Should I Stay or Should I Go? Explaining Turnover Intentions with Organizational Identification and Job Satisfaction*

The social identity approach is a powerful theoretical framework for the understanding of individuals' behaviour. The main argument is that individuals think and act on behalf of the group they belong to because this group membership adds to their social identity, which partly determines one's self‐esteem. In the organizational world, social identity and self‐categorization theories state that a strong organizational identification is associated with low turnover intentions. Because identification is the more general perception of shared fate between employee and organization, we propose that the relationship between identification and turnover will be mediated by job satisfaction as the more specific evaluation of one's task and working conditions. In four samples we found organizational identification feeding into job satisfaction, which in turn predicts turnover intentions.     

Religious Social Identities in the Hybrid Self‐presentations of Sikh Businesspeople

This paper explores the identity work practices of Thai Sikh businesspeople. The paper focuses on two important social identities in participants’ self‐presentations – those derived from religious (Sikh) and western business discourses – and identifies powerful tensions in their hybrid identity work. Conducting discourse analysis on identity work practices within interview settings, the authors explore how participants resolve, accommodate or reject these discursive tensions while attempting stable and coherent hybrid self‐presentations. They identify several different forms of hybridity, including what they term ‘equipollence’, which occurs when two equally powerful, contradictory discourses are incorporated in self‐presentations, producing potentially irresolvable intersections and leading to a lack of coherence. Contributions are made to the literatures on religion and work, hybrid identity work processes and social identities.     

Planning personnel retraining: column generation heuristics

Retraining of staff is a compulsory managerial function in many organisations and often requires planning for a large number of employees. The large scale of this problem and various restrictions on the resultant assignment to classes make this planning challenging. The paper presents a complexity analysis of this problem together with linear and nonlinear mathematical programming formulations. Three different column generation based optimisation procedures and a large neighbourhood search procedure, incorporating column generation, are compared by means of computational experiments. The experiments used data typical to large electricity distributors.     

Are sponsors blamed for edging off? Consumer reactions to sponsorship terminations

Firms regularly terminate sponsorships, even without publicly known misconduct by the sponsee such as athlete doping. Consumer reactions to these sponsorship terminations by firms have not been studied despite being a regular occurrence. Using a set of experimental studies, this paper analyzes consumer reactions to these sponsorship terminations (i.e., early and non-renewal) that were not caused by a sponsee’s misconduct, the underlying process that causes the reactions, and the role of several moderating factors (trust, power balance, and locus of control). Our findings reveal that sponsorship terminations have a negative effect on sponsors’ brand images—particularly early terminations that occur before the end of a contract—because consumers perceive these sponsorship terminations as unfair. The results also suggest that a termination is particularly harmful for the sponsor’s perceived fairness if the sponsor is powerful and if the termination decision is under the sponsor’s control. Further, the termination effect is particularly strong for firms that consumers trust.     

A cross-validation of a structural equation model of accidents: organizational and psychological variables as predictors of work safety

A study to establish a structural equation model of accidents is presented. The eight variables included in the model were those associated with accidents in previous research. The reliability of questionnaires to measure those variables and a structural equation model relating them are provided. The model explaining the occurrence of accidents was cross-validated through three Spanish samples (n=123; 182; 124).The model presented a good fit to data in two samples, while a third had unclear fit indices. Therefore, most relationships among variables did not vary among these three samples. The role of the safety variables in the model is discussed. The discussion is also focused on risk measurement difficulties commonly reported in the literature. Finally, some suggestions for future safety research with structural equation modelling techniques are provided.     

Median split, k-group split, and optimality in continuous populations

Continuous populations are grouped in many social, economic, medical, or technical fields of research. However, by grouping them, a lot of information provided by the continuous population is lost. Especially the median split, which is still adopted by many researchers, and its generalization to an equiprobable k-group split lead to a high efficiency loss. Here, this loss of information is investigated by analytical and numerical analyses for some typical symmetric and skew population distributions often found in applications. Various distribution parameters, numbers of groups, and split methods are taken from theoretical considerations and real data sets. Losses sometimes in excess of 50% can be reduced by optimal grouping.     

Perceived importance of “social goals” in business organizations

Business organizations operate within a complex socio-technical environment. Interactions between these socio-technical dimensions and the managers' personal value systems are thought to influence managerial role patterns and decisions. This paper investigates shifts in perceived importance of “social goals” from a set of organizational goals. The research concludes that there has been no significant changes occurring in either the ordering or the clustering of organizational goals.     

Eating dysfunctions in college women: the roles of depression and attachment to fathers

The authors examined the roles of depression and attachment to fathers in college women's eating dysfunctions. Three-hundred six undergraduate women completed (1) a diagnostic measure of eating dysfunctions that categorized them as asymptomatic, symptomatic but not eating disordered, or eating disordered; (2) 3 dimensional measures of attachment to fathers; and (3) a dimensional measure of depression. Depression was directly related to severity of participants' eating dysfunction; the eating-disordered group had scores consistent with clinical depression. After controlling for depression, 3 facets of attachment to fathers significantly differentiated the 3 groups.