This work suggests that researchers in work and organizational psychology (WOP) and WOP as a discipline would benefit from a critical perspective on their own research and practice. We highlight the ...value of critical reflection and critical reflexivity on contexts of research and practice in order to increase the practical impact of WOP for everyone. First, we outline how WOP currently fails to address pressing global issues, such as precarious employment, by focusing on work‐related phenomena in affluent societies and neglecting issues relevant to the majority of the world's working population. Second, we present a heuristic framework of four fundamental contextual components that are important to consider when engaging in a continuous process of critical reflection and critical reflexivity: history; economy and politics; society and culture; and personal background. Third, we illustrate why these contexts are important for WOP with the example of precarious employment. Considering context more explicitly is important for future WOP research because context not only co‐determines the experiences of the working people under investigation but also the subjectivity of researchers themselves. We hope to encourage WOP researchers to engage in critical reflection and critical reflexivity to promote a more critical WOP.
This article studies the organizational implementation of public policy, specifically shared parental leave (SPL) legislation (2015), through the lens of attribution theory (that is, actors’ ...inferences for why policies are implemented by their employing organization), drawing on 26 in-depth interviews with a range of actors in a British university. Our findings highlight that attributions vary between different organizational actors despite SPL being an externally-mandated, unavoidable policy. Our key contributions are to study attributions associated with under-considered external policy, highlight the unintended intra-organizational variations in these attributions, and explore how the co-existence of varying actor attributions impacts policy implementation.
Drawing on scholarship in the fields of vocational and industrial/organizational (VIO) psychology, we propose a definition of social justice and assess progress and problems in achieving it. Using a ...critical psychology lens, we find that the historical focus on higher-income settings and workers with relatively privileged status reflects the neoliberal underpinning implicit in most of VIO psychology. We identify five marginalizing conditions that act at macro levels to perpetuate the status quo and restrict progress toward social justice: group bias, forced movement of people, poverty, unemployment, and lack of decent work. Our review of these conditions accentuates the necessity of social justice praxis at multiple ecological levels to effect significant progress. We propose a set of recommendations for the future that highlight the importance of articulating and deconstructing context, power, and perception implicit in extant VIO endeavors. Our recommendations challenge the field to: (1) extend the scope of the locations and range of ecological levels at which VIO research and practice are carried out, (2) highlight who is and is not served and benefitted by VIO research and practice, and (3) question the underlying values and ideological assumptions of existing VIO research and practice. We call for greater critical consciousness among VIO psychologists in order to ensure the relevance and benefit of our research and practice for all workers around the globe.
•Much VIO social justice scholarship focuses on individuals and microsystems.•A focus on structural sources of injustice and neoliberal influences is needed.•VIO social justice endeavors should address context, power, and perception.•Progress will require multilevel engagement that interrupts the status quo.
As the world faces increasing environmental, social and financial crises, as a result of climate change, deepening unrest about inequality, and the cost of living crisis, there are growing calls for ...organisations to play a role in responding to them. Scholars in the field of sustainable human resource management (HRM) have elaborated various avenues through which the field of HRM can contribute to this response. One such contribution HRM can make to global grand challenges is through contributing to the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Of particular relevance for HRM is SDG8, which calls for decent work. In this study we empirically explore why, how and what influences HR managers in international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) to seek to enact fair reward, a key component of decent work. Based on our analysis, we find evidence that HR managers can be strategic actors in enacting fair pay, and we identify a complex interplay between HR managers and their context in the behaviours underpinning this enactment. HR managers adopt one of at least three identified roles to proactively enact fair reward (visionary, gatekeeper or technical consultant). Each role adopts differing strategic and fairness enactment behaviours to navigate the constraints posed by the context in which they work, including focussing on influencing different justice dimensions, and leveraging disruption in the external environment. By drawing out the key role HR managers can play in enacting fairness, we offer support for the importance of HRM in contributing to decent work and global grand challenges. Ultimately our study offers support for a common good HRM, in which HR manager actions are influenced and driven by challenges beyond the scope of their organisation. We offer empirical support and theoretical development related to how context shapes HR manager roles at work.
Salary comparison has well-established implications for employees' attitudes and behaviors at work. Yet how employees process information about simultaneous comparisons, particularly when internal ...and external comparison information is incongruent, remains controversial. In this article, we draw from the model of dispositional attribution and equity theory to predict how the incongruence of internal and external salary comparisons affects perceptions of distributive justice and subsequent employee withdrawal behavior. We hypothesized that the effect of salary comparisons on perceived distributive justice follows a hierarchically restrictive schema in which a lower salary in comparison to a referent has a greater effect than a higher salary. This further affects employee withdrawal (neglect, turnover intention, and voluntary turnover). We also propose that the effects of salary comparisons are bounded by employees' zero-sum construal of success. Three studies were conducted to test our hypotheses: a quasi-experimental study and two time-lagged field studies. Consistent with our hypotheses, we observed that, when comparison information was incongruent, underpayment compared with others more strongly affected perceived distributive justice than overpayment did. The subsequent impact on perceived distributive justice was negatively related to employee withdrawal. As expected, the effect of incongruent salary comparison information was stronger for employees with lower zero-sum construal of success. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
Traditional living wage research has been the purview of economists, but recently contributions from the field of work psychology have challenged existing perspectives, providing a different lens ...through which to consider this issue. By means of a narrative interdisciplinary review of 115 peer-reviewed journal articles published between 2000 and 2020, we chart the transitions in the field with attention shifting from macro-economic and econometric lens largely concerned with the costs of living wage policies, to a more person-centric lens focusing on the employee and their family. Synthesizing prior study, we outline five key themes: consequences for individuals, organizations, and societies; changes in operationalization; exploration of different contexts; study of social movements; and the history of the topic. We outline the importance of work psychology in developing the living wage debate through more inclusive definitions, and novel operationalization and measurement, thereby providing fresh insights into how and why living wages can have a positive impact. Critically, we outline the redundancy of simple study of wage rates without understanding the elements that make work decent. We raise key areas for further study, and this topic presents a significant opportunity for psychology to shift focus to impact upstream policy by providing new empirical evidence, and challenges to structural inequalities.
•Fair treatment of employee groups in multinational contexts is a pervasive challenge.•Innovative global reward structures are emerging in response to perceived inequity.•Strategic alignment of ...global reward with social values drives incremental shifts.•Studying INGOs provides valuable insights into addressing concerns of fairness.
Global reward management plays a fundamental role in supporting the attraction, motivation and retention of employees, and yet recent research has underscored limitations of the dominant balance sheet approach, including inequity between host country national and expatriate staff. To shed light on how reward in international contexts can be structured to address issues of fairness and equity, this study explores approaches to global reward in international non-governmental organizations (INGOs), an underexplored context where fairness may be particularly salient. Through an inductive study of 15 INGOs, we show how organizations are reconceptualizing global reward systems by questioning dominant assumptions of the expatriate workforce and the jobs they do, and broadening consideration of reward to include both monetary and non-monetary components. Doing so enables incremental shifts toward strategic alignment of global reward with underlying social values. Our findings provide important insights for organizations operating internationally about how global reward can be structured to address concerns of fairness, while still enabling organizations to meet their demands for particular skills.
Developing Evidence-Based Alternatives to Dual Salary Systems McWha-Hermann, Ishbel; Marai, Leo; MacLachlan, Malcolm ...
International perspectives in psychology : research, practice, consultation,
10/2021, Letnik:
10, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The United Nation's Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 8.5 aims to "achieve equal pay for work of equal value" globally by 2030. This goal conflicts with a widespread and continuing practice of ...paying skilled workers from higher-income economies working in lower-income settings more than their host worker counterparts. This brief summarizes research that has found that dual salaries undermine host colleagues' sense of wage justice, work motivation, and team relations. At organizational levels, they fuel turnover, increase brain drain, and reduce mental well-being of workers. Higher ratios fuel a "double demotivation" - extending to international staff who overrate their own abilities and reduce their effort at work. International, multisector evidence shows conventional dual salaries to be neither compatible nor to align with the SDGs. Organizational options for meeting SDG 8.5 identified in civil society groups include reducing dual salary ratios and implementing single salary systems at a national level. We offer three macro policy frameworks (Project Fair's Principles and Standards of INGO Fair Reward, the UN Global Compact, and OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises) that can serve to render salary systems more facilitative of the SDGs and the Decent Work Agenda.
Impact and Implications
This work speaks directly to the United Nations' Agenda for Sustainable Development, and in particular SDG8.5: Equal pay for work of equal value. It addresses the challenge of fair pay and benefits for workers from different countries of origin working together in similar roles. Drawing on research in work and organisational psychology, this policy brief offers evidence-based alternatives to traditional dual salary systems.
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