We utilize a qualitative study of 33 employees in for-profit and non-profit organizations to elaborate theory on job crafting. We specifically focus on how employees at different ranks describe ...perceiving and adapting to challenges in the execution of job crafting. Elaborating the challenges employees perceive in job crafting and their responses to them details the adaptive action that may be necessary for job crafting to occur. Specifically, our findings suggest that higher-rank employees tend to see the challenges they face in job crafting as located in their own expectations of how they and others should spend their time, while lower-rank employees tend to see their challenges as located in their prescribed jobs and others' expectations of them. The nature of each group's perceived challenges is related to the adaptive moves that they make to overcome them, such that higher-rank employees adapt their own expectations and behaviors to make do with perceived opportunities to job craft at work, while lower-rank employees adapt others' expectations and behaviors to create opportunities to job craft. Our elaborated theory presents a socially embedded account of job crafting as a proactive and adaptive process that is shaped by employees' structural location in the organization.
Human physiological systems are highly responsive to positive social interactions, but the organizational importance of this finding largely has been unexplored. After reviewing extant research, we ...illustrate how consideration of the physiology of positive social interactions at work opens new research questions about how positive social interactions affect human capacity and how organizational contexts affect employee health and physiological resourcefulness. We also address the practical implications of integrating physiological data into organizational research. Our paper invites a fuller consideration of how employees' bodies are affected by everyday work interactions and, in so doing, encourages a stronger tie between human physiology and organizational research.
In this paper we organize research on work-related identities into a four-perspective typology that captures different ways identities can be "positive." Each perspective on positive identity—virtue, ...evaluative, developmental, and structural—highlights a different source of positivity and opens new avenues for theorizing about identity construction. We use these four perspectives to develop propositions about how different forms of positive work-related identity construction can strengthen employees through building social resources.
In four studies we examine whether and why respectfully engaging with other organizational members can augment creativity for individuals and teams. We develop and test a model in which respectful ...engagement among organizational members facilitates relational information processing, which in turn results in enhanced creative behaviors. We found a similar pattern across all four studies – respectful engagement is indirectly related, through relational information processing, to creative behavior at both the individual and team levels. These findings underscore the importance of respectful engagement in facilitating relational information processing and fostering creative behaviors at both the individual and team levels.
We developed an integrative logic for why respectful engagement with supervisors would encourage and enable help-seeking from coworkers, resulting in greater levels of task performance. Using ...time-lagged data, the results of a moderated-mediated model supported our theorizing that respectful engagement between employees and their supervisors is key to fostering help-seeking behaviors. Our results suggest respectful engagement fosters help-seeking behaviors particularly when employees report lower levels of psychological safety. Those help-seeking behaviors consequentially improve employee performance. We use these results to suggest how and when workplace relationships endogenously resource individuals to engage and achieve higher levels of job performance.
•We articulate an integrative logic of a relational resourcing theory.•Respect between supervisors and subordinates facilitates help seeking behaviors.•However, respect is more important when people feel less psychological safety.•Help seeking behaviors, in turn, enhance subordinates' job performance.•We used time-lagged data to test a moderated-mediation model.
Using a mixed methods design, we examine the role of self-evaluations in influencing support for environmental issues. In Study 1—an inductive, qualitative study—we develop theory about how ...environmental issue supporters evaluate themselves in a mixed fashion, positively around having assets (self-assets) and negatively around questioning their performance (self-doubts). We explain how these ongoing self-evaluations, which we label "situated self-work," are shaped by cognitive, relational, and organizational challenges individuals interpret about an issue from a variety of life domains (work, home, or school). In Study 2—an inductive, quantitative, observational study—we derive three profiles of environmental issue supporters' mixed selves (self-affirmers, self-critics, and self-equivocators) and relate these profiles to real issue-supportive behaviors. We empirically validate key constructs from Study 1 and show that even among the most dedicated issue supporters, doubts play an important role in their experiences and may be either enabling or damaging, depending on the composition of their mixed selves. Our research offers a richer view of both how contexts shape social issue support and how individuals' self-evaluations play a meaningful role in understanding the experiences and, ultimately, the issue-supportive behaviors of individuals working on social issues.
Researchers have assumed that employee support programs cultivate affective organizational commitment by enabling employees to receive support. Using multimethod data from a Fortune 500 retail ...company, we propose that these programs also strengthen commitment by enabling employees to give support. We find that giving strengthens affective organizational commitment through a "prosocial sensemaking" process in which employees interpret personal and company actions and identities as caring. We discuss theoretical implications for organizational programs, commitment, sensemaking and identity, and citizenship behaviors.
We propose that employees craft their jobs by changing cognitive, task, and/or relational boundaries to shape interactions and relationships with others at work. These altered task and relational ...configurations change the design and social environment of the job, which, in turn, alters work meanings and work identity. We offer a model of job crafting that specifies (1) the individual motivations that spark this activity, (2) how opportunities to job craft and how individual work orientations determine the forms job crafting takes, and (3) its likely individual and organizational effects.
Recognizing the prevalence of suffering among management teachers and students, we raise the importance of compassion as central to the practice of management teaching. To aid in understanding how ...suffering and compassion arise in management teaching, we call upon a theoretical view of their rhizomatic structure, which conveys the widespread, complex, and largely unspoken spreading of suffering and corresponding need for compassion in the work of management teaching. To meet this suffering with compassion, we propose two clusters of practices central to teaching that lend themselves to helping management teachers see possibilities for more skillfully intertwining suffering and compassion. The first focuses on how management teachers can design the context for teaching in ways that make compassion more likely, focusing specifically on roles and networks. The second draws upon Honneth’s recognitional infrastructure to focus on how teachers can approach the relational practice of teaching with emphasis on enriching human recognition of suffering. We conclude with a caution about overly simplistic approaches and overly individualized views of compassion in the work of management teaching. We call for systemic approaches to action that will enrich our imaginations as we approach management teaching and its role in our collective responsiveness to suffering.