The relative career advancement of men and women engineers in the United States

Abstract

Despite the fact that women engineering students perform as well as their male classmates during college, women engineers report lower salaries and supervisory responsibility levels after about five years in the labour force. Several hypotheses concerning the reasons for the differences in career advancement of men and women engineers were investigated in a national survey of engineers in the United States. The gender differences in career advancement could not be explained by differences in education level or in self-perceptions of ability. The fact that women were more likely to have taken a career break than were men did decrease their salaries and supervisory levels. However, gender differences were still apparent even when this factor was controlled. The careers of both men and women were affected by conflicts arising from the multiple roles of worker, spouse, and parent, but many women engineers avoided such conflicts by remaining single and childless. These results challenge several popular explanations for the differential advancement of men and women, but the actual causes remain unknown.     

News: University prizes

Abstract

Stressful working environments are often assumed to create conditions that may lead to bullying. However, few studies have investigated how factors experienced in the work environment may trigger perpetrators to engage in bullying of others. Drawing on Spector and Fox's (2005) stressor–emotion model of counterproductive work behaviour, the present study investigated the predictive effects of both individual and situational factors as predictors of being a perpetrator of workplace bullying, as applied to a representative sample of the Norwegian workforce (N=2359). Results from logistic regression analysis show that being oneself a target of bullying, regardless of the frequency, and being male strongly predicted involvement in bullying of others. Among the situational factors, only role conflict and interpersonal conflicts significantly predicted being a perpetrator of bullying. The present findings support the notion that bullying will thrive in stressful working environments and thus yield an important contribution in identifying antecedent conditions to counteract the development of bullying at workplaces.     

Post bureaucratic organisations and managers

Pressures to change in organizations administered on bureaucratic lines and using the production techniques of “scientific management” are deriving from certain intrinsic attributes of these systems and from changing attributes of the environment. These changes constitute attempts to introduce greater fluidity into organizational structures and attempts to diffuse power. To the extent that they are implemented they imply that future management will centre more on sociological and psychological data, will become more experimental and less directive in style, will focus more on organizational (as against departmental) concerns and will become more responsive to external groupings. They imply also that managers will be judged more by results than by the opinion of peers, that they will be more exposed to challenge and criticism, that they will be held responsible for the quality of the work experience of their subordinates and that their own careers will be less orderly.     

Why become a certified physician executive?

What is the CPE Tutorial and how can it help advance the careers of physician executives? This five-day program teaches executive skills that make physician executives more valued in the marketplace. When candidates successfully pass an evaluation judged by a panel of health care CEOs, recruiters, and Fellows of the College, they become Certified Physician Executives (CPEs). This certification provides recognition to potential employers that CPEs have: stature as a physician; been successfully tested in all disciplines of medical management; demonstrated management experience; and successfully completed the Tutorial with a five minute presentation describing skills and competencies on the last day. As CPEs become widely known in the marketplace, the designation will be a valued credential that helps physician executives get and keep desirable positions, as well as advance to the next level in their careers.     

Physician executives in the 21st century: new realities, roles, and responsibilities

This article is based in part on responses from 150 physician executives who participated in an interactive discussion of future trends at the American College of Physician Executives' 1999 Spring Institute and Senior Executive Focus, in Las Vegas, Nevada, on May 13, 1999. The session included electronic polling on 40 predictions, such as the future composition of the clinical workforce and how technology will affect the way that medicine is practiced and the patient-physician relationship. The prediction for physician executives? A growing number of physician executives will find themselves at the top of their careers in the next decade. The physician executive of the future will have a broad array of management opportunities and career choices. More doctors will be managers. Physician executives will work at every level of health care organizations, across the continuum of care, from large complex urban systems to small rural settings.     

When the Minority Rules: Leveraging Difference While Facilitating Congruence for Cultural Minority Senior Leaders

The inclusion of cultural minorities as senior leaders is of growing importance and relevance to contemporary organizations with increasingly international composition, but much is to be learned about how and when such leaders impact the workplaces they lead. We draw on the “cultural difference” and “cultural congruence” propositions (Dorfman and House, 2004) to build a model for understanding whether and under what conditions cultural minority senior leaders have an impact on the elaboration of task-relevant information and relationship conflict in their workplaces. Hierarchical regression results from a study of 315 Australian workplaces and their senior leaders suggest that, regardless of whether the senior leader is a member of a cultural minority group, an organizational climate for innovation and flexibility increases information elaboration – an effect that is stronger when the organization faces greater environmental turbulence. The results further provide support for a three-way interaction effect, whereby employees in workplaces led by a cultural minority leader have less relationship conflict when climate for innovation and environmental turbulence are both low. We conclude with a discussion of the scholarly contributions and practical implications of our conceptual and empirical work, the limitations of our study, and future directions for this research.     

Gender,power and office politics

Abstract

This interpretative study explores the experiences of Taiwanese female clerical workers as they deal with office politics. A hermeneutical phenomenology is used to describe and interpret the participants' experiences. The study shows that powerlessness and frustration result from: (1) structural barriers; (2) behavioral barriers; and (3) accommodation and rationalization. This study has implications for research and practice in international area of women's studies and for the field of international career development education.     

Nurses: Training for new job demands

Abstract

This paper argues that both the present and future job demands faced by nurses are likely to exceed the resources of the training which is currently provided for them. This argument will be supported by reference to the authors' studies of stress in nursing, as well as a variety of other sources. The common themes underlying reactions to both present and future demands include first, awareness of high stress levels to be found amongst nurses, and second, an emphasis on communication as both the problem and as the proposed solution. Common responses to these two themes are outlined, including training in stress management, and communication training. Some of the problems and unexamined assumptions (for example that hospital management actually wants to lower stress levels and improve communication in nursing) are examined. Some suggestions are made for developing training in health care contexts, to deal more adequately with likely future demands.     

Is Safe Production an Oxymoron?

This research examines how organizations simultaneously manage their operations and occupational health and safety. Although both safety and operations scholars conduct research in the same operational settings, they have reached different, yet untested, conclusions about the relationship between creating a safe workplace and creating a productive workplace. The results from a series of 10 case studies show that it is possible to create safe and productive workplaces, but that many facilities fail at this task because of problems associated with the culture management creates and the practices management adopts.     

Approach,Ability, Aftermath: A Psychological Process Framework of Unethical Behavior at Work

Abstract

Many of the scandalous organizational practices to have come to light in the last decade—rigging LIBOR, misselling payment protection insurance, rampant Wall Street insider trading, large-scale bribery of foreign officials, and the packaging and sale of toxic securities to naïve investors—require ethically problematic judgments and behaviors. However, dominant models of workplace unethical behavior fail to account for what we have learned from moral psychology and cognitive neuroscience in the past two decades about how and why people make the moral decisions they do. In this review, we explain how intuition, affect, physiology, and identity support and inform more deliberative reasoning process in the construction and enactment of moral behavior. We then describe how these processes play into how individuals approach a potential moral choice, whether they have the ability in the moment to enact it, and how it is encoded in the action' aftermath, feeding back into future approaches. Throughout, we attend to the role of organizational context in influencing these processes. By reviewing this large body of research and presenting a new framework that attempts to integrate these new findings, our hope is to motivate new research about how to support more moral workplace behavior that starts from what we know now.     

3 Staffing Twenty‐first‐century Organizations

Abstract

We highlight important differences between twenty‐first‐century organizations as compared with those of the previous century, and offer a critical review of the basic principles, typical applications, general effectiveness, and limitations of the current staffing model. That model focuses on identifying and measuring job‐related individual characteristics to predict individual‐level job performance. We conclude that the current staffing model has reached a ceiling or plateau in terms of its ability to make accurate predictions about future performance. Evidence accumulated over more than 80 years of staffing research suggests that general mental abilities and other traditional staffing tools do a modest job of predicting performance across settings and jobs considering that, even when combined and corrected for methodological and statistical artifacts, they rarely predict more than 50% of the variance in performance. Accordingly, we argue for a change in direction in staffing research and propose an expanded view of the staffing process, including the introduction of a new construct, in situ performance, and an expanded view of staffing tools to be used to predict future in situ performance that take into account time and context. Our critical review offers a novel perspective and research agenda with the goal of guiding future research that will result in more useful, applicable, relevant, and effective knowledge for practitioners to use in organizational settings.     

How do executive search firms increase interest in career opportunities? The role of past interactions

This article explores how executive search consultants stimulate executives’ consideration of career opportunities available at other employers. The study is based on a panel dataset of 3582 executives invited to a job interview by a global executive search firm from January 2005 to May 2009. The results demonstrate that past interactions between executives and the search consultants had a delayed effect on consideration of career opportunities. The results contribute to research on executive careers by identifying past relationships with search consultants as a factor affecting rejection of new career opportunities. They also shed light on the relatively understudied phenomenon of executive search firms.     

Impact of the psychosocial work environment on registered absence from work: A two-year longitudinal study using the IPAW cohort

During the Intervention Project on Absence and Well-being (IPAW), a 5-year project conducted in Denmark, we investigated psychosocial work environment factors as independent predictors of the number of absence days per year. The present two-year longitudinal study used the IPAW cohort, but was not intended to study intervention effects, which will be reported later. Data were derived from baseline questionnaires and employers' registers of absence for 1919 participants (1305 women, 614 men, mainly in low-skilled jobs) in different occupations from 52 workplaces. These workplaces included municipal care, municipal technical services and a large pharmaceutical company. Analyses were performed by Poisson regression accounting for over-dispersion. After controlling for age, family type, health behaviours and physical work environment variables, we found that high levels of decision authority predicted low absence rates in both women and men. We tested two new psychosocial constructs developed for this study: Predictability (relating to being informed on future events at work) and Meaning of Work (relating to how meaningful and useful the work is perceived to be). Higher Predictability was a significant predictor of lower absence rates in men. This study adds to the body of evidence that the psychosocial working environment influences absence and should therefore be considered to be an important target for intervention.     

Impact of the psychosocial work environment on registered absence from work: A two-year longitudinal study using the IPAW cohort

During the Intervention Project on Absence and Well-being (IPAW), a 5-year project conducted in Denmark, we investigated psychosocial work environment factors as independent predictors of the number of absence days per year. The present two-year longitudinal study used the IPAW cohort, but was not intended to study intervention effects, which will be reported later. Data were derived from baseline questionnaires and employers’ registers of absence for 1919 participants (1305 women, 614 men, mainly in low-skilled jobs) in different occupations from 52 workplaces. These workplaces included municipal care, municipal technical services and a large pharmaceutical company. Analyses were performed by Poisson regression accounting for over-dispersion. After controlling for age, family type, health behaviours and physical work environment variables, we found that high levels of decision authority predicted low absence rates in both women and men. We tested two new psychosocial constructs developed for this study: Predictability (relating to being informed on future events at work) and Meaning of Work (relating to how meaningful and useful the work is perceived to be). Higher Predictability was a significant predictor of lower absence rates in men. This study adds to the body of evidence that the psychosocial working environment influences absence and should therefore be considered to be an important target for intervention.     

Some thoughts on enterprise modelling

Enterprise management is highly value conscious, trying to determine and guide the activities of the company so as to be competitive (improve profits, reduce costs and time to market, etc.) and to build future capability to remain competitive. It is necessary to demonstrate why enterprise modelling is necessary to attain business objectives. We then discuss the role of interfaces in enterprise engineering and why enterprise modelling will play an even more significant role in the future enterprise. Finally, we discuss three research questions: model interoperability, the development of a reference model for global virtual enterprise, and plug-and-play, or 'component-based' enterprise engineering.     

Business and legal issues in enterprise collaborations: A German perspective

Virtual and Extended enterprises share a large amount of characteristics. Especially when it comes to the process of their foundation either one is well advised to base itself on a strong network of reliable partners. In this network each of the joining companies that form the Virtual enterprise can concentrate on their core competencies, giving the whole enterprise the chance to be extremely efficient. Bringing together the different partners and managing them is seen as being one of the biggest challenges of the Virtual enterprise. Therefore some partners will have to focus on those managing tasks. It might as well be their responsibility to ensure that no legal conflicts in regard to the foundation, dissolving, production and related topics emerge. This being especially difficult because the efficiency of a Virtual enterprise is strongly dependent on the looseness of its structure. What conflicts can appear in the described environment and how they might be solved is the focus of this article. It will be pointed out that the emergence of Virtual and Extended enterprises should be supported by general terms and conditions. This terms and conditions should be adjustable, offer the chance to establish a legal framework fitting just perfectly to the intended purpose to continuously create, adjust or dissolve Virtual enterprise. As a matter of fact a certain degree of commitment can positively expand the co-operation in a Virtual enterprise which is mainly based on trust.     

Deus ex machina? Career progress and the contingent benefits of knowledge management systems

Knowledge management (KM) systems are increasingly common in firms which promote self-managed careers and autonomy, such as professional service firms. Yet, whether or not KM systems provide real benefits is underexplored. Our focus is on the impact of KM use on the career progress of service professionals. We use recorded logs of employee KM system use and career progress data over a two-year period within a strategy consultancy to study the effect of KM use on career advancement speed. We present a contingency-based model to KM use effectiveness, showing that, although KM use generally boosts career progress speed, (a) benefits vary by seniority (more junior employees benefit more), (b) benefits vary by knowledge type (encyclopedic vs. social), with social knowledge use mattering more to career progress, and (c) those service professionals who tap a wider range of knowledge sources progress faster in their careers. We also find mediating effects, specifically that KM system use operates partly by accelerating the development of task-related skills. We draw the conclusion that KM systems contain neither a magical Deus ex machine for boosting employee performance and progress but nor do they warrant excessive skepticism, rather their impact on careers is contingent on employee needs.     

Open collaborative innovation and digital platforms

Abstract

This study uses contract theory to analyse the relationship between open collaborative innovation strategies and digital platforms. We argue that a collaborative mechanism and governance of the platform affect how operations are run and impact firm ambidexterity. We also explain how the twofold revealing strategy, both selective and free occurs via the platform and how governance positively impacts the coordination mechanism. A case study analysis on TIM OPEN draws a ground-breaking framework for future investigations. The analysis suggests that the combination of digital platform and collaborative innovation can facilitate the creative process and be a driver of operational synergies. Results confirm that the adoption of digital platforms for collaborative innovations reduces transaction costs.     

The Danish psychosocial work environment and symptoms of stress: The main,mediating and moderating role of sense of coherence

The aim of this cross-sectional study was to explore the main, mediating and moderating role of sense of coherence (SOC) on stress symptoms and on the association between perceived psychosocial work environment and stress symptoms. The sample includes 2053 Danish employees from 52 workplaces. Hierarchical regression models were applied for each measure of stress. The results strongly supported the presence of a main effect for SOC. People with high levels of SOC experienced fewer stress symptoms. A mediating effect of SOC was also supported. Thus, SOC in part explained the association between work environment and stress symptoms. In addition, some support for a moderating effect of SOC was found, suggesting that people with higher SOC coped more efficiently with work environmental strain that people with lower SOC. Taken together the regression models explained 11–32% of the variance in stress symptoms. The results suggest that measures of individual factors such as SOC should be included in analyses of the effects of work environmental factors on stress and well-being.