In 1975, the phrase “vertical dyad linkage” (VDL) was introduced to begin examining the quality of the roles between the leaders and direct reports, and it was soon discovered that the linkages ranged between high quality and low quality. That linkage progressed into “leader–member exchange” (LMX) in 1982. In essence, research reached a point where it found a continuum of the quality of the relationship between the two members. High-quality relationships put the employees into the leader’s “ingroup,” while low-quality relationships left employees on the outside looking in. It followed that those in the ingroup would have some say in the decision-making, would have easier access to the leader, and would garner more respect and “liking.”
Researchers have used the LMX-7 to examine how the quality of superior/subordinate relationships affects individual, interpersonal, and organization factors like job satisfaction, communication motives, and organizational identification (as did the original LMX scale). Although the LMX-7 remains one of the most prominent psychometric measures of LMX, researchers still debate whether the construct should be considered unidimensional or multidimensional.
While the intricacies of LMX-7 versus LMX have been argued, and with teams becoming more of an organizational resource, team–member exchange (TMX) was found to be a supported extension of LMX. While at this point TMX is lacking in the volume and pace of research, due to the difficulties of measurement among a group of people who might have a variety of leaders during the process, the existing research has produced some results that are extremely relevant, now and in the future. Examples of what has been found when the team exchange relationship is high include reduced stress, increased psychological empowerment, increased creativity, increased team performance, increased individual performance, increased organizational citizenship behaviors, increased organizational commitment, and increased job satisfaction, just to name a few.
In sum, the investigation into LMX provides a history of the field of LMX and its many iterations and the role it plays in leadership studies. This research includes LMX antecedents, consequences, moderators, mediators, and outcomes, as any field in which over 4,500 papers have been published needs an effective way to highlight the progress and pathways.
Article
Leader–Member Exchange: A Commentary on Long-Term Staying Power and Future Research Directions
Terri A. Scandura and Kim Gower
Article
Machine Learning in Management
Elizabeth Degefe, Krishna Savani, and Abhishek Sheetal
Although modern machine learning techniques were developed decades ago, management researchers have started using them only in the 2010s. Researchers in management have used machine learning techniques to analyze numeric data, most commonly relying on neural networks and decision trees; they have also used AI techniques to analyze text data to classify topics or model topics.
Article
Managing Team Diversity in the Workplace
Maartje Schouten, Jasmien Khattab, and Phoebe Pahng
The study of team diversity has generated a large amount of research because of the changing nature of workplaces as they become more diverse and work becomes more organized around teams. Team diversity describes the variation among team members in terms of any attribute in which individuals may differ. Examples are demographic background diversity, functional or educational diversity, and personality diversity. Diversity can be operationalized as categorical (variety), continuous (separation), or vertical (disparity).
Initial research on team diversity was dominated by a main-effects approach that produced two main perspectives: social-categorization scholars suggested that diversity hurts team outcomes, as it decreases feelings of cohesion and increases dysfunctional conflict, whereas the information and decision-making perspective suggested that diversity helps team outcomes, as it makes more information available in the team to help with decision-making. In an effort to integrate these disparate insights, the categorization-elaboration model (CEM) proposed that team diversity can lead both to social categorization and to information elaboration on the basis of contextual factors that may give rise to either process. The CEM has received widespread support in research, but a number of questions about the processes through which diversity has an effect on team outcomes remain.
Article
Mediation: Causal Mechanisms in Business and Management
Patrick J. Rosopa, Phoebe Xoxakos, and Coleton King
Mediation refers to causation. Tests for mediation are common in business, management, and related fields. In the simplest mediation model, a researcher asserts that a treatment causes a mediator and that the mediator causes an outcome. For example, a practitioner might examine whether diversity training increases awareness of stereotypes, which, in turn, improves inclusive climate perceptions. Because mediation inferences are causal inferences, it is important to demonstrate that the cause actually precedes the effect, the cause and effect covary, and rival explanations for the causal effect can be ruled out.
Although various experimental designs for testing mediation hypotheses are available, single randomized experiments and two randomized experiments provide the strongest evidence for inferring mediation compared with nonexperimental designs, where selection bias and a multitude of confounding variables can make causal interpretations difficult. In addition to experimental designs, traditional statistical approaches for testing mediation include causal steps, difference in coefficients, and product of coefficients. Of the traditional approaches, the causal steps method tends to have low statistical power; the product of coefficients method tends to provide adequate power. Bootstrapping can improve the performance of these tests for mediation. The general causal mediation framework offers a modern approach to testing for causal mechanisms. The general causal mediation framework is flexible. The treatment, mediator, and outcome can be categorical or continuous. The general framework not only incorporates experimental designs (e.g., single randomized experiments, two randomized experiments) but also allows for a variety of statistical models and complex functional forms.
Article
Mentoring Research Through the Years: A Brief Review
S. Gayle Baugh
Mentoring relationships involve a more experienced individual who provides support for the career and personal development of a less experienced coworker. The focus of mentoring research has evolved over the years. Early on, investigators were interested in learning about the outcomes of the mentoring relationship for the protégé, who is the primary beneficiary of the relationship. Risks for the protégé were not acknowledged in the initial research on mentoring relationships. There were questions about how individuals identify appropriate mentoring partners and about the course of the relationship. Attention then turned to the motivations and potential benefits to the mentor, the other party in the relationship. However, scholars recognized that while there were positive outcomes from serving as a mentor, there were also costs associated with the role. Given that so much empirical focus was on the benefits of voluntary developmental relationships, scholars became interested in more formal, organizationally controlled approaches to encouraging mentoring relationships. However, mentoring relationships are not uniformly positive and beneficial to the parties so engaged. Just as would be the case in any relationship, there is a “dark side” to mentoring relationships that has emerged as the focus of empirical attention. Finally, the influence of diversity of the mentoring participants has been explored. That exploration has largely focused on gender issues, with limited attention devoted toward ethnicity. With the advent of greater diversity in the workforce in the United States and elsewhere, diversity represents an area ripe for investigation. Overall, despite the wealth of research on mentoring relationships, there are questions that remain under-researched or unexplored in each of the areas of research.
Article
Minority Employees’ Ethnic Identity in the Workplace
Nasima M. H. Carrim
With an increase in the number of diverse groups of individuals (including ethnic minorities) entering organizations, managing diversity in the 21st-century workplace has become imperative. The workplace provides employees with opportunities to work interactively with others in diverse situations and to express their identities, including ethnic identity. Despite Western-based organizations’ adoption of strategies such as affirmative action in an effort to integrate diverse employees into their workplaces, members of ethnic minority groups may still experience great difficulties in obtaining instrumental and social support in these organizations. While some minorities may not outwardly manifest their ethnicity, in the majority of cases, ethnic identity forms a core identity of many individuals and employees do not leave this identity at the doorstep of the organization. In some countries, ethnic minorities have refused to assimilate into the majority workplace culture, and have maintained strong ethnic identities. By outwardly expressing their identities, ethnic minority employees face discrimination, stereotyping and micro-aggressive behaviors within the workplace, and in the majority of cases are relegated to dead-end lower level posts and face barriers to their career advancement. Also, having strong ethnic identities results in a conflict between minorities ethnic identities and the workplace culture. This is especially apparent in terms of religious beliefs and values. Embracing ethnic identity of migrants into organizational cultures is especially challenging for organizations these days, as many immigrants are highly skilled professionals that enter western corporations. They experience discrimination and not receiving support in order to advance their careers.
Article
Multicultural Identities at Work
Yih-Teen Lee and Nana Yaa Gyamfi
Cultural identity, a specific form of social identity that refers to a person’s degree of identification and sense of belonging to a specific cultural group, has been extensively examined as a kind of social identity over the past decades, especially in the fields of migration, cross-cultural psychology, and applied international management. Meanwhile, exposure to settings with different cultures typically triggers a process of acculturation, enabling individuals to develop multicultural identities, whereby people see things from multiple cultural groups’ perspectives, feel at one with the cultural groups, and act according to the norms of those cultural groups. Individual organizational members serve as the conduit by which culture influences and is influenced by organizational life. There exist various forms of multicultural identities with different psychological and behavioral implications on individuals. In terms of plurality, to date, extant studies accumulated extensive knowledge on biculturalism, which focuses on individuals having two distinct cultural identities and how these identities intersect and influence the individual. Beyond biculturalism obtained through birth, ancestry, or immersive foreign experience, individuals may become multicultural by being simultaneously immersed in more than two cultures: a situation common among children of immigrants (i.e., second-generation immigrants), children raised in multicultural households, third culture individuals who spend their formative years outside their passport country, and individuals living within multicultural societies.
A key to understanding multicultural identities is how these multiple identities are structured within individuals. Scholars largely agree that the structural pattern of identities affects the outcomes and degree of synergy among multiple identities. Widely accepted modes of structuring multiple identities include relative strength of identities involved and how multiple identities relate to each other. Scholars have built on these lines of thinking to examine specific forms of multicultural identities and their outcomes. Furthermore, research indicates that multiculturals possess unique identity resources relevant to organizational life, including cognitive strengths, relational capital and belonging, and leadership-related competencies.
Although there is evidence for responsiveness of multicultural identity to situational cues, there are also strong arguments made in favor of the agency of individuals over their multiple identities. The foregoing notwithstanding, individuals with multicultural identities must balance their agentic enactments of identity with societal requirements of legitimacy. In particular, business organizations play a vital role in providing identity workspaces and other enabling factors which legitimize multicultural identities. Additionally, business organizations play the role of balancing power, status and other dynamics between multicultural and non-multicultural members.
Article
Pay Transparency: Conceptualization and Implications for Employees, Employers, and Society as a Whole
Peter A. Bamberger
Pay transparency refers to the degree to which pay communication policies and practices governing employee pay knowledge facilitate or restrict the sharing of pay-related information. While relatively few enterprises have adopted transparent pay-communication practices, a variety of institutional factors, such as government regulations and social norms, are driving employers to provide their employees with greater pay knowledge. Consensus has emerged around the existence of three main dimensions or forms of pay transparency, namely pay-outcome transparency, pay-process transparency, and pay-communication transparency. Research findings indicate that pay-outcome transparency, which relates to the degree to which pay rate information is disclosed by the employer, has both beneficial and problematic consequences, depending on the outcome. For example, while pay-outcome transparency has been consistently found to be associated with enhanced individual task performance and reduced gender-based pay discrepancies, it has also been associated with higher levels of envy, diminished helping, heightened levels of counterproductive work behavior, and pay compression (which could elicit negative sorting effects). In contrast, pay-process transparency, which relates to the degree to which employees are informed about the parameters underlying reward-related decisions, has been found to have largely beneficial consequences and few unintended negative consequences. Finally, while it is least studied, pay-communication transparency, capturing the degree to which restrictions are placed on employees’ ability to share pay knowledge with others, is positively associated with employee perceptions of employer fairness and trustworthiness and can have significant implications for employee retention.
Article
Person–Environment Fit: Theoretical Perspectives, Conceptualizations, and Outcomes
Rein De Cooman and Wouter Vleugels
The idea of person–environment (PE) fit builds upon interactional psychology, which suggests that the interplay between personal and environmental attributes is the primary driver of human behavior. The “environment” in PE fit research can take many different forms, with organizational environments being one of the most important settings with which people may fit or misfit. Henceforth, PE fit is defined as the compatibility that occurs when individuals match the characteristics of the work environment they inhabit. The notion that individuals with personal needs, values, goals, abilities, and personalities and organizational environments with distinctive demands, supplies, values, and cultures are differentially compatible and that “fitting in” is an evolving process that triggers behavioral, cognitive, and affective responses has been well accepted since PE fit was introduced as an independent theory in the mid-1970s. Presently, the PE fit idea has established itself as a firm research framework and has surfaced in many different literatures, ranging from applied and vocational psychology to human resource management, resulting in a plethora of theories that cover many different views on, and various conceptualizations of, PE fit. From an individual (i.e., employee) perspective, fit theories suggest that fit is a sought-after and rewarding experience in and of itself, especially when multiple types of fit (e.g., fit with the job and with the organization) co-occur. However, from a team, organizational, and societal perspective, the advantages of high levels of fit must be weighed against its potential costs, including favoritism, conformity, and homogeneity, which may eventually result in organizational inertia and the reproduction of inequality.
Article
Pride in Organizations
Yuen Lam Wu, Prisca Brosi, and Jason D. Shaw
Pride is a self-conscious emotion evoked when individuals perceive themselves attaining an outcome that is congruent with their goals and being responsible for achieving a socially valued outcome. The experience of pride can influence one’s own behaviors but the accompanying expressions can also elicit behavioral changes in observers. Although pride is a positive emotion and provides individuals with psychological rewards and pleasant feelings, accumulated empirical findings show a broad range of consequences in response to both the experience and expression of pride in organizations. In attempts to explain the various outcomes, pride researchers have conceptualized the construct in different ways. Some researchers examine pride as a unified emotion that arises from the attainment of positive outcomes; others adopt a multifaceted view to explain its divergent consequences. The multifaceted view suggests that pride can be authentic or hubristic depending on whether the achievement is assumed to arise from one’s efforts or abilities, and promotive or preventive depending on whether the achievement is assumed to result from promotion-related eagerness or prevention-related vigilance. Pride may also be differentiated into specific facets based on whether it is elicited by the achievement of performance or moral standards. Furthermore, as the individual self is embedded in social contexts, pride can arise from group belongingness. Thus, the conceptualization of pride can extend beyond the individual level to cover group and organizational pride. This article concludes that pride is an important source of motivation for both individuals who experience it and those who express it in organizations. Yet, what outcomes or behaviors result depends crucially on the source of pride because pride leads individuals to repeat behaviors attributed as the original cause of the positive feeling. Although pride is commonly engendered by achievements and socially desirable outcomes, it can also arise from immoral behaviors when those behaviors are assumed to benefit the organization. The outcomes of pride experience and expression are also contingent on individual and contextual boundary conditions.
Article
Professions from a Gendered Perspective
Isabel Boni-Le Goff and Nicky Le Feuvre
Professions or professional occupations have been studied through a large number of empirical and theoretical lenses over the last decades: as potential substitutes for organizations and markets, as protected labor markets, and as the site of the subjective experiences and socialization processes of their members. Combining a sociological and a gender perspective, a growing number of studies have shed new light on the growth and dynamics of professional occupations since the mid-20th century. They show how the massive entry of women into the upper reaches of Western labor markets has played a major role in the expansion and reconfiguration of the professions. However, by studying the barriers to women’s access to once exclusively masculine environments, scholars tend to show that the feminization processes coexist with persistent inequalities in income, promotion opportunities, career patterns, and access to leadership positions, popularized by the metaphor of the “glass ceiling” effect.
These contradicting trends—numerical feminization and the persistence of gender inequalities—have inspired a large range of empirical research projects and conceptual innovations. This article distinguishes three ways of framing the gendered dynamics of professional and managerial occupations.
A first way of framing the issue adopts a resolutely structural perspective, presenting feminization as a process that ultimately leads to the crystallization of traditional gender inequalities, thus confronting women with the risk of deprofessionalization or dequalification. Some of these studies observe variations in the rhythms and patterns of feminization across occupations. They reveal complex processes whereby the overall increase in women’s education levels comes with the persistence of gender-differentiated choices of study and occupation. Rhythms and patterns of feminization may also differ within a given occupation, from one specialty to another and from one type of organization to another, depending on the internal hierarchy of the occupation. Very significant gaps may also be observed according to employment status: wage labor or self-employment, for example.
A second way of framing the question adopts an organizational-level perspective; showing, for example, that a “glass ceiling” systematically hampers women’s career progression in all sectors of the labor market. These studies explore the combination of direct and indirect discriminatory processes—from the persistence of “old boys’ networks” to the legitimation of certain gendered body images of professionalism—within different organizational and professional contexts. In the face of such resistance, women’s career progression is particularly slow and arduous, both due to the prevailing symbolic norms of leadership models and due to the collective strategies of closure by male professionals at the organizational level.
Finally, a third way of framing the issue adopts a more holistic perspective, with a stronger focus on the agency of women within the occupational context and on the societal implications of changes to the gender composition of the professions. These studies insist on the potential or real changes that women may bring to the professional ethos and to the occupation-specific “rules of the game” in previously male-dominated bastions. Interested in the undoing of conventional norms of masculinity and fathering as well as of femininity and mothering, this third perspective explores a potential shift to more egalitarian gender arrangements at the organizational, interpersonal, and societal levels.
Article
Qualitative Designs and Methodologies for Business, Management, and Organizational Research
Robert P. Gephart and Rohny Saylors
Qualitative research designs provide future-oriented plans for undertaking research. Designs should describe how to effectively address and answer a specific research question using qualitative data and qualitative analysis techniques. Designs connect research objectives to observations, data, methods, interpretations, and research outcomes. Qualitative research designs focus initially on collecting data to provide a naturalistic view of social phenomena and understand the meaning the social world holds from the point of view of social actors in real settings. The outcomes of qualitative research designs are situated narratives of peoples’ activities in real settings, reasoned explanations of behavior, discoveries of new phenomena, and creating and testing of theories.
A three-level framework can be used to describe the layers of qualitative research design and conceptualize its multifaceted nature. Note, however, that qualitative research is a flexible and not fixed process, unlike conventional positivist research designs that are unchanged after data collection commences. Flexibility provides qualitative research with the capacity to alter foci during the research process and make new and emerging discoveries.
The first or methods layer of the research design process uses social science methods to rigorously describe organizational phenomena and provide evidence that is useful for explaining phenomena and developing theory. Description is done using empirical research methods for data collection including case studies, interviews, participant observation, ethnography, and collection of texts, records, and documents.
The second or methodological layer of research design offers three formal logical strategies to analyze data and address research questions: (a) induction to answer descriptive “what” questions; (b) deduction and hypothesis testing to address theory oriented “why” questions; and (c) abduction to understand questions about what, how, and why phenomena occur.
The third or social science paradigm layer of research design is formed by broad social science traditions and approaches that reflect distinct theoretical epistemologies—theories of knowledge—and diverse empirical research practices. These perspectives include positivism, interpretive induction, and interpretive abduction (interpretive science). There are also scholarly research perspectives that reflect on and challenge or seek to change management thinking and practice, rather than producing rigorous empirical research or evidence based findings. These perspectives include critical research, postmodern research, and organization development.
Three additional issues are important to future qualitative research designs. First, there is renewed interest in the value of covert research undertaken without the informed consent of participants. Second, there is an ongoing discussion of the best style to use for reporting qualitative research. Third, there are new ways to integrate qualitative and quantitative data. These are needed to better address the interplay of qualitative and quantitative phenomena that are both found in everyday discourse, a phenomenon that has been overlooked.
Article
Social Network Analysis in Organizations
Jessica R. Methot, Nazifa Zaman, and Hanbo Shim
A social network is a set of actors—that is, any discrete entity in a network, such as a person, team, organization, place, or collective social unit—and the ties connecting them—that is, some type of relationship, exchange, or interaction between actors that serves as a conduit through which resources such as information, trust, goodwill, advice, and support flow. Social network analysis (SNA) is the use of graph-theoretic and matrix algebraic techniques to study the social structure, interactions, and strategic positions of actors in social networks. As a methodological tool, SNA allows scholars to visualize and analyze webs of ties to pinpoint the composition, content, and structure of organizational networks, as well as to identify their origins and dynamics, and then link these features to actors’ attitudes and behaviors. Social network analysis is a valuable and unique lens for management research; there has been a marked shift toward the use of social network analysis to understand a host of organizational phenomena. To this end, organizational network analysis (ONA) is centered on how employees, groups, and organizations are connected and how these connections provide a quantifiable return on human capital investments. Although criticisms have traditionally been leveled against social network analysis, the foundations of network science have a rich history, and ONA has evolved into a well-established paradigm and a modern-day trend in management research and practice.
Article
Social Networks and Employee Creativity
Gamze Koseoglu and Christina E. Shalley
In the field of management, employee creativity, which is defined as the production of novel and useful ideas concerning products, processes, and services, has been found to be necessary for organizational success and survival. An employee’s relationships with others in the organization affect creativity because employees work in the presence of, and with, their coworkers. A social network approach has been taken to understand how employee relationships can affect creativity.
Social networks examine the interaction of individuals with those around them, such as asking them for help or advice. Four components of social networks that have a role in employee creativity have received attention: the nature of the employee’s relationships with coworkers, the structure of the employee’s social network, the position of the employee in the organizational network, and the employee’s network heterogeneity. Regarding the nature of relationships, while some researchers have found that weaker ties are more beneficial for employee creativity, other researchers have found that stronger ties are more advantageous. In order to resolve this conflict, researchers examined the role of strong versus weak ties at different stages of the creativity process and found that, while weak ties might be more useful during idea generation, strong ties come into play during idea elaboration. There are also conflicting findings on the role of the structure of social network. Specifically, a group of researchers found support for a positive relationship between sparse networks and employee creativity, and another group found a positive relationship between dense networks and creativity. Some researchers aimed to resolve this debate, and their findings mirrored the findings on tie strength. They found that density affects different stages of the creative process in unique ways, and while sparse networks are more beneficial during idea generation, dense networks become more important during idea implementation.
Compared to the previous two components, the role of network position and network heterogeneity has received less attention from researchers. Researchers found that both central and peripheral positions have certain benefits and costs for creativity. For example, on the one hand, employees located at the periphery of an organization can collect nonredundant information from outside of the organization that has not been shared by others in the organization and has a positive influence on creativity. On the other hand, employees at a central location gain benefits from fast and easy access to information based on many contracts and receiving recognition from many others, thereby improving creativity. Finally, researchers consistently found that different types of network heterogeneity, such as the diversity of one’s contacts in terms of functional background, organizational function, or nationality, positively affects employee creativity.
There are many opportunities for future research on the relationship between social networks and creativity, such as examining the role of motivational and cognitive processes as mediational mechanisms, focusing on the role of alter characteristics, studying social networks in a team setting, and taking a temporal approach to understand how changes in social networks over time affect employee creativity.
Article
Strategic Empowerment in Human Resource Management
M. Taner Albayrak and Alper Ertürk
Empowerment is considered one of the best managerial approaches to foster employees’ effectiveness, creativity, commitment, performance, and other positive work-related attitudes and behaviors while providing an essential tool for leadership development and succession planning. Empowerment involves delegation of authority, sharing of information and resources, and allowing employees to participate in decision-making processes. Empowerment practices result in positive outcomes through psychological empowerment, which comprises meaning, impact, self-determination, and competence. However, empowerment should be exercised with care, and before doing so, leaders should understand their employees’ competences, willingness, and characteristics, as well as the organizational culture and industrial dynamics. With the increasing use of information and communication technologies, inevitable influence of globalization, and continuously changing dynamics of interconnectedness among industries, the business environment has become more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA). In order to survive in this environment, companies try to increase diversity in their workforce to make the best use of a broad variety of skills, experiences, and opinions, thus boosting creativity and innovativeness, which makes leadership more difficult than ever.
With empowerment, the concept of delegation of power is important. Therefore, comparing the concept of personal empowerment with managerial empowerment helps in understanding that these concepts are different, although interconnected. Delegation of authority ensures that the manager transfers decision-making authority to subordinates under certain conditions. In delegation, authority is retained by the manager, who has the ultimate responsibility. On the other hand, in empowerment, authority is fully transferred to the person who is already doing the job, with all the rights and responsibilities to take the initiative as necessary.
Empowerment is also closely related but different from the concept of motivation. In motivation, decision-making authority and control stays with the manager. Empowerment, on the other hand, gives employees the opportunity to participate in management, solve problems, and participate in decision-making processes. In this context, the concepts of delegation of authority, motivation, participation in management, and job enrichment are the domain dimensions of personal empowerment, and thus they are interrelated, yet different.
It is important to create a common vision and to have common values in order to establish the empowerment process. Subordinates and supervisors need to trust each other, and empowerment needs to be seen as a philosophy, not a technique. It is necessary to create business conditions that enable the development of knowledge and skills in personnel empowerment. These conditions affect the perceptions and attitudes of the staff, such as, support, loyalty, identification, and trust. Empowering employees promotes organizational commitment, increases engagement, and reduces turnover intentions of key personnel. Because empowerment involves encouraging participation of subordinates in the decision-making process, it also helps to enhance the effectiveness of the decisions and reduce decision-making time. In the VUCA world, limited decision making could be a critical obstacle to establish and maintain sustainability in highly competitive business environments.
Article
The Kaleidoscope Career Model
Sherry E. Sullivan and Shawn M. Carraher
The kaleidoscope career model (KCM) was developed by Mainiero and Sullivan in 2006 based on data from interviews, focus groups, and three surveys of over 3,000 professionals working in the United States. The metaphor of a kaleidoscope was used to describe how an individual’s career alters in response to alternating needs for authenticity, balance, and challenge within a changing internal and external life context. As a kaleidoscope produces changing patterns when its tube is rotated and its glass chips fall into new arrangements, the KCM describes how individuals change the pattern of their careers by rotating the varied aspects of their lives to arrange their work–nonwork roles and relationships in new ways. Individuals examine the choices and options available to create the best fit among various work demands, constraints, and opportunities given their personal values and interests.
The ABCs of the KCM are authenticity, balance, and challenge. Authenticity is an individual’s need to make choices that reflect their true self. People seek alignment between their values and their behaviors. Balance is an individual’s need to achieve an equilibrium between the work and nonwork aspects of life. Nonwork life aspects are defined broadly to include not only spouse/partners and children but also parents, siblings, elderly relatives, friends, the community, personal interests, and hobbies. Challenge is an individual’s need for stimulating work that is high in responsibility, control, and/or autonomy. Challenge includes career advancement, often measured as intrinsic or extrinsic success. All three parameters are always active throughout the life span, and all influence decision-making. One parameter, however, usually takes priority; this parameter has greater influence in shaping an individual’s career decisions or transitions at that point in time. Over an individual’s life, the three parameters shift, with one parameter moving to the foreground and intensifying in strength as it takes priority at that time. The other two parameters will lessen in intensity, receding into the background, but they remain active.
Article
The Personality Underpinnings of Strategic Leadership: The CEO, TMT, and Board of Directors
Bret Bradley, Sam Matthews, and Thomas Kelemen
“Strategic leadership” is the umbrella term used to describe the study of an organization’s top leaders—what they do, their interactions, and how they influence important organizational outcomes. The three major areas of focus within this field are the chief executive officer (CEO), the top management team (TMT), and the board of directors. Although each area has vibrant bodies of literature on important topics of inquiry, the integration of research findings, frameworks, and insights across the three areas remains underdeveloped. For example, the study of leader personality is a rich line of inquiry within the broader management literature, and all three areas are developing, albeit at different rates and with little integration across the three areas.
The work on CEO personality is the most developed, and the work on board personality is the least developed. CEOs personality traits that have been studied include the Big Five personality traits (conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, openness to experience, and emotional stability), locus of control, core self-evaluations, narcissism, overconfidence, hubris, humility and regulatory focus (a person’s general approach to goals as either promotion focused or prevention focused). TMT personality traits that have been studied include the Big Five, trait positive affect, propensity to innovate, and competitive aggressiveness. Finally, board of directors’ personality traits that have been studied include only personality diversity.
Article
Voluntary Turnover in Organizations
Peter Hom and Jungmin Seo
Employee turnover—or voluntary resignation from employing organizations—affects both the welfare of leavers and employers. Given its import, scholarly inquiries during the 20th century have identified its causes, manifestations, and consequences. Classic theories focused on why employees quit, highlighting job dissatisfaction, job alternatives, and critical events prompting thoughts of quitting (“shocks”). Since the 21st century, scholars increasingly examined job embeddedness (forces constraining incumbents from leaving jobs), recognizing that the motives for why incumbents stay are not mirror opposites of oft-studied motives for why they leave. Empirical evidence for these perspectives, their deficiencies, and their refinements are discussed. Turnover research also investigated different types of turnover—notably, dysfunctional turnover (stellar performers leaving), collective turnover (unit-level quit rates), and turnover contagion (turnover inducing more turnover). Lastly, emerging work on different forms of job embeddedness, as well as its “dark side,” are examined.
Article
Work Design in the Contemporary Era
Caroline Knight, Sabreen Kaur, and Sharon K. Parker
Work design refers to the roles, responsibilities, and work tasks that comprise an individual’s job and how they are structured and organized. Good work design is created by jobs high in characteristics such as autonomy, social support, and feedback, and moderate in job demands such as workload, role ambiguity, and role conflict. Established research shows good work design is associated with work outcomes such as job satisfaction, organizational commitment, work safety, and job performance. Poor work design is characterized by roles that are low in job resources and/or overly high in job demands, and has been linked to poor health and well-being, absenteeism, and poor performance. Work design in the 20th century was characterized by traditional theories focusing on work motivation, well-being, and performance. Motivational and stress theories of work design were later integrated, and work characteristics were expanded to include a whole variety of task, knowledge, social, and work-context characteristics as well as demands, better reflecting contemporary jobs. In the early 21st century, relational theories flourished, focusing on the social and prosocial aspects of work. The role of work design on learning and cognition was also recognized, with benefits for creativity and performance.
Work design is affected by many factors, including individual traits, organizational factors, national factors, and global factors. Managers may impact employees’ work design “top-down” by changing policies and procedures, while individuals may change their own work design “bottom-up” through “job crafting.”
In the contemporary era, technology and societal factors play an important role in how work is changing. Information and communication technology has enabled remote working and collaboration across time and space, with positive implications for efficiency and flexibility, but potentially also increasing close monitoring and isolation. Automation has led to daily interaction with technologies like robots, algorithms, and artificial intelligence, which can influence autonomy, job complexity, social interaction, and job demands in different ways, ultimately impacting how motivating jobs are.
Given the rapidly changing nature of work, it is critical that managers and organizations adopt a human-centered approach to designing work, with managers sensitive to the positive and negative implications of contemporary work on employees’ work design, well-being, and performance. Further research is needed to understand the multitude of multilevel factors influencing work design, how work can be redesigned to optimize technology and worker motivation, and the shorter- and longer-term processes linking work design to under-researched outcomes like identity, cognition, and learning. Overall, the aim is to create high-quality contemporary work in which all individuals can thrive.
Article
Work-Family Conflict and Work-Life Conflict
Ellen Ernst Kossek and Kyung-Hee Lee
Work-family and work-life conflict are forms of inter-role conflict that occur when the energy, time, or behavioral demands of the work role conflicts with family or personal life roles. Work-family conflict is a specific form of work-life conflict. Work-family conflict is of growing importance in society as it has important consequences for work, non-work, and personal outcomes such as productivity, turnover, family well-being, health, and stress. Work-family conflict relates to critical employment, family, and personal life outcomes. These include work outcomes (e.g., job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and turnover), family outcomes (e.g., marital satisfaction and family satisfaction), and personal outcomes related to physical health (e.g., physical symptoms, eating and exercise behaviors), and psychological health (e.g., stress and depressive symptoms, life satisfaction). Many different theoretical perspectives are used to understand work-life conflict: starting with role theory, and more recently conservation of resources, job demands and resources, and life course theories. Many methodological challenges are holding back the advancement of work-family conflict research. These include (1) construct overlap between work-family conflict and work-life conflict, and work-life balance measures; (2) measurement issues related to directionality and operationalization; and (3) a lack of longitudinal and multilevel studies. Future research should include studies to (1) advance construct development on linkages between different forms of work-family and work-life conflict; (2) improve methodological modeling to better delineate work-family conflict mechanisms; (3) foster increased variation in samples; (4) develop resiliency interventions that fit specific occupational contextual demands; (5) increase integration and sophistication of theoretical approaches; and (6) update work-family studies to take into account the influence of the growing prevalence of technology that is transforming work-family relationships.
