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Research indicates that although women have achieved virtual parity with men when entering organizations, within five to six years their careers begin to lag behind those of their male counterparts. This lag is often attributed to the glass ceiling and mentoring has been suggested as one tool to assist women in breaking through. We still have very little empirical research that informs our understanding of the effectiveness of formal mentoring in comparison to informal mentoring relationships. The purpose of this article is to take a hard look at formal mentoring programs and the implications for women participating in them. It compares formal mentoring to informal mentoring. It focuses on the practice of formal mentoring relationships and the unique challenges that women may face as they negotiate these planned relationships as well as some suggested strategies to deal with these challenges. It concludes by discussing the implications of this work as well as alternative sources of support for women.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between leaders’ expressed traits and their impact on their country’s COVID-19 outcomes. Some leaders are over relying on masculine traits and dismissing feminine traits. An alternative – androgynous leadership – supports leaders in drawing from the full portfolio of behaviors.

This paper has a theoretical approach using an extensive review of the literature.

Leaders can take a number of actions to fully embrace androgynous leadership. These actions include building a diverse “tempered” team, communicating with respect, recognizing the impact of framing and moving from autopilot to realizing their best androgynous self.

Research limitations include a critique of Bem’s framework as outdated and dichotomous; a categorization of feminine, masculine and neutral behaviors that is determined by the authors; and a focus on leadership style that does not take other dimensions, such as health-care systems, into account.

The authors propose that an “androgynous” leadership style has been used effectively by some political leaders around the globe in the COVID-19 crisis. The COVID-19 context has provided a laboratory for developing and building competence as androgynous leaders.

The mental capacity to look at a situation, pause and explicitly select effective behavior is necessary, but oftentimes, it is not put into practice. By not drawing from a larger portfolio of androgynous behaviors, the opportunity for leaders to their best work is missed.

There is an acknowledgement of the benefits of the combination of masculine and feminine leadership traits. There are also clear recommendations supporting leaders in developing their androgynous leadership skills.

This study aims to examine women’s organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) or the voluntary, discretionary behaviors employees perform that are not linked to their reward system but benefit organizations. Specifically, it investigates several attitudinal and organizational antecedents relative to two sub-dimensions of OCB: organizational loyalty and helping behaviors.

Alumnae (n = 160) responded to an e-mail survey regarding their self-reported OCBs, job satisfaction, work engagement and several demographic and organizational variables.

In this fiscal climate, organizations are challenged with fostering an environment encouraging employees to go beyond job requirements. Findings here suggest that married women who are engaged in work have the highest propensity to do this by engaging in these non-compensated, non-mandated behaviors. However, importantly, differences were found between organizational loyalty citizenship and helping behaviors. An inverse relationship was also found between job tenure and helping behaviors: an interesting result.

An important implication of the research is the dissection and examination of two sub-dimensions of OCB (i.e. organizational loyalty and helping), providing a better understanding of the dimensionality of the phenomenon and how they relate to job satisfaction and work engagement for a significant segment of the American workforce: women.

This study examines the dimensionality of OCB (as called for by previous research) and establishes that not all OCBs can be treated equally, as antecedents vary in their predictability of OCB engagement. Further, this research investigates the relationship between individual job satisfaction components (pay, recognition and supervision) and OCBs to help clarify conflicting findings between OCB and this key workplace attitude.

A key challenge facing organizations today is sustainability in economic, environmental, and social arenas. The purpose of this paper is to examine flexible work arrangements (FWAs) a source of social sustainability.

Drawing from theoretical explanations of social sustainability, the authors explored opportunities and challenges of FWAs as social sustainability in the American workforce.

While FWAs allow organizations to “sustain” their workforce, diverse employees face challenges in accessing them, particularly across dimensions of gender, race, and class. The paper offers guiding principles for organizational leaders, including making flexibility an organizational norm, better understanding employees' lives outside of work, and creating metrics of social sustainability.

To extend knowledge on FWAs as a source of social sustainability, researchers should focus beyond managerial, professional, and mostly White women in America. What can be learned about employees of color, of lower socioeconomic levels, and those in location‐dependent jobs? What can be learned from companies and countries, who are leaders in providing flexible options?

Given the potential for FWAs to minimize tensions from conflicting demands of work and life, efforts to employ FWAs should be directed at the entire organization. This paper discusses the differential impact of FWAs across different groups of women and questions current organizational responses.

The paper expands the understanding of social sustainability to include an organization's human resources by examining the use of FWAs for diverse women, and by offering suggestions for practitioners and researchers interested in social sustainability.

This study aims to examine the relationships among leader‐member exchange (LMX), innovative work behaviour (IWB), and intention to quit. The mediating role of work engagement is tested within the relationship of LMX, IWB, and intention to quit.

Respondents to a survey were 979 Indian managerial employees working in six service sector organisations in India. Structural equation modelling was used to test hypothesised relationships.

Results suggest quality of exchanges between employees and their immediate supervisors influences engagement. Work engagement correlates positively with innovative work behaviour and negatively with intention to quit. Work engagement mediates the relationship between LMX and innovative work behaviour, and partially mediates intention to quit.

A cross‐sectional design and use of self‐reported questionnaire data is a limitation of this study. Since the study focuses only on service‐sector organisations, the results of this study should be interpreted with caution.

This study makes important theoretical contributions in three ways. In the domain of work engagement, it addresses factors that influence employee engagement and its outcomes. It expands knowledge about organisational resources that foster work engagement. For LMX, this study complements existing research by investigating work engagement as an outcome. Identifying LMX and work engagement as antecedents of innovative work behaviour, it also extends research in that domain. An important contribution is positioning work engagement as a means through which job resources are linked to employee outcomes. The study is also a rare examination of the Indian context.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the impact of persistent racial bias, discrimination and racial violence is facilitated by otherwise well-intentioned individuals who fail to act or intercede. Utilizing the aversive racism framework, the need to move beyond awareness raising to facilitate behavioral changes is discussed. Examining the unique lens provided by the aversive racism framework and existing research, the bystander effect provides important insights on recent acts of racial violence such as the murder of Mr. George Floyd. Some promise is shown by the work on effective bystander behavior training and highlights the need for shared responsibility in preventing the outcomes of racial violence and discrimination to create meaningful and long-lasting social change.

This paper uses literature based on the aversive racism framework together with the literature on the bystander effect to understand the factors, conditions and consequences for lack of intervention when the victim is African American. This paper also provides evidence and theory-based recommendations for strategies to change passive bystanders into active allies.

The use of the aversive racism framework provides a powerful lens to help explain the inconsistencies in the bystander effect based on the race of the victim. The implications for intervention models point to the need for behavioral and competency-based approaches that have been shown to provide meaningful change.

Several different approaches to address incidents of racial aggression and violence have been developed in the past. However, given the principles of aversive racism, a unique approach that considers the inconsistencies between self-perceptions and actions is needed. This sets a new agenda for future research and meaningful behavioral intervention programs that seek to equip bystanders to intercede in the future.

The need to address and provide effective strategies to reduce the incidence of racial aggression and violence have wide-ranging benefits for individuals, communities and society.

By connecting the aversive racism framework to the bystander effect, the need for different models for developing responsive and active bystanders can be more effectively outlined.

We examined the role gender plays in managerial stereotypes and changes that have occurred in the US for executive women in the workforce. We also investigated factors and personality traits that affect advancement into upper management for all executives and those that affect women in particular. Despite increased organisational sensitivity, public policies, and equal rights legislation, women continue to be underrepresented in corporate America. Pay increases and promotions for females have not kept pace with those for men. Study results also indicate that managerial womenwho juggle jobs and family life benefit from these multiple roles, but women who put off marriage and family to build top‐level careers suffer in later years from greatly reduced chances of finding spouses and having children. Further adaptation of organisational culture in the new economy, weakening of the glass ceiling phenomenon, and family friendly work policies may alleviate some of the difficulties experienced by women who want it all.

Past research on flextime programs often treat work schedule flexibility as a homogeneous construct. The purpose of this paper is to empirically demonstrate the relationship between different flexible work schedules and employee perceptions of organizational attractiveness.

Participants (n = 655) reviewed a scenario with work schedule flexibility manipulated into one of eight consecutively more flexible schedules. Participants then rated the job offer within the scenario on organizational attractiveness.

The study found significant differences in organizational attractiveness based on the eight types of work schedule flexibility. The study's results supported categorizing flextime programs as heterogeneous constructs.

The study utilized scenarios reducing generalization to work situations. Participants were college students with a limited work experience and may have viewed organizational attractiveness based on expectations, not on experiences. Future studies should examine workforce populations and also examine different work schedule flexibility programs' effects on absenteeism and productivity.

The study suggested that work schedule flexibility affects future employees' perceptions of organizational attractiveness. Attracting high‐quality employees is in the best interests of organizations and the effects of a flexible work schedule may begin before employees are hired.

The paper illustrates that different work schedule flexibility schedules, often labeled “flextime,” are perceived differently regarding organizational attractiveness. The paper further supports the notion that work schedule flexibility is a complex construct that cannot be examined using one broad term.