Informal Mentoring as an Organisational Resource

Mentoring is a mechanism for supporting junior managers but until now little research on the benefits to the organisation has been reported. This paper reports on a survey of managers in a UK local government authority to ascertain their views of the benefits of informal mentoring to the organisation. Both mentors and protégés perceived mentoring as investment in a future pool of managers and a tool for the management of change. Mentoring was also seen as assisting in the transfer of knowledge, organisational learning and cross-departmental communication—in other words, as nodes in an information network. Further research is suggested into mentoring as a micro-level knowledge-producing community of practice. As informal mentoring is likely to bring longer-term advantages to the organisation, the paper also discusses how to capture the benefits of informal mentoring when designing formal schemes.     

‘Sent Down’ in China: Stratification challenged but not denied

Dramatic shocks to social systems can disrupt normal social processes such as life course sequences and socioeconomic attainment. Such shocks provide a rare opportunity for contrasting normal and extraordinary social processes and thus revealing social structures and processes that may otherwise be invisible. The current article focuses on the ‘sent-down’ generation in China of the 1960s and 1970s, many of whom were forcibly relocated to the countryside following middle or high school graduation to “learn from the peasants.” Although most of these young people eventually returned to urban areas, the experience was traumatic for at least some and disrupted normal life course developments and process of socioeconomic attainment for many. This is especially the case for those who stayed in the countryside for an extended period of time. Data from the Chinese General Social Survey indicate that both the formal and informal power of parents was unable to protect children from being sent down. Nevertheless, as the process matured, stratification forces reemerged in the ability of politically well-placed parents to facilitate the early return of their children. Despite some success in attaining college education and Communist Party membership for the sent-down generation, sent-down men report more unhappiness with life than their non-sent-down counterparts and sent-down men and women report much earlier retirement and withdrawal from the labor force than non-sent-down women. These findings collaborate and extend prior research on the sent-down generation and illustrate the lasting effects of both inequality and of attempts to change inequality.     

Eight Motivational Forces and Voluntary Turnover: A Theoretical Synthesis with Implications for Research

In this study, we synthesize, from the attitude and turnover literatures, a framework of eight (8) distinctive motives, or “Forces”. We then illustrate how the “8 Forces” framework can be utilized by turnover researchers as clarification of reported reasons for turnover, as causal mediators of turnover predictors, and as factors related to the type of turnover decision process. Finally, we discuss further implications of this framework.     

The Fairness of Decision Rules

Prior work on resource allocation has generally considered only a small number of allocation rules, usually reflecting equity or equality. We use a scenario study to examine the effect of eight different allocation rules (past performance, future performance, rank, random draw, chance meetings, business need, personal need, and political reasons) on recipient reactions to the gain or loss of three different kinds of resources in an organizational setting. We find evidence that allocations based on past performance and random draw rules lead to the highest fairness perceptions and the lowest expectations that the decisions made will lead to intragroup conflict. However, fairness judgments are also influenced by a variety of other factors, such as the type of resource being allocated and whether the recipient is advantaged or disadvantaged relative to others in the workgroup (what we term the “egocentric interaction”). We discuss how our results might influence managers’ allocation decisions.     

Grey Advantage: New strategies for the old

With nearly one fifth of the population of the industrialized world soon to be beyond a traditional retirement age, businesses need to re-appraise their attitudes towards both older workers and older customers. Whilst some public and private sector organizations may have signalled such intentions, the gap between the rhetoric and reality of ‘third age’ employment and grey market development is still substantial. Analysing the ‘Age-Quake’, this article reviews current ageing population trends and associated business agendas. Using case study analysis, it then challenges three perceived ‘grey discontinuities’, as well as the traditional perception of simplistic step-change declines in physical and mental abilities and economic activity at the traditional retirement age. Deriving from this, the article challenges the older received wisdom by offering the individual assessment of ‘third-agers’ in terms of abilities as employees and tastes as customers as two generic strategies to assist managers in the strategic alignment of their organizations in pursuit of “grey advantage”.     

A recent look at the factors influencing workforce retention in public child welfare

Consistency of services to children and their families continues to be an ongoing problem in public child welfare agencies. Worker turnover is high, thus affecting the availability of a well trained, experienced workforce. It is critical that we continue to explore the factors associated with worker turnover and retention in public child welfare agencies. Such knowledge will allow us to determine the needs of workers, administrators, and the agency in general, in an effort to create an environment that will result in worker retention, and a better quality of services. Children and their families will be major benefactors of such knowledge as the consistency and quality of services will be enhanced. Existing research has found that outcomes for families and children are affected by the workload and training of frontline workers, and organizational characteristics (GAO, 2003, NASW, 2004, and Milner, 2003). This study describes personal and organizational factors relative to worker retention for public child welfare workers in the northwest corridor of Georgia.