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This empirical study aims to determine whether justice perceptions formed in one context (i.e. the agency or the client) relate to work behaviors in another context (i.e. the client or the agency). To provide a balanced perspective, it seeks to examine both organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) and counterproductive workplace behaviors (CWBs). It also aims to understand how workers' “volition” or their attitudes towards temporary employment would affect their behaviors.

To test the hypotheses, 157 temporary agency workers were surveyed; these data were analyzed with structural equation modeling (SEM). To ensure that the measures were appropriate for the context of temporary agency employment, a two‐stage pretest was conducted.

The results suggest that temporary agency worker perceptions of interpersonal justice from their agencies and their client organizations “spillover” and are indeed related to their OCBs and CWBs in both contexts. Furthermore, the extent to which workers voluntarily chose temporary agency employment related to agency‐directed OCBs, while a preference for permanent employment related to client‐directed OCBs.

This study provides insight into the ways in which perceptions formed in one context (i.e. interpersonal justice) may spill over and affect behaviors in another context. The findings also contribute to the broader literature on how volition affects temporary agency worker behaviors.

Paul D. Bliese is currently the commander of the U.S. Army Medical Research Unit – Europe. He received his Ph.D. in Applied Social Psychology from Texas Tech University. His research interests include multilevel methodology, leadership, and occupational stress. He is a consulting editor for the Journal of Applied Psychology, and also serves on the editorial boards of Leadership Quarterly and Organizational Research Methods. His work has appeared in the Human Performance, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, Journal of Organizational Behavior, and Organizational Research Methods.Kristina A. Bourne is a doctoral candidate in Organization Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she also obtained a M.B.A. and a Women’s Studies Graduate Certificate. Her academic interests include gender and organization as well as family-friendly policies and benefits. She is currently working on her dissertation in the area of women business owners, and on a collaborative research project focusing on part-time work arrangements.Gilad Chen is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. in Industrial-Organizational Psychology from George Mason University. His research focuses on work motivation, teams, and leadership, with particular interests in modeling motivation and performance in work team contexts and the examination of multilevel organizational phenomena. His work has appeared in the Academy of Management Journal, Human Performance, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Organizational Behavior, and Organizational Research Methods.Jae Uk Chun is a doctoral student in Organizational Behavior in the School of Management at the State University of New York at Binghamton, where he is also research assistant of the Center for Leadership Studies. His major research interests include leadership, group dynamics and group decision-making, and multiple levels of analysis issues.Vinit M. Desai is a doctoral student and researcher in Organizational Behavior and Industrial Relations at the Walter A. Haas School of Business, University of California at Berkeley. His research interests include organizational learning, sensemaking, and error cognition in high reliability organizations.Shelley D. Dionne is an Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior and Leadership in the School of Management at Binghamton University, and a fellow in the Center for Leadership Studies. She received her Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from Binghamton University. Her research interests include leadership and creativity, levels of analysis issues, and team development and training.Daniel G. Gallagher (Ph.D. – University of Illinois), is the CSX Corporation Professor of Management at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. He currently serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Organizational Behavior, Journal of Management, and Industrial Relations (Berkeley). His current research interests include the multi-disciplinary study of contingent employment and other forms of work outside of the traditional employer – employee relationship.David A. Hofmann (Ph.D., The Pennsylvania State University) is currently Associate Professor of Management at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research interests include safety issues in organizations, multi-level analysis, organizational climate/culture and leadership, content specific citizenship behavior, and the proliferation of errors in organizations. In 1992, he was awarded the Yoder-Heneman Personnel Research award by the Society for Human Resource Management. His research appears in a number of journals including the Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Process, and Personnel Psychology. He has also co-authored several book chapters, edited a book (Safety and Health in Organizations: A Multi-level Perspective), and presented papers/workshops at a number of professional conferences.James G. (Jerry) Hunt (Ph.D. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) is the Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of Management, Trinity Company Professor in Leadership and Director of the Institute for Leadership Research at Texas Tech University. He is the former editor of the Journal of Management and current Senior Editor of The Leadership Quarterly. He founded and edited the eight volume leadership symposia series, and has authored or edited some 200 book and journal publications. His current research interests include processual approaches to leadership and organizational phenomena and the philosophy of the science of management.Kimberly S. Jaussi is an Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior and Leadership in the School of Management at Binghamton University and a fellow in the Center for Leadership Studies. She received her doctorate from the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include unconventional leader behavior, creativity and leadership, identity issues in diverse groups, and organizational commitment.Lisa M. Jones is a doctoral candidate in Organizational Behavior at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She received her B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley and her M.B.A. and M.A. from Brigham Young University. Her research interests include leadership, collective personality, and innovation implementation.Kyoungsu Kim is Associate Professor of Organization in the College of Business Administration, Chonnam National University. His major fields of interest are culture and leadership at multiple levels of analysis. His research focuses on charismatic leadership, organizational structure, roles, culture, and multiple levels of analysis.Barbara S. Lawrence is Professor of Human Resources and Organizational Behavior at the UCLA Anderson Graduate School of Management. She received her Ph.D. from the Sloan School of Management at MIT. Dr. Lawrence’s current research examines organizational reference groups, the evolution of organizational norms, internal labor markets and their effects on employees’ expectations and implicit work contracts, and the impact of population age change on occupations.Craig C. Lundberg is the Blanchard Professor of Human Resource Management at Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration. He works with organizations facilitating organizational and personal development and publishes extensively (over 200 articles and chapters, five co-authored books). His current scholarship focuses on organizational change and culture, consultancy, alternative inquiry strategies, and sensemaking and emotions in work settings.Kenneth D. Mackenzie is the Edmund P. Learned Distinguished Professor in the School of Business at the University of Kansas. He is also the President of a pair of consulting companies which support and enrich his research. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He serves on various editorial boards and has published numerous books and articles. He received a B.A. in Mathematics and a Ph.D. in Business Administration from the University of California at Berkeley. He has spent his career trying to overcome the handicap of “excessive theoretical education.”Peter Madsen is a doctoral student at the Walter A. Haas School of Business, University of California at Berkeley. His thesis work examines the processes by which organizations attempt to learn from past failures and the organizational actions and characteristics that facilitate such learning. His other interests include organizational reliability, strategic management, the work-life interface, and ethics.John E. Mathieu is the Northeast Utilities and Ackerman Scholar Professor of Management at the University of Connecticut. He received a Ph.D. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from Old Dominion University in 1985. He has published over 50 articles and chapters on a variety of topics, mostly in the areas of micro- and meso-organizational behavior. He is a member of the Academy of Management, a Fellow of the Society of Industrial Organizational Psychology, and the American Psychological Association. His current research interests include models of training effectiveness, team and multi-team processes, and cross-level models of organizational behavior.Sara Ann McComb is an Assistant Professor of Operations Management at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She obtained her Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering at Purdue University. Her research interests include alternative work arrangements and project teams. Currently, she is examining mutually beneficial links between organizations and part-time workers, particularly in the service sector. She is also studying the way in which project teams share information, a project for which she was award the National Science Foundation’s CAREER Award.Jone L. Pearce is Professor of Organization and Strategy in the Graduate School of Management, University of California, Irvine. She conducts research on workplace interpersonal processes, such as trust, and how these processes may be affected by political structures, economic conditions and organizational policies and practices. Her work has appeared in over seventy scholarly articles and her most recent book is Organization and Management in the Embrace of Government (Erlbaum, 2001). She is a Fellow of the Academy of Management and served as the Academy’s President in 2002–2003.Amy E. Randel is an Assistant Professor and the Coca-Cola Fellow in the Calloway School of Business & Accountancy at Wake Forest University. She received her Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from the Graduate School of Management at the University of California, Irvine. Her research interests include identity in organizations, diverse group dynamics, group efficacy, cross-cultural management, and social capital.Richard Reeves-Ellington is currently Professor Emeritus in the School of Management at Binghamton University and an Associate Dean at Excelsior College. He taught at the American University in Bulgaria and Sofia University in Bulgaria as a Fulbright Senior Scholar. His fields of interest revolve around cross-cultural aspects of global organization, marketing, and business strategy. He also served on the Fulbright Selection Committee for SE Europe, the Muskie Foundation for students from the CIS, and the Fulbright Senior Scholars Program. His initial 33-year career in the pharmaceutical industry included 19 years of living in Asia, Europe, and Latin America.Christine M. Riordan is a faculty member in the Department of Management and also the Director of the Institute for Leadership Advancement in the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia. Chris’ current research, which includes the study of labor force and cross-cultural diversity, has been published in journals such as the Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management, Organizational Research Methods, and Research in Personnel and Human Resource Management.Karlene H. Roberts is a Professor of Business Administration at the Walter A. Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley. She has been on the review boards of many major journals in her field. She is a fellow of the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society and the Academy of Management. Her current research interests are in the design and management of organizations in which errors can have catastrophic outcomes. In this area she explores cross-level issues.Denise M. Rousseau is the H. J. Heinz II Professor of Organizational Behavior and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. An organizational psychologist, her research focuses on worker-employer relationships and multi-level processes in organizational change. She is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Organizational Behavior, and in 2003–2004, President of the Academy of Management.Melissa Woodard Barringer is an Associate Professor of Management at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She obtained her Ph.D. in Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University. Her research interests are in the areas of total compensation and alternative work arrangements. She is currently studying part-time work in the service industry, and contingent work in the accounting and academic professions.

McComb, Barringer and Bourne have presented a multi-level perspective for understanding the phenomenon of part-time employment that can serve as a very useful framework or roadmap for future research. Within this commentary particular attention is given to reinforcement of a number of issues raised by the authors, as well as some suggestions for further elaboration on their “cross-level moderator” and “mixed determinant” models of work arrangements. Some specific comments are offered pertaining to further examination of individual-, organizational-, and group-level variables.

One significant trend in human resource practice that dominated the 1990s was the move away from traditional, full-time employment toward a variety of different forms of alternative work arrangements. Accompanying this trend was a growing concern about the effects of alternative forms of work for well being. We first review the different forms of alternative work arrangements, which vary in terms of temporal, numerical and locational flexibility. Thereafter, the effects of different forms of alternative work arrangements (e.g. part-time employment, job-sharing, outsourcing) on psychological and physical well being, and occupational safety and health are evaluated. We conclude by noting that alternative work arrangements do not necessarily exert uniformly negative effects on well being. Instead, the importance of the volitionality with which individuals assume alternative work arrangements must be considered: When individuals choose such arrangements because they want to, any potential negative effects are minimized. In contrast, when individuals assume such work arrangements because of a lack of perceived alternatives, there is a greater risk for negative effects. Finally, the need for future research which more rigorously accounts for the conceptual differences across alternative work arrangements is noted.

The authors explore the nature of commitment, job satisfaction and job characteristics, and the nature of the interrelationships among these variables concerning expatriate employees in Saudi Arabia. An examination of a sample of 504 expatriate employees reveals that these employees are, by and large, indifferent with respect to their perceptions of commitment, job satisfaction, and job characteristics. In addition, the results provide strong support for (1) the influence of job satisfaction on commitment, (2) the influence of job variety on commitment, and (3) the influence of job autonomy, identity, and feedback on job satisfaction.

Through a survey of 200 employees working in five of the thirty establishments analysed in previous research about the microeconomic effects of reducing the working time (Cahier 25), the consequences on employees of such a reduction can be assessed; and relevant attitudes and aspirations better known.

Viewed in the context of liberalization, privatization and globalization, the socio-economic and legal environment facing the unions have changed, throwing them into clutches of adversity and destitution. The purpose of this paper is to identify the reasons (i.e. antecedents) behind workers’ participation in union activities (such as strikes, rallies, demonstrations) in today’s scenario, and to understand how these participation tactics influence workers’ performance (i.e. worker behavior effectiveness) at work.

A range of published sources is drawn on, including quantitative, survey based and qualitative, case-study and other evidence for building the conceptual review.

The investigation clearly indicates that contemporary challenges facing unions in the present scenario prompt industrial actions. Only specific and genuine grievances and justifiable demands motivate workers to form a strong emotional attachment to their unions and engage in union participation activities such as strike activity (Darlington, 2006; Bean and Stoney, 1986).

Contrary to the traditional view, which sights unions as detrimental to worker productivity, turnover, and attendance at work (via restrictive work rules, featherbedding and disruptive strikes or other adversarial tactics), the investigation, through extensive review of literature proposes that unions positively influence worker behavior at work. The model, however, requires empirical testing to validate the proposed relationships.

In the context of the growing feminisation of membership in Canadian labour unions, this study examines the relationship between gender and multiple dimensions of worker commitment to the union organisation. Based upon survey responses from 223 female and 222 male union members in Saskatchewan, the results reveal no gender differences with regard to expressed levels of union “loyalty” and “responsibility to the union”. However, a small but significantly lower level of “willingness to work for the union” was expressed by female union members. In comparative analyses of males and females, the results are generally supportive of greater commonality than differences in the correlates of union commitment for men and women.