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Purpose – This research examines the effects of gender, race, human capital, work conditions, and organizational characteristics on employees’ current supervisory status at work, and their perceptions of their future promotability.

Methodology – Data are drawn from the salaried employees of The National Study of the Changing Workforce in 2002, a nationally representative sample of all U.S. workers. Employees are compared by race and gender using correlation coefficients, t-tests, and multiple regression.

Findings – In contrast to earlier research, in 2002 non-white women are as likely as white women and non-white men to have attained supervisory status at work. There also is no gender or race effect on employees’ perception of their future promotional opportunity.

Workers who are supervisors, both white and non-white, are more likely than non-supervisors to perceive that they have future promotional opportunity. Having a work context that is supportive, and having supportive coworkers and a supportive supervisor, leads to the perception of greater chances to continue to move up in one's company, as does having greater job demands and union membership. On the contrary, work/family spillover, having a supervisor of the same race, and perceiving racial discrimination at the workplace leads to perception of less chance to continue to move up.

Research limitations – Employees’ actual job titles are not known except that supervising others is a major part of their job.

Practical implications – Many of the variables shown to be related to supervisory status and promotability suggest directions for the restructuring of workplaces to provide more supportive and less biased environments.

Purpose: This chapter applies and integrates theories of status and stigma to better understand the mechanisms that drive the combined effects of the status of race and the stigma of criminal record in the context of the labor market. Using these social psychological theories of status and stigma, I propose and test two potential mechanisms – moral expectations and performance expectations – that might explain the compound or “double disadvantage” observed among Black job seekers with a criminal record. Within this synthetic application, I also seek to bridge and extend the literatures on status and stigma processes.

Methodology/Approach: To examine the relationship between race and criminal record and the potential mediating role of moral and performance expectations, I use a laboratory experiment consisting of a hiring scenario where participants evaluate mock, but ostensibly real job applicants who vary on the characteristics of interest. Participant evaluations consist of rankings along a series moral and performance-related scales as well as a set of workplace outcomes.

Findings: Findings suggest that race and criminal record aggregate to intensify disadvantage, with Black applicants who have a criminal record faring worse than other applicants on each workplace outcome. Results also support moral expectations, but not performance expectations, as a key mechanism driving this status-stigma intensification process.

Implications: This study has important implications for studies of race, crime, and employment as well as for theories of status and stigma. Future research should attend more closely to the role of perceived morality both in substantive work on race and criminal record and in bridging work on status and stigma processes. Pinpointing moral expectations as a mechanism of bias related to race and criminal record also opens new avenues for targeted intervention efforts.

Past research has found that married men have advantages in the labor market. In this paper we examine the extent to which the advantage of married men is evident in research and development organizations with different characteristics. Specifically, we examine the extent to which each of the following organizational characteristics enhance or limit the advantages that married men enjoy both in access to favorable work experiences on the job and in the evaluation of their performance: the extent of involvement in basic research, the proportion of funding from corporate sources, the extent of external contracting, the tightness of work schedules, and the use cross-functional teams. Using information from managers to measure organizational characteristics, we find that married men are advantaged in all types of R&D organizations.

This chapter estimates a dynamic reduced-form model of intra-firm promotions using an employer–employee panel of over 300 of the largest corporations in the United States in the period from 1981 to 1988. The estimation conditions on unobserved individual heterogeneity and allows for both an endogenous initial condition and sample attrition linked to individual heterogeneity in demonstrating the relative importance of variables that influence promotion. The role of the executive’s functional area in promotion is considered along with the existence and source of promotion fast tracks. We find that while the principal determinant of promotions is unobserved individual heterogeneity, functional area has a high explanatory power, resulting in promotion probabilities that differ by functional area for executives at the same reporting level and firm. No evidence is found that an executive’s recent speed of advancement in pay grade has a positive causal impact on in-sample promotions after conditioning on the executive’s career speed of advancement, except for the lowest level executives the data. Fast tracks appear to largely result from heterogeneity in persistent individual characteristics, not from an inherent benefit in recent advancement itself.

The gap in gender equity is profoundly evident in academia, particularly in the area of positional and financial remuneration for women, and, although a global phenomena, it is particularly acute in South Africa.

The case study was conducted through one-on-one interviews with fourteen academic and upper management staff members on the East London campus of the University of Fort Hare, South Africa. Participants represented men and women of varied ages, ethnicities, and positions within the University.

This research indicates that women find themselves discriminated by their maternal responsibilities, as well as complaints that their management styles are more emotionally subjective and less efficient. Some respondents find competition not camaraderie with other women also complicate the workplace, and others determine race and gender equally play significant roles in their promotability, research funding, and publication possibilities.

The case study was restricted to the academic and upper management staff from one selected university in the nation.

According to this research, women are less likely to be promoted to upper management or professorial positions and, if they are, find it quite arduous to be accepted within these roles, due in part to stereotypes which deem them less effective in upper level positions.

Transformation in gender equity policy and practices is still necessary and women must pursue gender equality in every area of the institutional structures of academia.

No similar study has been conducted at South African universities.

Recently, ethical leadership has become a widely studied research topic. Simultaneously, many studies have begun to emphasise the role of interpersonal communication competence (ICC) in successful leadership. However, there has been little discussion on the links between ethical leadership and leaders’ ICC. To address this research gap, this study aims to compare and combine the research traditions of ethical leadership and leaders’ ICC. The study is based on two literature reviews examining (a) ethical leadership (substudy 1; N = 27) and (b) leaders’ ICC (substudy 2; N = 18). The research questions are as follows: (a) How are the requirements of leaders’ ICC noticed in the literature of ethical leadership? (substudy 1) (b) How are the requirements of ethical leadership noticed in the literature of leaders’ ICC? (substudy 2) The findings reveal that (a) studies in ethical leadership rarely pay attention to leaders’ ICC and (b) studies in leaders’ ICC do not often discuss ethical aspects of ICC, at least explicitly. While a larger sample would have been preferred, the study contributes to previous research by addressing a research gap between ethical leadership and leaders’ ICC and suggests integrating these research traditions to better understand the nature of ethics and ICC in leadership. By promoting novel interdisciplinary research perspectives, the study provides a foundation for further research and development of (a) a competence-based approach to ethical leadership and (b) an ethics-focused approach to competent leadership communication.

This study extends work from home (WFH) literature by recasting WFH performances that emphasise agents’ manipulation of scene. Drawing on the dramatist paradigm, the study uses Burke’s pentadic criticism to code the social media application Pinterest’s ‘work from home’ and ‘home office’ pinboards for act, agent, agency, scene, and purpose. Pinterest is a social media application that users post pins (images with verbal tags and link to external sites, especially blog sites) and collect pins by subject on an electronic pinboard, which other users can like, follow, and share. Analysis of WFH pins reveals that the agent–scene ratio saturates pins emphasising the agency of WFH agents to control their scenes or home office spaces. The idealism of the agent–scene ratio in pins further demonstrates an unrealistic approach to popular culture’s shift to WFH and a romanticisation of WFH as idyllic working conditions. Scripts for employees and employers are explored to equip them with the rhetorical resources to more closely align their agent–scene ideals with the scene–agent realities.

A model of stereotypical beliefs that older workers have difficulty learning and developing and are not motivated to learn is presented. Three categories of antecedents of the stereotypical beliefs are addressed: (1) experience with stereotype-consistent behaviors and promulgation of the stereotype by others; (2) perceived learning and development inhibitors internal to the older worker; and (3) perceived learning and development inhibitors external to the older worker. Potential consequences of the stereotypical beliefs for older workers and employing organizations are also explored. Individuating information and knowledge of within-older-group differences are posited to attenuate the influence of group-based stereotypes. Processes and tactics within organizations that should increase this information and knowledge are presented. The proposed model provides a framework to help guide future research on this topic and also some suggestions for managing a work place where these beliefs may exist.

Post-merger integration (PMI) success depends heavily on the social and cultural integration of the two legacy organizations. Given that organizational members work and exchange information through social relationships, social network analysis can serve as a useful tool to identify key actors, address areas of concern, and measure PMI success. However, few PMI studies have employed a social network perspective or social network analysis. In this chapter, the authors review the current literature on PMI and organizational change, including the few studies that use social networks approach. The authors also identify recent developments in social networks and organizational change research that can improve our understanding of PMI processes and propose promising avenues for future research. Further, the authors identify obstacles for social network research on PMI and provide practical advice for overcoming them.