Donald E. Gibson

Role models in career development: New directions for theory and research

Abstract Career theory proposes the importance of role models as helping to guide individual development. Furthermore, the media often depict role models as essential to career success. However, research on role models as a construct distinct from developmental relationships with mentors and behavioral models has waned. This article makes the case for reinvigorating the role model construct. A revised definition is provided, depicting role models as cognitive constructions based on an individual’s needs, wants, and ambitions. Drawing on recent advances in social comparison and self-concept theories, a dimensional approach to role models integrates current theory and research, suggesting that role models should be construed along two cognitive dimensions (positive/negative, global/specific), and two structural dimensions (close/distant, up/across-down). The article concludes by suggesting new research directions prompted by this new view of the role model construct.

The Effects of Flexibility in Employee Skills, Employee Behaviors, and Human Resource Practices on Firm Performance

The components of human resource (HR) flexibility and their potential relationship to firm performance have not been empirically examined. The authors hypothesize that flexibility of employee skills, employee behaviors, and HR practices represent critical subdimensions of HR flexibility and are related to superior firm performance. Results based on perceptual measures of HR flexibility and accounting measures of firm performance support this prediction. Whereas skill, behavior, and HR practice flexibility are significantly associated with an index of firm financial performance, the authors find that only skill flexibility contributes to cost-efficiency.

Anger in Organizations: Review and Integration

Organizations are rife with situations likely to cause employee anger, including complex relationships, chronic pressure, high stakes, and factors beyond individual control. The importance of this discrete emotion has led to a range of studies exploring the implications of anger for critical organizational phenomena, including emotion norms, leadership, gender issues, status and power, and cross-cultural differences. Despite the dramatic increase in scholarly attention over the past decade to understanding anger experience and expression in organizations, there exist few current reviews and little integration of this diverse literature. By combining a psychological perspective of anger as an episodic process with an organizational perspective emphasizing contextual effects and norms, this review will summarize current research in this vital area, provide a model for understanding and integrating this work, and propose themes for future research.

Group Affect Its Influence on Individual and Group Outcomes

We review and synthesize the research literature examining group affect and its consequences, focusing on groups who interact together to accomplish a task. We use a definition of group affect that incorporates the mutual influence of a group’s affective context and affective composition (the amalgamation of group members’ state and trait affect). Our focus is on the influence of group affect on individual members’ behaviors and attitudes and on group-level outcomes. We call for more research in this area, including the study of more specific discrete group emotions and a broadening of the types of groups studied in this research area.

Women's and Men's Career Referents: How Gender Composition and Comparison Level Shape Career Expectations

This study examines how women’s and men’s career referents, the people they see as having similar careers, affect career expectations. We raise two questions. First, what is the relative effect of the gender composition and comparison level of career referents on such expectations? Second, what happens to career expectations when women and men identify career referents at the same comparison level? Current research suggests that women have lower career expectations than men because they compare themselves with women who hold lower-level positions than the career referents identified by men. Thus, if women and men identify with similar level career referents, their career expectations should be equal. However, this chain of reasoning has not been tested. Using data collected from a large organization, we identify both the specific individuals women and men perceive as having similar careers and these referents’ career levels, defined as their hierarchical level in the firm. The results show that the level of career referents is more important than their gender composition in explaining individuals’ career expectations. In contrast to extant explanations, the results show that even when women identify career referents at the same levels as men, they still exhibit significantly lower career expectations. Drawing on social comparison theory, we speculate this occurs because men’s expectations are bolstered by extreme upward comparisons, whereas women’s expectations are dampened, perhaps because they see high achieving others as representing a less probable goal.

Emotional episodes at work : An experiential exercise in feeling and expressing emotions

This exercise explores how organizations affect individuals’ feelings and expressions of emotion. Although recent attention by management theorists suggests that emotions are an important aspect of organizational life, people’s actual experience of emotions at work often do not reflect this emphasis: Work-place emotions remain, in large part, undiscussable. The purpose of this experiential exercise is to emphasize emotions as a central, rather than hidden, part of work life. In the exercise, students explore and discuss emotional “episodes” from their work lives to learn about how organizations generate display rules for emotional expression and what this means for individual and organizational effectiveness.

Exploring the Impact of Role Models on Older Employees.

The international trend toward organizations emphasizing adaptability and change throughout careers suggests that research should examine the development of employees into later career stages. Role models have been seen as critical to individuals’ skill and identity development, but have only been regarded as salient in early career stages and to younger individuals. In this study, we argue that older employees’ commitment to and satisfaction in their organization will be associated with their perception of available role models. As predicted, the study finds that older employees tended to identify multiple role models in their organization. Moreover, the study finds that the degree to which older employees perceive that they have role models available and perceive that these role models share similar attitudes, values, and goals is associated with commitment and satisfaction. Implications of these findings for career researchers and for managers are discussed.

Belle Rose Ragins and Kathy E. Kram: The Handbook of Mentoring at Work: Theory, Research, and Practice

It has been 30 years since Daniel Levinson (1978: 97) wrote, “The mentor relationship is one of the most complex, and developmentally important, a [person] can have in early adulthood.” As this new handbook demonstrates, researchers are still convinced of its importance and still trying to tease apart its complexity. Following Levinson, Kathy Kram provided a cogent agenda for academic research with her Mentoring at Work (1985). She identifi ed antecedents and outcomes to mentoring, delineated key functions (career, psychosocial), emphasized the complexities of cross-gender relationships, and noted that mentoring relationships are often characterized by phases. Researchers found much to like in Kram’s study, and since its publication, research in mentoring has enlarged, honed, and enlivened the construct.

Organizational Anger Contexts and their Relationship to Outcomes of Anger Expressions in the Workplace

This paper demonstrates that organizational anger contexts and the form of anger expression does impact positive and negative outcomes of anger. Anger context refers to an organizations normative rules governing anger expression, specifically defined as the extent to which organizational sanctions are likely to be experienced following an overt expression of anger. We examined 154 episodes of anger in three distinct anger contexts. We identified three forms of anger expression and four categories of anger outcomes. We found evidence of organizations that value the expression of anger and find it useful in accomplishing organizational goals. In these setting positive outcomes were associated with expressions of anger. In contrast, in organizations where anger is suppressed by managers and employees working to prevent expressions of anger, we found both positive and negative outcomes. Thus, organizational context does have an impact on the outcomes of anger episodes.

Blame and Credit Attributions and Quality of Work Life: The Effect of Organizational Structure and Culture

Employees’ affective responses to their work have increasingly been linked to their subjective well-being and their quality of life (QOL) overall. One source of subjective well-being for individuals is the credit they receive for organizational successes and the blame they receive for failures. This chapter presents two ethical dilemmas involving blame and credit attributions. In determining how to address these dilemmas, we review the research literature on responsibility assignments, integrate recent research on blame contagion, describe how this process can affect employees’ willingness to take risks and report errors, and examines how these processes can impact an organization’s capacity to learn. We finally integrate these findings in a model of blame assignment in organizations, proposing structural and cultural interventions that may help to address some of the problematic outcomes of blame and credit attributions for QWL.