Research in Personnel and Human Resources Management: Volume 29

While research on workplace safety spans across disciplines in medicine, public health, engineering, psychology, and business, research to date has not adopted a multilevel theoretical perspective that integrates theoretical issues and findings from various disciplines. In this chapter, we integrate research on workplace safety from a variety of disciplines and fields to develop a multilevel model of the processes that affect individual safety performance and safety and health outcomes. In doing so, we focus on cross-level linkages among national, organizational, and individual-level variables in relation to the exhibition of safe work behavior and occurrence of individual-level accidents, injuries, illnesses, and diseases. Our modeling of workplace safety is intended to fill a theoretical gap in our understanding of how the multitude of individual differences and situational factors interrelate across time to influence individual level safety behaviors and the consequences of these actions, and to encourage research to expand the limits of our knowledge.

This paper is an investigation of the pay-for-performance link in executive compensation. In particular, we document main issues in the pay–performance debate and explain practical issues in setting pay as well as data issues including how pay is disclosed and how that has changed over time. We also provide a summary of the state of CEO pay levels and pay mix in 2009 using a sample of over 2,000 companies and describe main data sources for researchers. We also investigate what we believe to be at the root of fundamental confusion in the literature across disciplines – methodological issues. In exploring methodological issues, we focus on empirical specifications, causality, fixed-effects, first-differencing, and instrumental variable issues. We then discuss two important but not yet well-explored areas, international issues, and compensation in non-profits. We conclude by examining a series of research areas where further work can be done, within and across disciplines.

We extend emotional-labor research by developing a time-based theory of the effects of emotion regulation in emotional-labor performance. Drawing on Gross's (1998a) process model, we argue that antecedent- and response-focused regulatory styles can be used to make differential predictions about outcomes such as performance, health, and antisocial behavior and that these effects differ in shorter- and longer-time windows. We discuss the theoretical implications and address the strengths and limitations of our approach.

This chapter applies three of the most prominent theories in vocational and career psychology to further illuminate the turnover process. Prevailing theories about attrition have rarely integrated explanatory constructs from vocational research, though career (and job) choices clearly have implications for employee affect and loyalty to a chosen job in a career field. Despite remarkable inroads by new perspectives for explaining turnover, career, and vocational formulations can nonetheless enrich these – and conventional – formulations about why incumbents stay or leave their jobs. To illustrate, vocational theories can help clarify why certain shocks (critical events precipitating thoughts of leaving) drive attrition and what embeds incumbents. In particular, this chapter reviews Super's life-span career theory, Holland's career model, and social cognitive career theory and describes how they can fill in theoretical gaps in the understanding of organizational withdrawal.

In this paper, we suggest a contemporary view of learning during the process of organizational socialization. The relationship between learning and socialization is implicit in much of the existing socialization literature. In an attempt to make this research more explicit, we suggest a theoretical approach to the actual learning processes that underlie workers’ socialization experiences. In order to accomplish this, we review previous work on socialization, information seeking and feedback seeking during socialization, and learning. In doing so we describe the learning process that underlies socialization, highlighting the beginning of the process, the role of information during the process, and integrating three different types of learning (planned, deutero, and meta) into the process of organizational socialization. In addition, we also discuss the implications of these three types of learning during the process of socialization and directions in future research on the socialization process.

E-learning programs exist in a wide variety of formats. Without a framework for distinguishing between different e-learning programs, it is a challenge for researchers to compare their effectiveness or identify characteristics of e-learning that contribute to learning effectiveness. Based on general theories of learning, we develop a typology that compares e-learning programs in terms of the nature of the learning interactions they provide for learners in three dimensions: degree of interaction, learner control of interactions, and informational value of interactions. The typology dimensions apply to learner–instructor, learner–learner, and learner–instructional material interactions. We also discuss important theoretical implications of the typology. First, we show the utility of the typology for comparing the effectiveness of different e-learning programs. Second, we apply the typology dimensions to develop a theoretical framework for e-learning research that provides a foundation for examining factors that influence learning effectiveness in an e-learning program. The framework identifies e-learning program characteristics, learner characteristics, and contextual factors that impact learning effectiveness in different e-learning environments. It also shows how the typology dimensions align with learning goals to influence learning effectiveness.

M. Ronald Buckley holds the JC Penney Company Chair of Business Leadership and is a professor of management and a professor of psychology in the Michael F. Price College of Business at the University of Oklahoma. He earned his Ph.D. in industrial/organizational psychology from Auburn University. His research interests include, among others, work motivation, racial and gender issues in performance evaluation, business ethics, interview issues, and organizational socialization. His work has been published in journals such as the Academy of Management Review, Personnel Psychology, Journal of Applied Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and the Journal of Management.