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Full-Text Articles in Labor Relations

Experimentation And Decentralization In China’S Labor Relations, Eli D. Friedman, Sarosh Kuruvilla Apr 2015

Experimentation And Decentralization In China’S Labor Relations, Eli D. Friedman, Sarosh Kuruvilla

Eli D Friedman

In this introduction to the special issue ‘Changing work, labour and employment relations in China’, we argue that China is taking an experimental and decentralized approach to the development of new labor relations frameworks. Particular political constraints in China prevent interest aggregation among workers, as the central state sees this as posing a risk to social stability. Firms and local governments have been given a degree of space to experiment with different arrangements, as long as the categorical ban on independent unions is not violated. The consequence has been an increasingly differentiated labor relations landscape, with significant variation by region …


Getting Through The Hard Times Together? Chinese Workers And Unions Respond To The Economic Crisis, Eli D. Friedman Apr 2015

Getting Through The Hard Times Together? Chinese Workers And Unions Respond To The Economic Crisis, Eli D. Friedman

Eli D Friedman

How do post-socialist unions respond to market crisis? And what are the implications of this response for labor representation? Drawing on literature on post-socialist labor and union democracy, I argue that economic crisis affects not just labor – capital and labor – state relations, but also the relationship between union representatives and workers. Such a dynamic is highlighted by an empirical account of the divergent activities of workers and All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) unions in China following the economic crisis of 2008. While the union responded to mass unemployment with an administrative and policy-oriented strategy, workers took to …


Alienated Politics: Labour Insurgency And The Paternalistic State In China, Eli Friedman Apr 2015

Alienated Politics: Labour Insurgency And The Paternalistic State In China, Eli Friedman

Eli D Friedman

Is there a labour movement in China? This contribution argues that China does not have a labour movement, but that contestation between workers, state and capital is best characterized as a form of ‘alienated politics’. Widespread worker resistance is highly effective at the level of the firm be-cause of its ability to inflict losses on capital and disrupt public order. But authoritarian politics in China prevent workers from formulating political demands. Despite the spectacular repressive capacity of the state, the central government has in fact responded to highly localized resistance by passing generally pro-labour legislation over the past decade. The …


Insurgency And Institutionalization: The Polanyian Countermovement And Chinese Labor Politics, Eli D. Friedman Apr 2015

Insurgency And Institutionalization: The Polanyian Countermovement And Chinese Labor Politics, Eli D. Friedman

Eli D Friedman

Why is it that in the nearly 10 years since the Chinese central government began making symbolic and material moves towards class compromise that labor unrest has expanded greatly? In this article I reconfigure Karl Polanyi's theory of the countermovement to account for recent developments in Chinese labor politics. Specifically, I argue that countermovements must be broken down into two constituent but intertwined "moments": the insurgent moment that consists of spontaneous resistance to the market, and the institutional moment, when class compromise is established in the economic and political spheres. In China, the transition from insurgency to institutionalization has thus …


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 …


Remote Work: Examining Current Trends And Organizational Practices, Bradford Bell Mar 2015

Remote Work: Examining Current Trends And Organizational Practices, Bradford Bell

Bradford S Bell

[Excerpt] Although remote work offers a number of potential benefits, it is not without risks and challenges. Companies can find it difficult to build a culture that is accepting and supportive of remote work. It can also be difficult to track exactly who is working remotely, particularly when remote work is adopted more informally, and to measure the business impact of these initiatives. Remote workers can face a number of personal and professional challenges. For instance, they may struggle for exposure and access to professional opportunities and there is the risk that those working outside the office can become socially …


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 …


Work Groups And Teams In Organizations: Review Update, Steve W. J. Kozlowski, Bradford S. Bell Mar 2015

Work Groups And Teams In Organizations: Review Update, Steve W. J. Kozlowski, Bradford S. Bell

Bradford S Bell

This review chapter examines the literature on work team effectiveness. To begin, we consider their nature, define them, and identify four critical conceptual issues—context, workflow, levels, and time—that serve as review themes and discuss the multitude of forms that teams may assume. We then shift attention to the heart of the review, examining key aspects of the creation, development, operation, and management of work teams. To accomplish objectives of breadth and integration, we adopt a lifecycle perspective to organize the review. Topics involved in the team lifecycle include: (1) team composition; (2) team formation, socialization, and development; (3) …


The State Of The Art In Performance Management: Learnings From Discussions With Leading Organizations, Bradford S. Bell, Christopher J. Collins Mar 2015

The State Of The Art In Performance Management: Learnings From Discussions With Leading Organizations, Bradford S. Bell, Christopher J. Collins

Bradford S Bell

Performance management is one of the fundamental HR tools that has been part of organizational life for decades and has long been the backbone of other activities of the HR system (e.g., pay decisions, development plans). Despite the importance of performance management, it has historically been rated by employees, managers, and the HR function itself as one of the least effective and understood HR practices. Given the stagnation in academic research on the topic and discontent on the part of organizational stakeholders, we decided it was an opportune time to meet with leading companies to understand the state of the …


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 …


Three Conceptual Themes For Future Research On Teams, Bradford S. Bell Mar 2015

Three Conceptual Themes For Future Research On Teams, Bradford S. Bell

Bradford S Bell

[Excerpt] Tannenbaum, Mathieu, Salas, and Cohen (2011) identify three change themes – dynamic composition, technology/distance, and delayering/empowerment – that are affecting the nature of teams and discuss future research directions within each thematic area. They acknowledge that these emerging research needs may require new theories, research methods, and analyses and describe a few specific approaches that may hold promise, but focus their attention largely on describing the substantive issues and questions research should target going forward. We do not dispute that these themes are important – they are garnering substantial research attention (see Bell, 2007; Chen & Tesluk, in press; …


Team Learning: A Theoretical Integration And Review, Bradford S. Bell, Steve W. J. Kozlowski, Sabrina Blawath Mar 2015

Team Learning: A Theoretical Integration And Review, Bradford S. Bell, Steve W. J. Kozlowski, Sabrina Blawath

Bradford S Bell

With the increasing emphasis on work teams as the primary architecture of organizational structure, scholars have begun to focus attention on team learning, the processes that support it, and the important outcomes that depend on it. Although the literature addressing learning in teams is broad, it is also messy and fraught with conceptual confusion. This chapter presents a theoretical integration and review. The goal is to organize theory and research on team learning, identify actionable frameworks and findings, and emphasize promising targets for future research. We emphasize three theoretical foci in our examination of team learning, treating it as multilevel …


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 …


Family Wages: The Roles Of Wives And Mothers In U.S. Working-Class Survival Strategies, 1880-1930, Ileen Devault Jan 2015

Family Wages: The Roles Of Wives And Mothers In U.S. Working-Class Survival Strategies, 1880-1930, Ileen Devault

Ileen A DeVault

The common image of a female wage earner in the U.S. in the decades around the turn of the 20th century is that of a young, single woman: the daughter of her family. However, the wives and mothers of these families also made important economic contributions to their families' economies. This paper argues that we need to rethink our evaluation of the economic roles played by ever-married women in working-class families. Using a range of government reports as well as IPUMS, I document three ways in which working-class wives and mothers strove to bring cash into their family units: through …


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 …