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Although employee race has been an actively investigated area of scientific inquiry for decades, a thorough and informed understanding of the role of race in the organizational sciences has eluded us for a number of reasons. The relationship of race and stress in organizations is a prime example of this neglect and deficiency in our knowledge base, as little work has been done in this area. We attempt to address this limitation in the literature by proposing an inductively derived, review-centric framework that attempts to articulate the multiple intermediate linkages that explain the process dynamics taking place in the relationship between employee race and health and well-being in organizations. We argue that socialization processes, social networks, information and resource access, and mentoring contribute to distance and differences between racial minorities and nonminorities concerning control, reputation, performance, and political understanding and skill, which in turn, creates barriers to success, and increased stress and strain for racial minorities. The implications of this framework along with directions for future theory and research are discussed in this chapter.

From an online survey of 114 participating accountants at staff, senior staff, and supervisor levels from a top-100 U.S. accounting firm, we investigate the effects of the Big Five personality traits (Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Extraversion, Neuroticism, and Openness) on the ethical decision-making process of accountants. Within the framework of Rest’s (1986) Four-Component Model of Ethical Behavior, we focus on Component III, the formation of an intention to act upon one’s best ethical judgment. Based on the limited extant literature on the connection between personality and ethical behavior, we expect that accountants high in Conscientiousness and Openness will tend to form an intention to act ethically despite pressure in an ethical dilemma. We develop more tentative hypotheses about the remaining three factors. Controlling for age, gender, education, sole earning status, and experience, we find clear positive statistical effects of only Conscientiousness and Openness. These findings have implications for the human resource departments of accounting firms, as well as contributing to a basic understanding of the relationships between Big Five personality factors and ethical intention.

Purpose – Past literature suggests that the performance and turnover of the subordinate are affected by the support, abuse, and feedback provided by the supervisor. In this study, we posit that support, abuse, and feedback in an accounting firm, are in turn, affected by the supervisor's personality, as defined by the Big Five personality factors.

Methodology/approach – We conducted a web-based study with 115 accountants from a top 100 US accounting firm. The accountants completed questionnaires related to the personality of their supervisors along with questionnaires related to the support, abuse, and feedback they received from their supervisors. We analyzed the data using factor analysis and multiple regression.

Findings – We hypothesize that Openness and Agreeableness increase support; Neuroticism increases abuse, but less so if the supervisor is an Extravert; and Extraversion and Conscientiousness increase feedback. Among the hypothesized relationships, all are supported except the relationship between Openness and support. Additional findings are that Extraversion and Conscientiousness increase support; Agreeableness and Conscientiousness decrease abuse; and Agreeableness increases feedback.

Research implications – Our study contributes to the literature by demonstrating the relationship between the personality traits of supervisors and their behavior toward subordinates in an accounting setting. The results of our study can be used in identifying the supervisors who have the right personality for the position, which will likely improve the work environment and reduce turnover.

Smart card-based E-payment systems are receiving increasing attention as the number of implementations is witnessed on the rise globally. Understanding of user adoption behavior of E-payment systems that employ smart card technology becomes a research area that is of particular value and interest to both IS researchers and professionals. However, research interest focuses mostly on why a smart card-based E-payment system results in a failure or how the system could have grown into a success. This signals the fact that researchers have not had much opportunity to critically review a smart card-based E-payment system that has gained wide support and overcome the hurdle of critical mass adoption. The Octopus in Hong Kong has provided a rare opportunity for investigating smart card-based E-payment system because of its unprecedented success. This research seeks to thoroughly analyze the Octopus from technology adoption behavior perspectives.

Cultural impacts on adoption behavior are one of the key areas that this research posits to investigate. Since the present research is conducted in Hong Kong where a majority of population is Chinese ethnicity and yet is westernized in a number of aspects, assuming that users in Hong Kong are characterized by eastern or western culture is less useful. Explicit cultural characteristics at individual level are tapped into here instead of applying generalization of cultural beliefs to users to more accurately reflect cultural bias. In this vein, the technology acceptance model (TAM) is adapted, extended, and tested for its applicability cross-culturally in Hong Kong on the Octopus. Four cultural dimensions developed by Hofstede are included in this study, namely uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, individualism, and Confucian Dynamism (long-term orientation), to explore their influence on usage behavior through the mediation of perceived usefulness.

TAM is also integrated with the innovation diffusion theory (IDT) to borrow two constructs in relation to innovative characteristics, namely relative advantage and compatibility, in order to enhance the explanatory power of the proposed research model. Besides, the normative accountability of the research model is strengthened by embracing two social influences, namely subjective norm and image. As the last antecedent to perceived usefulness, prior experience serves to bring in the time variation factor to allow level of prior experience to exert both direct and moderating effects on perceived usefulness.

The resulting research model is analyzed by partial least squares (PLS)-based Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) approach. The research findings reveal that all cultural dimensions demonstrate direct effect on perceived usefulness though the influence of uncertainty avoidance is found marginally significant. Other constructs on innovative characteristics and social influences are validated to be significant as hypothesized. Prior experience does indeed significantly moderate the two influences that perceived usefulness receives from relative advantage and compatibility, respectively. The research model has demonstrated convincing explanatory power and so may be employed for further studies in other contexts. In particular, cultural effects play a key role in contributing to the uniqueness of the model, enabling it to be an effective tool to help critically understand increasingly internationalized IS system development and implementation efforts. This research also suggests several practical implications in view of the findings that could better inform managerial decisions for designing, implementing, or promoting smart card-based E-payment system.

Erving Goffman has been variously interpreted as a symbolic interactionist, a structural functionalist, or an a-structural power-game theorist. However, when considering Goffman’s affiliation with the human ecology (HEC) of Robert Park and Everett Hughes, one is able to shed new light on Goffman’s relationship to the aforementioned sociological paradigms. This chapter will demonstrate that his Darwinist underpinnings and overall implicit evolutionary perspective allowed him to develop a dramaturgical theory that explicates how actors are able to understand, predict, anticipate, accommodate to, and influence others while pursuing one’s own or own group’s interests, through one or more of role “taking,” “playing,” and “making.” Furthermore, Goffman elaborates upon Park’s use of dramaturgy, following him in making more room for competition and inequalities in status and power, and offering new dimensions and categories for specifying when and why different adaptive strategies will be used, within different types and degrees of accommodation. Ecological dramaturgy is the term we give to these interdependent lines of social action within stratification contexts. Such structural concerns ultimately separate Goffman from the more subjective and less deductive elements of traditional symbolic interactionist thought. We argue that Goffman’s much neglected ecological and evolutionary-minded approach to role-taking and its inspired analysis of competitive interactive processes provide a missing link in better understanding his complicated intellectual heritage.

The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of female entrepreneurship in Latin American countries and to show how the environment, through formal and especially informal institutions, influences the characteristics of the business and to some extent limits the exploitation of opportunities by women. Entrepreneurship addressed in the text consists of initiatives characterized by creativity, risks, use of available resources, and the ability to generate wealth and change economic and social contexts, especially at the micro level. The literature review showed how informal institutions, impregnated by patriarchal and macho culture, shape and determine gender relations in the world of work in the region, especially in business activities conducted by women. Although the cases presented cannot be generalized to all Latin American countries, they provide a small sample of the obstacles, challenges, and limitations imposed on female entrepreneurs by the social structure and its repeated practices consolidated in Latin American society.

This paper analyzes the impact of the Converging Economy on the role and function of human resource management (HRM) practice and research. The forces driving convergence - information technology, globalization, and the importance of human assets - are discussed and then related to both HRM practice and research. We identify and discuss nine cutting-edge practices that firms have developed to cope with the changes brought about by the Converging Economy. These practices have potential significance for managers and scholars alike: they may serve as exemplars for organizations needing to navigate the shifting terrain of the Converging Economy. After discussing these practical responses to the changing environment, we discuss several promising new ways to apply theory to this area as a guide for future HRM researchers.