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Full-Text Articles in Labor Relations

Building And Rebuilding Trust: Why Perspective Taking Matters, Michele Williams Nov 2015

Building And Rebuilding Trust: Why Perspective Taking Matters, Michele Williams

Michele Williams

[Excerpt] There is growing interest surrounding the function of perspective taking in social interactions and organizational life. In this chapter, I examine the role of perspective taking in trust building and trust repair. Whereas some researchers focus on the ability of perspective taking to elicit sympathy, concern, and cooperative behavior (Batson, Turk, Shaw, & Klein, 1995; Parker, Atkins, & Axtell, 2008; Parker & Axtell, 2001), others focus on the strategic impact of perspective taking (Epley, Caruso, & Bazerman, 2006; Galinsky, Maddux, Gilin & White, 2008; Galinsky & Mussweiler, 2001). I build on both streams of research by examining work that …


Perspective Taking Building Positive Interpersonal Connections And Trustworthiness One Interaction At A Time, Michele Williams Nov 2015

Perspective Taking Building Positive Interpersonal Connections And Trustworthiness One Interaction At A Time, Michele Williams

Michele Williams

There is growing interest in the role of perspective taking in organizations. Perspective taking has been linked to enhanced interpersonal understanding and the strengthening of social bonds. In this chapter, I integrate research from sociology, communications, and psychology to provide insight into why, when, and how perspective taking facilitates the relational resources of positive connections and trustworthy actions. I introduce the importance of a three-dimensional view of perspective taking for building relational resources and present data validating this conceptualization. I conclude with directions for future research.


Occupations, Organizations, And Boundaryless Careers, Pamela S. Tolbert Nov 2015

Occupations, Organizations, And Boundaryless Careers, Pamela S. Tolbert

Pamela S Tolbert

[Excerpt] The central premise of this chapter is that, as organizations become less important in defining career pathways and boundaries, occupations will become increasingly more important. While occupational demarcations have always had a significant, albeit often unacknowledged, impact on individual career patterns, the significance of such demarcations for careers is likely to be heightened by current trends in employment relationships. In this chapter, then, I review the sociological literature on occupational labor markets and on the structure of professional occupations, in an effort to shed light on a number of issues associated with occupationally based careers. Of specific concern are …


On Organizations And Oligarchies: Michels In The Twenty-First Century, Pamela S. Tolbert, Shon R. Hiatt Nov 2015

On Organizations And Oligarchies: Michels In The Twenty-First Century, Pamela S. Tolbert, Shon R. Hiatt

Pamela S Tolbert

[Excerpt] A central problem for those interested in studying and explaining the actions of organizations is how to conceptualize these social phenomena. In particular, because organizations are constituted by individuals, each of whom may seek to achieve his or her interests through the organization, questions of how decisions are made in organizations and whose preferences drive those decisions are critical to explaining organizational actions. Although early organizational scholars spent much time wrestling with these questions (e.g. Barnard 1938; Simon 1947; Parsons 1956; March and Simon 1958), more recent work in organizational studies has tended to elide them, adopting an implicit …


Thinking About You: Perspective Taking, Perceived Restraint, And Performance, Michele Williams Jul 2015

Thinking About You: Perspective Taking, Perceived Restraint, And Performance, Michele Williams

Michele Williams

Conflict often arises when incompatible ideas, values or interests lead to actions that harm others. Increasing people’s willingness to refrain from harming others can play a critical role in preventing conflict and fostering performance. We examine perspective taking as a relational micro-process related to such restraint. We argue that attending to how others appraise events supports restraint in two ways. It motivates people to act with concern and enables them to understand what others view as harmful versus beneficial. Using a matched sample of 147 knowledge workers and 147 of their leaders, we evaluate the impact of appraisal-related perspective taking …


Affect, Emotion And Emotion Regulation In The Workplace: Feelings And Attitudinal Restructuring, Michele Williams Jul 2015

Affect, Emotion And Emotion Regulation In The Workplace: Feelings And Attitudinal Restructuring, Michele Williams

Michele Williams

[Excerpt] Almost 40 years after publishing A Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiations in 1965, the fields of negotiations and organizational behavior experienced an “affective revolution” (Barsade, Brief and Spataro 2003). Although Walton and McKersie could not have predicted the widespread academic and public interest in emotion and emotional intelligence, they foreshadowed this affect-laden direction in the section of their book on attitudinal structuring, which identified the dimension of friendliness-hostility as a critical aspect of the relationship between negotiating parties in the workplace and other settings.


Generational Diversity Can Enhance Trust Across Boundaries, Michele Williams Jul 2015

Generational Diversity Can Enhance Trust Across Boundaries, Michele Williams

Michele Williams

In interorganizational project teams, generational diversity among team members undermines the experience of trust within demographically similar dyads but enhances the experience of trust within demographically dissimilar dyads.


Ports And Ladders: The Nature And Relevance Of Internal Labor Markets In A Changing World, Paul Osterman, M. Diane Burton Jul 2015

Ports And Ladders: The Nature And Relevance Of Internal Labor Markets In A Changing World, Paul Osterman, M. Diane Burton

M. Diane Burton

[Excerpt] Many believe that the nature of careers has changed dramatically in the past twenty years. One scholar writes that internal labor markets have been 'demolished', while a human resources manager at Intel comments that, in contrast to the past, today, 'You own your own employability. You are responsible' (Knoke 2001: 31). The idea of the 'boundaryless career' seems increasingly popular (Arthur and Rousseau 1996). If it is in fact true that the old rules for organizing work have disappeared, this would represent a fundamental change for employees. It would also have major implications for how scholars think about the …


Being Trusted: How Team Generational Age Diversity Promotes And Undermines Trust In Cross-Boundary Relationships, Michele Williams Jul 2015

Being Trusted: How Team Generational Age Diversity Promotes And Undermines Trust In Cross-Boundary Relationships, Michele Williams

Michele Williams

We examine how demographic context influences the trust that boundary spanners experience in their dyadic relationships with clients. Because of the salience of age as a demographic characteristic as well as the increasing prevalence of age diversity and intergenerational conflict in the workplace, we focus on team age diversity as a demographic social context that affects trust between boundary spanners and their clients. Using social categorization theory and theories of social capital, we develop and test our contextual argument that a boundary spanner’s experience of being trusted is influenced by the social categorization processes that occur in dyadic interactions with …


Squeezed In The Middle: The Middle Status Trade Creativity For Focus, Michelle M. Duguid, Jack Goncalo Jun 2015

Squeezed In The Middle: The Middle Status Trade Creativity For Focus, Michelle M. Duguid, Jack Goncalo

Jack Goncalo

Classical research on social influence suggested that people are the most conforming in the middle of a status hierarchy as opposed to the top or bottom. Yet, this promising line of research was abandoned before the psychological mechanism behind middle status conformity had been identified. Moving beyond the early focus on conformity, we propose that the threat of status loss may make those with middle status more wary of advancing creative solutions in fear that they will be evaluated negatively. Using different manipulations of status and measures of creativity, we found that when being evaluated, middle status individuals were less …


[Review Of The Book Sustainable Prosperity In The New Economy? Business Organization And High-Tech Employment In The United States], Rosemary Batt, Jae Eun Lee May 2015

[Review Of The Book Sustainable Prosperity In The New Economy? Business Organization And High-Tech Employment In The United States], Rosemary Batt, Jae Eun Lee

Rosemary Batt

[Excerpt] Best known as a business and economic historian, William (Bill) Lazonick may often escape the view of academics in human resource studies, organizational behavior, and labor relations. This is a mistake. Lazonick's new book, Sustainable Prosperity in the New Economy?, is a must-read for scholars and students in these fields. He has chosen to study an important problem in the real world, has marshaled detailed empirical evidence to support his argument, and has used this evidence to critique conventional theory in economics and management.


Organizational Performance In Services, Rosemary Batt, Virginia Doellgast May 2015

Organizational Performance In Services, Rosemary Batt, Virginia Doellgast

Rosemary Batt

The question of performance in service activities and occupations is important for several reasons. First, over two-thirds of employment in advanced economies is in service activities. Second, productivity growth in services is historically low, lagging far behind manufacturing, and as a result, wages in production-level service jobs remain low. In addition, labor costs in service activities are often over 50% of total costs, whereas in manufacturing they have fallen to less than 25% of costs. This raises the question of whether management practices that have improved performance in manufacturing, such as investment in the skills and training of the workforce, …


Review: John S. Ahlquist And Margaret Levi, 'In The Interest Of Others: Organizations And Social Activism" (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013), Rowan Cahill Apr 2015

Review: John S. Ahlquist And Margaret Levi, 'In The Interest Of Others: Organizations And Social Activism" (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013), Rowan Cahill

Rowan Cahill

Review of the comparative study of trade union organizational behaviour by John S. Ahlquist and Margaret Levi, 'In the Interest of Others: Organizations and Social Activism" (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013), which involves a target group of US and Australian trade unions.


The Liberating Consequences Of Creative Work: How A Creative Outlet Lifts The Physical Burden Of Secrecy, Jack Goncalo, Lynne Vincent, Verena Krause Apr 2015

The Liberating Consequences Of Creative Work: How A Creative Outlet Lifts The Physical Burden Of Secrecy, Jack Goncalo, Lynne Vincent, Verena Krause

Jack Goncalo

A newly emerging stream of research suggests creativity can be fruitfully explored, not as an outcome variable, but as a contributor to the general cognitive and behavioral responding of the individual. In this paper, we extend this nascent area of research on the consequences of creativity by showing that working on a creative task can contribute to feelings of liberation— feelings that can help people to overcome psychological burdens. We illustrate the liberating effects of creativity by integrating the embodied cognition literature with recent research showing that keeping a secret is experienced as a psychological and physical burden. While secrecy …


Collective Failure: The Emergence, Consequences, And Management Of Errors In Teams, Bradford S. Bell, Steve W. J. Kozlowski Mar 2015

Collective Failure: The Emergence, Consequences, And Management Of Errors In Teams, Bradford S. Bell, Steve W. J. Kozlowski

Bradford S Bell

The goal of the current chapter is to examine the emergence, consequences, and management of errors in teams. We begin by discussing the origin and emergence of errors in teams. We argue that errors in teams can originate at both the individual and collective level and suggest this distinction is important because it has implications for how errors propagate within a team. We then consider the paradoxical effects of errors on team performance and team learning. This discussion highlights the importance of error management in teams so that errors can prompt learning while at the same time mitigating their negative …


Rigor And Relevance, Bradford S. Bell Mar 2015

Rigor And Relevance, Bradford S. Bell

Bradford S Bell

[Excerpt] As the incoming editorial team, our goal is to build on this position of strength and to advance both the reputation and readership of the journal. One way in which we intend to do this is by staying true to the mission that has guided P-Psych since its inception, which is to publish rigorous psychological research centered around people at work. Over the years, this focused mission has enabled the journal to publish seminal articles in personnel selection (Barrick & Mount, 1991), person-organization fit (Schneider, 1987), organizational citizenship behavior (Organ & Ryan, 1995), and many other areas of industrial-organizational …


Hedonic And Transcendent Conceptions Of Value, Joel M. Podolny, Marya Besharov Feb 2015

Hedonic And Transcendent Conceptions Of Value, Joel M. Podolny, Marya Besharov

Marya Besharov

In this paper we introduce a conceptual distinction between a hedonic and transcendent conception of value. We posit three linguistic earmarks by which one can distinguish these conceptions of value. We seek validation for the conceptual distinctions by examining the language contained in reviews of cars and reviews of paintings. In undertaking the empirical examination, we draw on the work of M.A.K. Halliday to identify clauses as fundamental units of meaning and to specify process types that can be mapped onto theoretical distinctions between the two conceptions of value. Extensions of this research are discussed.


Revisiting The Meaning Of Leadership, Joel Podolny, Rakesh Khurana, Marya Besharov Feb 2015

Revisiting The Meaning Of Leadership, Joel Podolny, Rakesh Khurana, Marya Besharov

Marya Besharov

During the past fifty years, organizational scholarship on leadership has shifted from a focus on the significance of leadership for meaning-making to the significance of leadership for economic performance. This shift has been problematic for two reasons. First, it has given rise to numerous conceptual difficulties that now plague the study of leadership. Second, there is now comparatively little attention to the question of how individuals find meaning in the economic sphere even though this question should arguably be one of the most important questions for organizational scholarship. This chapter discusses several reasons for the shift, arguing that one of …


The Journey From Data To Qualitative Inductive Paper: Who Helps And How?, Špela Trefalt, Marya Besharov Feb 2015

The Journey From Data To Qualitative Inductive Paper: Who Helps And How?, Špela Trefalt, Marya Besharov

Marya Besharov

How do qualitative inductive researchers move from raw data to publishable paper? Existing scholarly resources focus on how to analyze data more deeply and write it up to make a compelling contribution. Much less discussed but also critical is how researchers enlist others in the journey from data to paper – even when they are single authors of their work. Our chapter uncovers qualitative researchers’ helpers and the types of help they provide. Drawing on data from detailed accounts of single authored qualitative, inductive studies, we explain the role of qualitative and quantitative scholars, peers and hired professionals, field informants …


Is It Me Or Her? How Gender Composition Evokes Interpersonally Sensitive Behavior On Collaborative Cross-Boundary Projects, Michele Williams, Evan Polman Dec 2014

Is It Me Or Her? How Gender Composition Evokes Interpersonally Sensitive Behavior On Collaborative Cross-Boundary Projects, Michele Williams, Evan Polman

Michele Williams

This paper investigates how professional workers’ willingness to act with interpersonal sensitivity is influenced by the gender and power of their interaction partners. We call into question the idea that mixed-gender interactions involve more interpersonal sensitivity than all-male interactions primarily because women demonstrate more interpersonal sensitivity than do men. Rather, we argue that the social category “women” can evoke more sensitive behavior from others such that men as well as women contribute to an increase in sensitivity in mixed-gender interactions. We further argue that the presence of women may trigger increased sensitivity such that men can also be the recipients …