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Research on perceptions of organizational politics has mostly explored the negative aspects and detrimental outcomes for organizations and employees. Responding to recent calls in the literature for a more balanced treatment, we expand on how positive and negative organizational politics perceptions are perceived as stressors and affect employee outcomes through their influence on the social environment. We propose that employees appraise positive and negative organization politics perceptions as either challenge or hindrance stressors, to which they respond with engagement and disengagement as problem-focused and emotion-focused coping strategies. Specifically, employees who appraise the negative politics perceptions as a hindrance, use both problem- and emotion-focused coping, which entails one of three strategies: (1) decreasing their engagement, (2) narrowing the focus of their engagement, or (3) disengaging. Although these strategies result in negative outcomes for the organization, employees’ coping leads to their positive well-being. In contrast, employees appraising positive politics perceptions as a challenge stressor use problem-focused coping, which involves increasing their engagement to reap the perceived benefits of a positive political environment. Yet, positive politics perceptions may also be appraised as a hindrance stressor in certain situations, and, therefore lead employees to apply emotion-focused coping wherein they use a disengagement strategy. By disengaging, they deal with the negative effects of politics perceptions, resulting in positive well-being. Thus, our framework suggests an unexpected twist to the stress process of politics perceptions as a strain-provoking component of employee work environments.

Hospitals within the United States consistently have injury rates that are over twice the national employee injury rate. Hospital safety studies typically investigate care providers rather than support service employees. Compounding the lack of evidence for this understudied population is the scant evidence that is available to examine the relationship of support service employees’ perceptions of safety and work-related injuries. To examine this phenomenon, the purpose of this study was to investigate support service employees’ perceptions of safety leadership and social support as well as the relationship of safety perception to levels of reported injuries.

A nonexperimental survey was conducted with the data collected from hospital support service employees (n=1,272) and examined: (1) relationships between safety leadership (supervisor and organization) and individual and unit safety perceptions; (2) the moderating effect of social support (supervisor and coworker) on individual and unit safety perceptions; and (3) the relationship of safety perception to reported injury rates. The survey items in this study were based on the items from the AHRQ Patient Safety Culture Survey and the U.S. National Health Care Surveys.

Safety leadership (supervisor and organization) was found to be positively related to individual safety perceptions and unit safety grade as was supervisor and coworker support. Coworker support was found to positively moderate the following relationships: supervisor safety leadership and safety perceptions, supervisor safety leadership and unit safety grade, and senior management safety leadership and safety perceptions. Positive employee safety perceptions were found to have a significant relationship with lower reported injury rates.

These findings suggest that safety leadership from supervisors and senior management as well as coworker support has positive implications for support service employees’ perceptions of safety, which, in turn, are negatively related to lower odds of reporting injuries.

To examine perceptions of organizational atmosphere and joint ownership in a firm in which capital ownership is broadly shared among members of its work force.

A questionnaire was administered with a sample of 123 people from a Mondragon cooperative firm, ULMA Architectural Solutions, and responses were analyzed using principal components’ analysis and regression techniques.

Two factors are found to play especially important roles in explaining perceptions: (1) work and management/supervisory practices, especially those relating to communication and participation in decisions in respondents’ immediate work area, and (2) job type (blue collar vs. white collar).

The study confirms earlier research on the broad centrality of participation and related practices to perceptions of work and the organization in employee ownership settings, while findings focus on the immediate work environment and relationships with immediate managers for blue-collar workers.

These are closely related to the research implications, underlining the importance to worker-owners, in manufacturing contexts, of communication and involvement in decisions in their immediate work environment.

Widespread concerns about inequality, poor working conditions, and competitiveness suggest the importance of investigating enterprises with broadly shared capital ownership, enterprises that tend to address these concerns.

The chapter reinforces the fundamental roles of information-sharing and participation in enterprises with shared ownership, while making key distinctions between shopfloor and office workers experiences and perceptions.

Hospitals in North America consistently have employee injury rates ranking among the highest of all industries. Organizations that mandate workplace safety training and emphasize safety compliance tend to have lower injury rates and better employee safety perceptions. However, it is unclear if the work environment in different national health care systems (United States vs. Canada) is associated with different employee safety perceptions or injury rates. This study examines occupational safety and workplace satisfaction in two different countries with employees working for the same organization.

Survey data were collected from environmental services employees (n = 148) at three matched hospitals (two in Canada and one in the United States). The relationships that were examined included: (1) safety leadership and safety training with individual/unit safety perceptions; (2) supervisor and coworker support with individual job satisfaction and turnover intention; and (3) unit turnover, labor usage, and injury rates.

Hierarchical regression analysis and ANOVA found safety leadership and safety training to be positively related to individual safety perceptions, and unit safety grade and effects were similar across all hospitals. Supervisor and coworker support were found to be related to individual and organizational outcomes and significant differences were found across the hospitals. Significant differences were found in injury rates, days missed, and turnover across the hospitals.

This study offers support for occupational safety training as a viable mechanism to reduce employee injury rates and that a codified training program translates across national borders. Significant differences were found between the hospitals with respect to employee and organizational outcomes (e.g., turnover). These findings suggest that work environment differences are reflective of the immediate work group and environment, and may reflect national health care system differences.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of psychological climate perceptions on the employee’s intent to comply with the organization’s whistle-blower policies. This study also endeavors to add evidence to the debate concerning the effectiveness of implementing anti-retaliation measures to improve whistle-blowing behavior. Survey results show that psychological climate perceptions of fairness and commitment to the organization influence the employee’s attitude toward whistle-blower policies, perception of how important others within the organization view the act of whistle-blowing and the employee’s intent to blow the whistle. The results of this study also suggest that anti-retaliation measures used by government policy makers and organizations to improve whistle-blowing behavior may not be an effective strategy. This manuscript discusses the implications of the findings on whistle-blowing behavior and the debate concerning anti-retaliation measures.

Research on how performance measurement systems affect employees’ perceptions of workplace fairness is important. As organizations often rely on their performance measurement systems to communicate information to their employees, it is useful to ascertain if and how the developments of performance measurement systems that are far more comprehensive than traditional financial systems affect employees’ perceptions of informational fairness through the information communicated to employees. Informational fairness refers to employees’ perceptions of workplace fairness that is based on the amount and the truthfulness of information that organizations provide to their employees. Based on a sample of managers from manufacturing organizations, the Partial Least Square results indicate that comprehensive performance measurement systems (comprehensive PMS) have a significant direct effect on job-relevant information. They also indicate that comprehensive PMS have an indirect effect on informational fairness via job-relevant information. In contrast, systems that are based on financial measures have no significant effects on job-relevant information and informational fairness. These results demonstrate how comprehensive PMS (through the communication of a greater amount of job-relevant information) can be used to engender employees’ perceptions of high workplace fairness.

Human resource (HR) process research emerged as a response to questions about how (bundles of) HR practices related to organizational outcomes. The goal of HR process research is to explain variability in employee and organization outcomes by focusing on how HR practices are intended (adopted) by senior managers, the way that these HR practices are implemented and communicated by line managers, and how employees perceive, understand, and attribute these HR practices. In the first part of this chapter, we present a review of 20 years of HR process research from the start, to how it developed, and is now maturing. Within the body of HR process research, several different research theoretical streams have emerged, which are largely studied in isolation without benefiting from each other. Therefore, in the second part of this chapter, we draw on previous work to propose a staged process model in which we integrate the different research streams of HR process research, recognizing contingencies in the model. This leads us to an agenda for future research and practical implications in the final part of the chapter.

This study examines the effects of a firm’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiative on its employees’ organizational attachment and intent to leave. We propose that employees’ perceived authenticity of their firm’s CSR activity mediates the effects of a firm’s CSR initiative on employees’ attachment to the firm and intent to leave. We also hypothesize that employees understand the authenticity of their firm’s CSR initiative based on internal and external attribution mechanisms. We propose that internal attribution enhances authenticity, while external attribution reduces it.

We surveyed a sample of 450 employees from 38 Korean companies that were included in the 2009 Dow Jones Sustainability Index Korea (DJSI Korea). To test the theoretical model, we employed a linear structural equation modeling which allows the causal estimation of theoretical constructs after taking into account their measurement errors.

As predicted, internal attribution significantly increases employees’ perceptions of their firm’s CSR authenticity, whereas external attribution significantly reduces such perceptions. Employees’ perceptions of authenticity, in turn, increase their affective attachment and decrease their intent to leave. In addition, the effects of the two attribution mechanisms on organizational attachment and intent to leave were mediated by employees’ perceptions on authenticity.

Research on authenticity has been case studies or narrative ones. This is one of the first studies investigating the role of authentic management empirically.

We demonstrate that a firm’s CSR initiative is a double-edged sword. When employees perceive inauthenticity of their firm’s CSR initiative, the CSR initiative could be detrimental to employees’ attachment to the firm. This study calls attention to the importance of authentic management of CSR.

Informational transparency through social network services become the foundational reality to the contemporary management. To maintain competitive edge in this changing world, every stakeholder of a firm including managers, employees, customers, shareholders, government, and communities should collaborate and help each other live the principle of authenticity.

Over the past decade, the U.S. workforce has become increasingly diverse. In response, scholars and practitioners have sought to uncover ways to leverage this increasing diversity to enhance business performance. To date, research evidence has failed to provide consistent support for the value of diversity to organizational effectiveness. Accordingly, scholars have shifted their attention to diversity management as a means to fully realize the potential benefits of diversity in organizations. The principal aim of this chapter is to review the current wisdom on the study of diversity climate in organizations. Defined as the extent that employees view an organization as utilizing fair personnel practices and socially integrating all personnel into the work environment, diversity climate has been proposed as a catalyst for unlocking the full value of diversity in organizations. During our review, we discuss the existent individual- and aggregate-level research, describe the theoretical foundations of such work, summarize the key research findings and themes gleaned from work in each domain, and note the limitations of diversity climate research. Finally, we highlight the domains of uncertainty regarding diversity climate research, and offer recommendations for future work that can enhance knowledge of diversity climate effects on organizational outcomes.