Kenneth Butterfield, Nathan Robert Neale, Eunjeong Shin and Mengjiao (Rebecca) He
The current management literature suggests that when employees engage in wrongdoing, managers typically respond with punishment. The emerging moral repair literature suggests an…
Abstract
Purpose
The current management literature suggests that when employees engage in wrongdoing, managers typically respond with punishment. The emerging moral repair literature suggests an alternative to punishment: a reparative response that focuses on repairing harm and restoring damaged relationships. However, little is currently known about restorative managerial responses, including why managers respond to employee wrongdoing in a reparative versus punitive manner. The purpose of this paper is to examine a variety of cognitive and emotional influences on this managerial decision.
Design/methodology/approach
This study used a scenario-based survey methodology. The authors gathered data from 894 managers in sales and financial services contexts to test a set of hypotheses regarding individual-level influences on managers’ punitive versus restorative responses.
Findings
This study found that managers’ restorative justice orientation, retributive justice orientation, social considerations (e.g. when employees are relatively interdependent versus independent), instrumental considerations (e.g. when the offender is highly valuable to the organization) and feelings of anger influenced their reparative versus punitive responses.
Research limitations/implications
Data are cross-sectional, so causality inferences should be approached with caution. Another potential limitation is common method bias due to single-source and single-wave data.
Practical implications
The findings of this study show that managers often opt for a restorative response to workplace transgressions, and this study surfaces a variety of reasons why managers choose a restorative response instead of a punitive response.
Social implications
This study focuses on social order and expectations within the workplace. This is important to victims, offenders, observers, managers and other stakeholders. This study seeks to emphasize the importance of social factors, a shared social identity, social bonds and other relationships within this manuscript. This is an important component of organizational-focused restorative justice research.
Originality/value
This is the first study, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, to explicitly test individual-level influences on managers’ reparative versus punitive responses to employee wrongdoing.
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Research addressing the impact of tacit and explicit pay secrecy policies on organizational climates is fairly limited. While researchers desire to explain the impact of such…
Abstract
Purpose
Research addressing the impact of tacit and explicit pay secrecy policies on organizational climates is fairly limited. While researchers desire to explain the impact of such policies on individuals' pay satisfaction, a direct effect has not been supported. This study seeks to better explain how these policies are related to ethical climates and pay satisfaction.
Design/methodology/approach
This study draws on ethical climate theory to show the influence of ethical climate types on job satisfaction and a moderating effect of explicit and tacit pay secrecy policies on this relationship. This is accomplished through designing this study by using existing scales from the literature in a survey methodology. A pilot study of 246 undergraduate students was used to validate the measures. Then, a sample of 217 adults was obtained to test the proposed relationships. Linear regression is employed to analyze the data and to test the existence of direct and moderating effects.
Findings
The five empirically tested ethical climates each have a direct effect on pay satisfaction. Explicit pay secrecy policies has a positive moderating effect on the relationship between rules, law and code ethical climates, and pay satisfaction. Tacit pay secrecy policies moderate the relationship between caring, rules, law and code, and independence ethical climates and pay satisfaction.
Research limitations/implications
The findings strengthen the literature by demonstrating a stronger relationship between ethical climates and pay satisfaction. While some of the moderating effects were significant, others were not. This was surprising, but present avenues to further test ethical climate theory and the impact of pay secrecy policies.
Practical implications
This study presents practical implications for managers. Understanding how these policies may be viewed differently, depending on the type of climate that is experienced within an organization may help managers evaluate using them. Trying to protect employees or the organization itself by enacting these polices may backfire and create additional problems. Managers may want to evaluate the manner that they communicate these polices through formal or informal means, depending on the type of climate experienced within the workplace.
Originality/value
This study is the first to examine the influence of explicit and tacit pay secrecy policies on the relationship between ethical climates and employees' satisfaction with pay. It leads to a number of directions for further research that may continue to build upon this study in order to further advance scholarly understanding of the importance of ethical climates and pay secrecy policies.
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Lu Lu, Allan Cheng Chieh Lu, Dogan Gursoy and Nathan Robert Neale
This study aims to investigate the influence of employee positions (supervisor vs line-level employee) on work-related variables (e.g. work engagement, job satisfaction and…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to investigate the influence of employee positions (supervisor vs line-level employee) on work-related variables (e.g. work engagement, job satisfaction and turnover intentions).
Design/methodology/approach
Data were collected from line-level employees and supervisors of 29 mid- to up-scale hotels. A series of one-way ANCOVA were performed to test the position differences in work engagement, job satisfaction and turnover intentions. Hierarchical regression analyses were conducted to examine the moderating role of employees’ positions on the relationships between those variables.
Findings
Supervisors have significantly higher work engagement and lower turnover intentions than line-level employees, whereas job satisfaction does not differ across positions. Employee positions significantly moderate the relationship between absorption and job satisfaction, and the relationship between dedication and turnover intentions.
Practical implications
This study provides an in-depth analysis for hotel managers to capture work-related factors (i.e. work engagement, job satisfaction and turnover intentions) across employee positions. Dedication is the primary barometer that significantly leads to job satisfaction and reduced turnover intentions compared to vigor and absorption. Although job satisfaction may be boosted by improving employee work engagement (i.e. vigor, dedication and absorption), increasing absorption is not an effective solution to increase supervisors’ job satisfaction. Hotel managers need to carefully monitor supervisors’ levels of dedication, given its focal impact on turnover intentions.
Originality/value
This study is one of the first attempts to examine the differences between line-level employees’ and supervisors’ work engagement (i.e. vigor, dedication and absorption) and its consequences (i.e. job satisfaction and turnover intentions). Findings highlight the unique influence of the individual dimension of work engagement on job satisfaction and turnover intentions. This study reveals the moderating effect of employee positions on the links between engagement dimensions and consequences.
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This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.
Design/methodology/approach
This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.
Findings
Employee dissatisfaction with pay has negative implications for commitment and performance. Leaders might suitably address the issue and minimize conflict by adopting pay policies most appropriate to the type of ethical climate that prevails in the firm.
Originality/value
The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.
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Very much more might be done to improve the quality of our food supplies by the great organisations that exist for the avowed object of furthering the interests of traders in…
Abstract
Very much more might be done to improve the quality of our food supplies by the great organisations that exist for the avowed object of furthering the interests of traders in foodstuffs. It is no exaggeration to say that these organisations claim, and rightly claim, to speak in the aggregate on behalf of great commercial interests involving the means of livelihood of thousands of people and the most profitable disposal of millions of money. The information that they possess as to certain trade methods and requirements is necessarily unique. Apart from the commercial knowledge they possess, these organisations have funds at their command which enable them to obtain the best professional opinions on any subjects connected with the trades they represent. Their members are frequently to be found occupying positions of responsibility as the elected representatives of their fellow‐citizens on municipal councils and other public bodies, where the administration of the Food Laws and prosecutions under the Food and Drugs Acts are often under discussion. Such organisations, then, are in a position to afford an unlimited amount of valuable help by assisting to put down fraud in connection with our food supply. The dosing of foods with harmful drugs is, of course, only a part of a very much larger subject. It is, however, typical. Assuming the danger to public health that arises from the treatment of foods with harmful preservatives, the continued use of such substances cannot but be in the long run as harmful to the best interests of the traders as it is actually dangerous to public health. The trade organisations to which reference has been made might very well extend their sphere of usefulness by making it their business to seriously consider this and similar questions in the interests of public health, as well as in their own best interests. It is surely not open to doubt that a great organisation, numbering hundreds, and perhaps thousands of members, has such a membership because individual traders find it to their interest, as do people in all walks of life, to act more or less in common for the general advantage ; and, further, that it would not be to the benefit of individual members that their connection with the organisation should terminate owing to their own wrong‐doing. The executives of such trade organisations hold a sufficiently strong position to enable them to bring strong pressure to bear on those who are acting in a way that is contrary to the interests of the public generally, and of honest traders in particular, by adulterating or misbranding the food products that they gain their living by selling. It should also be plain that such trade organisations could go a long way towards solving many of the very vexed questions that arise whenever food standards and limits, for example, form the subject of discussion. These problems are not easy to deal with. The difficulties in connection with them are many and great; but such problems, however difficult of solution, are still not insoluble, and an important step towards their solution would be taken if co‐operation between those who are acting in the interests of hygienic science and those who are acting in the interests of trade could be brought about. If this could be accomplished the unedifying spectacle of alleged trade interests and the demands of public health being brought, as is so often the case, into sharp conflict, would be less frequent, and there can be no doubt that general benefit would result.
Steve McDonald, S. Michael Gaddis, Lindsey B. Trimble and Lindsay Hamm
Purpose – The introductory chapter to this special issue highlights contemporary scholarship on networks, work, and inequality.Methodology – We review the last decade of research…
Abstract
Purpose – The introductory chapter to this special issue highlights contemporary scholarship on networks, work, and inequality.Methodology – We review the last decade of research on this topic, identifying four key areas investigation: (1) networks and hiring, (2) networks and the labor process, (3) networks and outcomes at work, and (4) networks and institutional dynamics.Findings – Social networks play an important role in understanding the mechanisms by which and the conditions under which economic inequality is reproduced across gender, race, and social class distinctions. Throughout the review, we point to numerous opportunities for future research to enhance our understanding of these social processes.
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Critical race theory is a contemporary legal movement composed of progressive scholars, primarily people who identify as people of color, who seek to challenge racism in American…
Abstract
Critical race theory is a contemporary legal movement composed of progressive scholars, primarily people who identify as people of color, who seek to challenge racism in American society. In their writing, they explore the many ways in which racism infuses American institutions, popular culture, commonsense beliefs, pervades interaction and cuts to the core of the American psyche. One of the central challenges that any person, scholar, activist faces in the U.S. is the peculiar nature of contemporary discourse on race. Often times, much of white America treats racism as if it were a thing of the past, an article of a time when the racial caste system was explicitly upheld and defended, either in the form of slavery, explicitly racist immigration laws (like the Chinese Exclusion Act), the Jim Crow laws, or when Native Americans were massacred by Union soldiers. Contemporary anti-racist work constantly confronts this denial of racism from a large segment of America.2 This denial of racism is one in which many people seem to have developed something of a psychic investment. Since the critical race theorists are working in a scholar-activist anti-racist vein, they also have to confront this massive self-delusion or mythic self-understanding.
Brian L. Steuerwald, Allison R. Brown, Malek Mneimne and David Kosson
The purpose of this paper is to test the attenuated-anger and heightened-anger hypotheses of psychopathy by assessing the physiological, behavioral, and subjective measures of…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to test the attenuated-anger and heightened-anger hypotheses of psychopathy by assessing the physiological, behavioral, and subjective measures of anger in individuals with and without psychopathic traits.
Design/methodology/approach
In all, 62 male college students were assigned to one of three groups based on evidence of elevated affective-interpersonal (Factor 1) and antisocial lifestyle (Factor 2) traits associated with psychopathy (the IF1+F2 group), evidence of only Factor 2 traits (the F2 only group), or based on the absence of psychopathic traits (the control group), using Gough’s (1957) Socialization scale and a modified, interview only form of Hare’s (1991) Psychopathy Checklist-Revised. To induce anger, participants received unjust criticism about their performance on a computer-based affective lexical decision task and were denied a performance bonus they had reason to expect.
Findings
Following provocation, the three groups displayed similar increases in blood pressure, pulse, and self-reported anger. The control and IF1+F2 groups also displayed similar retaliation toward the confederate. However, the IF1+F2 group displayed smaller increases on two of three measures of facial muscle activity associated with anger.
Originality/value
This study is one of the first to assess anger responsiveness in individuals with psychopathic traits using a powerful anger induction and using physiological, behavioral, and subjective indices of anger. It is also the first to assess both the attenuated-anger and the heightened-anger hypotheses of psychopathy. The findings appear largely inconsistent with both perspectives.