarking logic was associated with greater prevalence of age-neutral HR management, of age assessment practices, and of older worker-targeted practices. A strong compliance logic was associated with greater prevalence of age-assessment and older worker-targeted practices. This article contributes to research on ageing and extends work on institutional logics by (1) focusing on organizations’ differential enactment of institutional logics, reflecting the contextual embeddedness of HR practices, and (2) showing that the prevalence of age-neutral HR management and of age-related HR practices are associated with competitive as well as institutional isomorphism.
Organizations increasingly find themselves contending with circumstances that are suffused with dynamic complexity. So how do they make sense of and contend with this? Using a sensemaking approach, our empirical case analysis of the shooting of Mr Jean Charles de Menezes shows how sensemaking is tested under such conditions. Through elaborating the relationship between the concepts of frames and cues, we find that the introduction of a new organizational routine to anticipate action in changing circumstances leads to discrepant sensemaking. This reveals how novel routines do not necessarily replace extant ones but, instead, overlay each other and give rise to novel, dissonant identities which in turn can lead to an increase rather than a reduction in equivocality. This has important implications for sensemaking and organizing amidst unprecedented circumstances.
This article draws on combinations of discourse theory and Lacanian theory to study the role of fantasies in creative knowledge work. It attempts to nuance a number of critical Lacanian studies that emphasize how management and HRM practices exploit the seductive, yet disciplining, effects of fantasies to increase worker commitment. In contrast, empirical data from fieldwork in two creative industries are used to show how employees also ensnare and discipline their managers based on the same fantasmatic dynamics. The article argues that both managers and employees avoid concrete definitions of responsibility in favor of intense mutual recognition. This allows them to pursue a shared fantasy about limitless potential (financial and existential) realized via work. This dynamic of recognition renders both parties more vulnerable towards each other and makes both parties resist attempts at moderation. The question of power and exploitation thus becomes highly muddled.