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Studies of the work “choices” of mothers are plentiful – from the factors that influence occupational selection to the reasons why women work or “opt out” when they have children. However, we know little about how subjective preference for full or part-time work is “aligned” or “misaligned” with mothers’ objective work status. Based on qualitative interviews from the MacArthur Network’s “Transition to Adulthood and Public Policy” study, we consider the “alignment” of objective work intensity (full vs. part time) and subjective preferences, finding that one-third of the working mothers in the sample are “misaligned.” At the same time, the majority preferred full-time work: two-thirds (66 percent) either wanted to work full time and did so, or wanted to work full time but were actually employed part time. One-third of the working mothers had a preference for part-time work (although some worked full time). Only 12 percent of the working mothers in the sample were able to work part time and desired this arrangement. Furthermore, regardless of the alignment of their objective work status and preference, the majority of these mothers emphasized self-fulfillment and intrinsic satisfaction though work.

This chapter provides an overview of affect, personality, and job satisfaction, focusing on library employees. A reliable and valid measure for each construct is suggested, and an assessment model is provided. The purpose of the study conducted was to examine the three constructs among library employees, how these constructs relate to each other and to work experience, and whether they differ based on library type or department. The Positive and Negative Affect Schedule, Big Five Inventory, and Brief Index of Affective Job Satisfaction were administered at the various libraries of a research university. Data were analyzed using statistical software. Library employees scored high in positive affect and job satisfaction, and low in negative affect, and were introverted, agreeable, conscientious, emotionally stable, and open to experiences. Across all libraries, public services employees had higher positive affect and job satisfaction, and lower neuroticism, than technical services employees. In both service areas, positive affect was positively correlated with extroversion and job satisfaction, and negative affect with neuroticism. Work experience was correlated with positive affect only among technical services employees. The assessment model may be applied at libraries of any type and size to assess staff and customize resources for employees to meet their unique needs. Several ideas and applications are provided. This study addresses a gap in the literature by exploring how affect, personality, and job satisfaction are all related among library employees. The free measures may be used in any work setting, facilitating intra- and inter-professional comparisons.

The hospitality and tourism industry is highly labor-intensive. It is constituted by a fast-paced, dynamic, unpredictable and unstable operating environment that requires an extraordinary leadership ability, and leaders may need to adopt a transformational leadership style. A plethora of theoretical and empirical studies have shown the importance of transformational leadership. However, there is still much to be learned. Meanwhile, no study to date has measured the relationship between transformational leadership, job involvement, and job satisfaction among employees in the hospitality and tourism industry in New Zealand. This study expands our understanding of transformational leadership in the specific context of hospitality and tourism.

High-involvement work processes (HIWPs) are associated with high levels of employee influence over the work process, such as high levels of control over how to handle individual job tasks or a high level of involvement at team or workplace level in designing work procedures. When implementations of HIWPs are accompanied by companion investments in human capital – for example, in better information and training, higher pay and stronger employee voice – it is appropriate to talk not only of HIWPs but of “high-involvement work systems” (HIWSs). This chapter reviews the theory and practice of HIWPs and HIWSs. Across a range of academic perspectives and societies, it has regularly been argued that steps to enhance employee involvement in decision-making create better opportunities to perform, better utilization of skill and human potential, and better employee motivation, leading, in turn, to various improvements in organizational and employee outcomes.

However, there are also costs to increased employee involvement and the authors review the important economic and sociopolitical contingencies that help to explain the incidence or distribution of HIWPs and HIWSs. The authors also review the research on the outcomes of higher employee involvement for firms and workers, discuss the quality of the research methods used, and consider the tensions with which the model is associated. This chapter concludes with an outline of the research agenda, envisaging an ongoing role for both quantitative and qualitative studies. Without ignoring the difficulties involved, the authors argue, from the societal perspective, that the high-involvement pathway should be considered one of the most important vectors available to improve the quality of work and employee well-being.

The relationship between demographic factors and worker well-being has garnered increased attention, but empirical studies have shown to inconsistent results. This chapter addresses this issue by examining how age, gender, and race/ethnicity relate to worker well-being using large, representative samples. Data from the Gallup Healthways Index and Gallup World Poll provided information on both job and life satisfaction outcomes for full-time workers in the United States and 156 countries, respectively. In general, results indicated that increasing age was associated with more workers reporting job satisfaction and fewer people reporting stress and negative affect. Women were comparable to men in reported job satisfaction and well-being, but more women reported experiencing negative affect and stress. Less consistent well-being differences in ethnic/racial groups were found. Finally, we found strong evidence for direct and indirect national demographic effects on worker well-being showing need for considering workforce demography in future theory building. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Work design has largely overlooked cognitive–emotional interactions in understanding employee motivation and satisfaction. My aim in this chapter is to develop a conceptual model that integrates what we know about these interactions from research on emotions and neuroscience with traditional and emergent work design perspectives. I propose that striving for universal goals influences how a person responds to the work characteristics, such that an event that is personally relevant or “self-referential” will elicit an emotional reaction that must be regulated for optimal performance, job satisfaction, and well-being. A Self-Referential Emotion Regulatory Model (SERM) of work design is presented.

The notion of virtue ethics emphasises individual character as the key element of ethical thinking, which may in turn affect individual actions. There is, however, a lack of attention to this aspect in mainstream theories and practices of motivation in organisations. To address this gap, this chapter focusses on theory of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and argues that it may be integrated with the conceptual framework of virtue ethics proposed by MacIntyre at the individual and organisational levels. A change in value-orientation may also enable a focus on good work instead of a narrow focus on monetary rewards. This chapter reviews literatures on motivation and MacIntyre’s framework, and develops a conceptual model to integrate virtue ethics with motivation. At the end, some avenues for future research are discussed.

In this chapter, how the occupational stress process changes over the life course and how this may intersect with observed generational differences are examined. This is done by jointly reviewing studies on occupational well-being that adopted the theoretical lens of generational or lifespan developmental perspectives; the two perspectives are closely related and have the potential to better inform one another because both consider chronological age to be a pivotal factor driving individual differences in work values, attitudes and well-being. However, these perspectives have yet to be simultaneously considered in a review of occupational well-being research, leaving scholars wondering whether they overlap, and if so, in which area. It is hoped that juxtaposition of the two disparate bodies of literature can better inform the convergence and divergence of findings on worker well-being scattered across the two literatures. In this chapter, (a) generational differences in job satisfaction, (b) how work characteristics may differentially affect job satisfaction in workers across generations, (c) how work contexts may differentially impact job satisfaction across generations, (d) generational differences in work-family interface, and lastly, (e) recent developments in the field are discussed. Although extant research on the first topic, generational differences in job satisfaction, has shown some consistent evidence, research findings in the subsequent topics remain relatively inconsistent. Based on our review, it is concluded that additional research is needed to expand our understanding of the role of generation and chronological age in workers’ occupational well-being.

There is abundant evidence that innovative work practices (IWPs) of various kinds, such as teams, quality control circles, no-layoff policies, job rotation, and employee ownership, have spread rapidly in developed market economies during the past thirty years or so. Between 1983 and 1993, Freeman, Kleiner, and Cheri (2000) report survey evidence that the number of nonmonetary incentive programs offered by firms increased by 500% in the United States. Similar trends appear to be at work in other countries including the United Kingdom, Japan (e.g., Kato, 2000), Denmark (e.g., Datta Gupta, & Eriksson, 2004), and Finland (e.g., Kalmi & Kauhanen, 2008). Whereas the corresponding evidence for transition economies is much slimmer, the available evidence is also suggestive that such practices are limited though spreading.¹ Unsurprisingly, both theoretical and an empirical literature have appeared to examine the impact of IWPs on both business performance and employee outcomes. As different scholars from diverse fields in the broad area of industrial relations have applied varying approaches to explore several research questions, those literatures have grown rapidly. At the same time, while it is clear that analytical work of the kind is becoming commonplace for advanced economies, work that focuses on developing and transition economies is very slim. As it is important to determine whether findings for firms in advanced market economies carry over to other economies, the first contribution of this chapter is to extend the geographical coverage of the empirical literature. This we do by assembling and analyzing new survey data set for a large Croatian manufacturing firm with our chapter perhaps representing one of the first such investigations for a former communist economy.