Search results

Although a significant body of work has amassed that explores the antecedents, correlates, and consequences of employee turnover in organizations, little is known about how employees go about quitting once they have made the decision to leave. That is, after the decision to voluntarily quit their job is made, employees must then navigate through the process of planning for their exit, announcing their resignation, and potentially working at their company for weeks after their plans to resign have been made public. Our lack of understanding of the resignation process is important as how employees quit their jobs has the potential to impact the performance and turnover intentions of other organizational members, as well as to harm or benefit the reputation of the organization, overall. Moreover, voluntary turnover is likely to increase in the coming decades. In this chapter, we unpack the resignation process. Specifically, drawing from the communication literature and prior work on employee socialization, we develop a three-stage model of the resignation process that captures the activities and decisions employees face as they quit their jobs, and how individual differences may influence how they behave in each of these three stages. In doing so, we develop a foundation upon which researchers can begin to build a better understanding of what employees go through after they have decided to quit but before they have exited their organization for the final time.

Idiosyncratic jobs occur when formal job duties match the abilities or interests of a specific person. New duties can accrue or be negotiated to match an existing employee or a potential hire. Idiosyncratic jobs can help organizations deal with changing contexts, and influence organizational goals and structure. They can affect job holders’ careers and organizational job structures. The evolutionary accumulation of idiosyncratic jobs can potentially generate unplanned organizational learning. Promising research frontiers include links to work on job crafting, I-Deals, negotiated joining, and ecologies of jobs. Deeper exploration of these domains can advance core theories of job design and organizational transformation and inform normative theory on organizational use of idiosyncratic jobs without falling into cronyism, inefficiency, or injustice.

This paper discusses national differences in the interpretation of time in mixed motive decision contexts, such as negotiation. Specifically, we consider how members of different national cultures (Portugal, Turkey, and the United States) experience temporality in these situations. We argue that cultural temporality such as polychronicity, future orientation, and uncertainty avoidance form part of a broader national environment. The national environment is also expressed in national stability factors such as legal systems, family ties, and homogeneity of populations. We propose that temporality and stability aspects of national environment determine negotiation paradigms, which subsequently influence temporality in negotiations. We conclude by suggesting that inclusion of complex and interdependent national environment factors in the study of negotiation has the potential to substantially advance our understanding of mixed motive decision situations.

When subordinates violate a policy, authority figures have to decide whether to be strict and make them face the consequences or be lenient and not enforce the policy. In this chapter, we argue that when an authority figure treats a subordinate leniently, that subordinate is more likely to develop an elevated sense of entitlement, which then has various negative consequences for the authority figure and the subordinate’s group members. Drawing on the literature on the sources and consequences of psychological entitlement, we put forward propositions relating to authority leniency and subordinate entitlement. In summary, we propose (a) that single acts of leniency may lead subordinates to feel entitled to future leniency, (b) that repeated leniency may lead subordinates to develop a general sense of entitlement, and (c) that leniency and the resulting entitlement can have many negative consequences such as increasing group conflict and causing low performance. We report preliminary results in support of some propositions. For example, we show that leniency that can be attributed to something external to the subordinate may prevent the subordinate from feeling entitled. Last, we call for additional research. We hope that our chapter will cause authority figures to consider the consequences of treating subordinates leniently, including the possibility that the subordinates will subsequently feel entitled.

This chapter examines how the everyday interactions that are fostered with the circulation of debt impact the socioeconomic order in which they operate. Employing the theoretical framework of “circuits of commerce,” scholars have examined how social relations and economic activities intertwine, are negotiated and transformed through the circulation of debt. The focus of such studies has been on the motives of actors, such as the desire for relationship-making, and structural conditions, like the inaccessibility of formal institution, that necessitate the emergence of debt-centered circuits of commerce (Hampton, 2003; Heslop, 2016; James, 2014). However, such circuits also have broader impacts and affect socially pervasive moral evaluations and work cultures (Ho, 2009; Zelizer, 2011). Building on these findings, I examine commission-based alliances among showroom owners and tour guides in Agra’s tourism market to understand how “bad debt” between them shapes Agra’s local tourism economy.

This chapter is based on ethnographic research conducted in 2012–2013 with Agra’s tourism entrepreneurs, like showroom owners, tour guides, and convincers.

Entrepreneurs’ everyday practices around the circulation of debt impact how tourism in Agra is perceived and conducted. Although debt is initiated to mitigate uncertainty of getting clientele, its circulation exacerbates that very uncertainty.

This chapter contributes to the theory of economic practice, highlighting how economic actors, through their everyday practices, shape the macro-structure of the economic system in which they operate.

Decreased regulation of part-time work is one way a country responds to high rates of unemployment. Proponents of deregulation argue that a more flexible labor market is required to allow labor markets to clear. A more traditional response to high unemployment is change in monetary policy, where interest rates are lowered to stimulate the economy and increase rates of employment. Both policies have been tried in Europe, a good place to study the effects of the two policy responses, both because European unemployment has been high and because the trade off between monetary policy and the deregulation of part time work has varied from country to country. The establishment of the European monetary union (EMU) in 1999 created a natural experiment in which any one country’s ability to adjust its monetary policy was curtailed, creating pressure for deregulatory policies to come into play (Aaronovitch & Grahl, 1997; Pisani-Ferry, 1998).

This chapter briefly reviews findings from recent socialization research to provide an updated view of the socialization literature. To help advance the literature, this chapter then takes an instructional system approach, viewing socialization fundamentally as a process of learning about a new or changed role and the environment surrounding that role. As such, attention will first be given to further understanding exactly what needs to be learned during socialization. In doing so, an expanded socialization content typology is presented. In addition, two other components are added to this typology to reflect the fact that (a) each of those content dimensions needs to be learned relative to different organizational levels (e.g., job, work group, unit, organization) and (b) socialization occurs over several months and there are temporal considerations relating to the different socialization content dimensions. This chapter then examines how to best facilitate the learning of that expanded socialization content. The Gagné-Briggs theory of instruction is used in connecting socialization content with the means of learning that content. The socialization and orienting activities commonly used by organizations to help new employees in the adjustment process are also identified and then mapped onto the learning outcomes they could best help facilitate. Finally, the conceptual, measurement, and research needs suggested by these extensions to the socialization literature are identified.