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The design of work has been shown to influence a host of attitudinal, behavioral, cognitive, well-being, and organizational outcomes. Despite its clear importance, scholarly interest in the topic has diminished over the past 20 years. Fortunately, a recent body of research has sought to reenergize research into work design by expanding our view of work design from a narrow set of motivational work features to one that incorporates broader social and contextual elements. In this chapter we seek to review the literature on work design and develop a framework that integrates both job and team design research. We begin by briefly reviewing the history of work design in order to provide needed historical context and illustrate the evolution of job and team design. We then define work design, particularly as it relates to incorporating job and team design elements and transitioning from a view of jobs to one of roles. Following this, we identify a comprehensive set of work design outcomes that provide the basis for understanding the impact that different work characteristics can have on individuals and teams. We then offer an extended discussion of our integrative model of work design, which includes three sources of work characteristics (task, social, and contextual) and the worker characteristics implied by these characteristics. Having defined the range of work and worker characteristics, we then discuss some of the fit and composition issues that arise when designing work, as well as discuss the mechanisms through which the work characteristics have their impact on outcomes. Finally, we discuss research into informal forms of work design.

The Spread of Status Value theory describes how new diffuse status characteristics can arise out of the association of initially non-valued characteristics to existing status characteristics that are already well-established in a society. Our objective is to extend this theory so that it describes how still other status elements, which have become of interest to researchers such as “status objects” (Thye, 2000) and “valued roles” (Fişek, Berger, & Norman, 1995), can also be socially created.

Our approach involves reviewing research that is relevant to the Spread of Status Value theory, and in introducing concepts and assumptions that are applicable to status objects and valued roles.

Our major results are an elaborated theory that describes the construction of status objects and valued roles, a graphic representation of one set of conditions in which this creation process is predicted to occur, and a design for a further empirical test of the Spread of Status Value theory. This extension has social implications. It opens up the possibility of creating social interventions that involve status objects and valued roles to ameliorate dysfunctional social situations.

Our elaborated theory enables us to understand for the first time how different types of status valued elements can, under appropriate conditions, be socially created or socially modified as a result of the operation of what are fundamentally similar processes.

This paper examines social influence in collective task settings using the Berger, Fisek, Norman and Zelditch's graph-theoretic method. The work examines in-group membership in task settings, and models contexts where both status processes and group membership are salient. At the core of these models is a theoretical concept called a group status typification state, defined as an abstract understanding that participants hold of the type of person who would be a good source of information. This paper builds upon recent theory and research and may serve as an initial step toward integration of Status Characteristics Theory and Social Identity Theory.

In this chapter, I detail a procedure for incorporating status characteristics with more than two ordered states, or graded status characteristics, into status characteristics theory. I revise theoretical definitions and assumptions accordingly. The new procedure adds a weighting function to the existing mathematical structure of the theory. I show that estimates using the new procedure are consistent with findings drawn from four experiments that were run in the standard setting for status characteristics theory. I also show that the procedure explains more variation and improves global model fit when predicting expectations using newly collected vignette data. I conclude with a general discussion of the procedures and implications for other expectation states theories and for research conducted outside the laboratory.

In this chapter the relationship between job design and older workers is considered. Starting from a conceptual definition of what the concept job and work design is, we consider theoretic approaches to the study of job design over the last decades, including recent frameworks, measurement, and research. We follow this with a specific focus on the topic of job design for older workers. We argue that the rules of “good job design” are not applicable to all workers, focusing specifically on the issues of age and career stage. We next show through a theoretical model and some empirical research that some job characteristics may be more suitable or beneficial for people in older age groups or later stages of their careers (e.g., Truxillo, Cadiz, Rineer, Zaniboni, & Fraccaroli, 2012). Empirical support for the role of age in job design is considered. We conclude by defining some avenues for future research, including the identification of additional factors that may determine how age and job characteristics affect worker behavior, attitudes, and well-being.

Data visualizations in some form or another have served as decision-support tools for many centuries. In conjunction with advancements in information technology, data visualizations have become more accessible and more efficient to generate. In fact, virtually all enterprise resource planning and human resource (HR) information system vendors offer off-the-shelf data visualizations as part of decision-support dashboards as well as stand-alone images and displays for reporting. Plus, advances in programing languages and software such as Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, R, and Python have expanded the possibilities of fully customized graphics. Despite the proliferation of data visualization, relatively little is known about how to design data visualizations for displaying different types of HR data to different user groups, for different purposes, and with the overarching goal of improving the ways in which users comprehend and interpret data visualizations for decision-making purposes. To understand the state of science and practice as they relate to HR data visualizations and data visualizations in general, we review the literature on data visualizations across disciplines and offer an organizing framework that emphasizes the roles data visualization characteristics (e.g., display type, features), user characteristics (e.g., experience, individual differences), tasks, and objectives (e.g., compare values) play in user comprehension, interpretation, and decision-making. Finally, we close by proposing future directions for science and practice.

The verbal and nonverbal behaviors that individuals display (i.e., their communication styles) influence the status positions they attain in their task groups. Prior research has generally concluded that communication behaviors that convey agency (i.e., characteristics denoting intelligence, ambition, and dominance) are more effective for obtaining a high-status position in a task group than communication behaviors that convey communality (i.e., characteristics denoting warmth, sincerity, and agreeableness). The message from these prior studies is that it is more status enhancing to be smart than to be social. The objective of this chapter is to challenge this assertion and argue that in some task groups it may be more status enhancing to be social rather than to be smart. I suggest that the status benefits of particular communication styles depend on the characteristics of the group to which an individual belongs to. Thus, in contrast to prior research in this area, I argue for a more contextual approach to the study of communication styles and status conferral, focusing on how structural and process differences between groups influence how the group members’ words and actions are evaluated.

We review the literature on individual acceptance of technology to show how organizations can improve the effective use of human resource web-based technologies. Integrating and expanding several theoretical models of technology acceptance, we develop a perceptual model of employee self-service (ESS) acceptance and usage. Based on this model, we propose several key individual, technological, and organizational factors relevant to individual intentions to use ESS technology. We summarize these in several testable propositions and also discuss implications for organizational researchers and practitioners.

This chapter presents a theoretical framework for the effects of prior task experience on team creativity. We distinguish among different types of experience within teams, namely direct and indirect prior task experience. We argue that different types of prior task experience differentially influence team creativity, and that the prior experience–creativity relationship is mediated by the development and use of transactive memory systems (TMS). We also argue that team characteristics such as identity and communication moderate the effect of prior task experience on TMS, and task characteristics such as uncertainty and interdependence moderate the effect of TMS on group creativity.

To describe how a defined video reflection prompt for preservice mathematics teachers shaped their reflective writing, which was examined using academic reflection as a genre model.

Academic reflection as a genre model was used to unpack the reflective processes evident in preservice teachers’ written reflections on a practicum teaching experience in the context of a methods course assignment, prior to any formal instruction about reflective genre. This chapter examines how the quality of participants’ reflective writing corresponded with two promising products of reflection – the accuracy of participants’ claims about the effectiveness of instructional tasks used during teaching and the quality of suggested revisions to the lesson.

The findings indicate that the extent to which participants engaged with the required parts of the assignment corresponded with the accuracy of their claims about the effectiveness of instructional tasks and the quality of revisions they suggested to the lesson. The authors discuss the writing produced by the participants, providing examples from their reflections to demonstrate preservice teachers’ initial competencies in using genre.

Informed by the nature of writing produced by the participants, the authors extend the model of reflection as a genre and suggest how it could be used to teach preservice teachers to effectively structure reflective writing. Furthermore, the authors offer recommendations for how to define the video reflection prompt to serve as a more effective scaffold of preservice teachers’ analysis of student learning.