Search results

Multiple forces that shape the identities of adolescents and young adults also influence their subsequent career choices. Early work experiences are key among these forces. Recognizing this, youth service programs have emerged worldwide with the hope of shaping participants’ future trajectories through boosting engagement in civically oriented activities and work. Despite these goals, past research on these programs’ impact has yielded mixed outcomes. Our goal is to understand why this might be the case.

We rely on interview, archival, and longitudinal survey data to examine young adults’ experiences of a European youth service program.

A core feature of youth service programs, namely their dual identity of helping others (i.e., service beneficiaries) and helping oneself (i.e., participants), might partly explain the program’s mixed outcomes. We find that participants focus on one of the organization’s identities largely to the exclusion of the other, creating a dynamic in which their interactions with members who focus on the other identity create challenges and dominate their program experience, to the detriment of a focus on the organization and its goals. This suggests that a previously overlooked feature of youth service programs (i.e., their dual identity) might prove both a blessing for attracting many diverse members and a curse for achieving desired outcomes.

More broadly, our results suggest that dual identity organizations might attract members focused on a select identity, but fail to imbue them with a blended identity; thus, limiting the extent to which such organizations can truly “redirect” future career choices.

This study examined access to and quality of supports for families of adolescents with disabilities.

An online survey was completed by family members of transition-aged young adults who had participated in parent training sessions on topics related to transitions to adulthood. Survey responses came from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and 4 U.S. territories.

More than one-third of families reported unmet information needs related to areas such as employment, housing, preparing for adult relationships, and preparing others to support the family members with disabilities. Families of younger transition-aged youth, youth with Autism Spectrum Disorder or other disabilities, and families with lower household incomes reported more unmet needs. The overall quality of services families reported receiving was 2.19 on a 4-point scale of 1 to 4. Parents reported needing more information and quality of supports related to the transition of youth from school to adulthood.

Given the scope of unmet needs, ongoing collaboration between schools, agencies, organizations, and other entities that serve families is critical. While schools play a key role in supporting the transition process, other organizations also have a role.

The results from this survey demonstrate that the need for support is not limited to youth with disabilities, but that family members also have information and support needs related to their roles as caregivers in the transition process.

This survey provides information about unmet needs and current services from a national sample that includes often underserved populations and includes sufficient numbers of respondents to allow comparisons between families, based on the type of disability their family member had.

This research documents the responsibilities and stresses of people with homeless relatives. Health and housing problems create a variety of challenges and sometimes burdens within families which are particularly stressful for family caregivers who are actively involved with helping homeless adults.

Our study and data examine stress proliferation and stress buffering among people with homeless relatives using quantitative data from 118 interviews, mostly with parents and siblings of homeless adults.

Quantitative data from 118 interviews, largely from parents and siblings of homeless adults, show that people who spend more time or money helping homeless relatives experience higher levels of stress. Stress levels are also higher among those who help a homeless relative with activities of daily living and those who work to prevent harm that involves a homeless relative. Stress derived from efforts to prevent harm is associated with stronger social support to people with homeless relatives.

Social and health service providers can provide helpful social support for both homeless people and for people with homeless relatives, particularly in circumstances where harm reduction is required.

Although organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) is widely known to have a positive ethical impact in work organizations, the causal antecedents that influence the likelihood of such behaviors among employees is understudied. We addressed this gap by examining the influence of visual images of people on relevant work-related behavior in a work-like setting using the theoretical frame of the social identity perspective. We found that students in a university setting, who were exposed to religious-themed student images, exhibited slower helping behaviors toward the organization than those who were exposed to organizational-themed student images. The results of the current study provide the first-known experimental confirmation of organizational identity as a causal antecedent of OCB.

For decades organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) has been of interest to scholars and practitioners alike, generating a significant amount of research exploring the concept of what citizenship behavior is, and its antecedents, correlates, and consequences. While these behaviors have been and will continue to be valuable, there are changes in the workplace that have the potential to alter what types of OCBs will remain important for organizations in the future, as well as what types of opportunities for OCB exist for employees. In this chapter we consider the influence of 10 workplace trends related to human resource management that have the potential to influence both what types of citizenship behaviors employees engage in and how often they may engage in them. We build on these 10 trends that others have identified as having the potential to shape the workplace of the future, which include labor shortages, globalization, immigration, knowledge-based workers, increase use of technology, gig work, diversity, changing work values, the skills gap, and employer brands. Based on these 10 trends, we develop propositions about how each trend may impact OCB. We consider not only how these trends will influence the types of citizenship and opportunities for citizenship that employees can engage in, but also how they may shape the experiences of others related to OCB, including organizations and managers.

Although employee helping behaviors have been widely examined by organizational and human resource management scholars, relatively little is known about the antecedents and consequences of help-seeking in the workplace. Seeking to fill this gap, I draw from the social and counseling psychology literatures, as well as from research in epidemiology and health sociology to first conceptualize the notion of employee help-seeking and then to identify the variables and mechanisms potentially driving such behavior in work organizations. My critical review of this literature suggests that the application of existing models of help-seeking may offer limited predictive utility when applied to the workplace unless help-seeking is conceived as the outcome of a multi-level process. That in mind, I propose a model of employee help-seeking that takes into account the potential direct and cross-level moderating effects of a variety of situational factors (e.g., the nature of the particular problem, organizational norms, support climate) that might have differential influences on help-seeking behavior depending on the particular phase of the help-seeking process examined. Following this, I focus on two sets of help-seeking outcomes, namely, the implications of employee help-seeking on individual and group performance, and the impact of help-seeking on employee well-being. The chapter concludes with a brief examination of some of the more critical issues in employee help-seeking that remain to be explored (e.g., the timing of help solicitation) as well as the methodological challenges likely to be faced by those seeking to engage in such exploration.

This chapter aims to clarify the distinction between feeling grateful and feeling indebted. Often overlooked and underappreciated, the differences that define these unique affective experiences are critical to understanding the consequences of helping behavior. This chapter describes the psychological underpinnings of gratitude and indebtedness and outlines the ways in which previous research has conflated the two constructs. In addition, it puts forth a set of testable propositions that help distinguish the relative importance of gratitude and indebtedness in interpersonal relations. The implications of these ideas are discussed in the context of individual generosity, social exchange, and group dynamics.

The accounting profession has recognized the need to increase pro bono (free) tax preparation services. Increased pro bono tax preparation services by accountants may address a growing unmet need for free tax preparation services by low-income taxpayers in the United States. One way to foster commitment to free services in the profession is by equipping accounting students with the knowledge and skills necessary to effectively serve low-income taxpayers in preparing their returns. We examined whether accounting students who provided free tax preparation services to low-income taxpayers as part of a service-learning course would experience significant changes in volunteering attitudes and motivation to offer free representation of low-income taxpayers in the future. The service-learning course was tied to the federal Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program. Results from traditional pretest/posttest and retrospective pretest/posttest found participants reported significant increases in volunteering attitudes, the role of accounting in addressing social issues, attitudes toward helping others, and motivation and competence to offer future free representation of low-income taxpayers. Also, most participants reported positive experiences in the VITA clinic and further developed skills important to the accounting profession. Qualitative data supported the quantitative results.