Margaret Posig

CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES ON WOMEN'S ENTREPRENEURSHIP: A REVIEW AND STRATEGIC RECOMMENDATIONS

The study of womens entrepreneurship has grown steadily during the last two decades, as the number of women-owned businesses worldwide has increased dramatically. This article presents an examination of major research questions and highlights the most recent scholarship on womens entrepreneurship within several key domains. The findings integrate broad areas of inquiry, including the emergence of women-owned firms in the global economy, entrepreneurial and firm characteristics, financing patterns, the greatest challenges to enterprise growth, and the influence of culture and family on the entrepreneurial organization. Recommendations are provided to contribute to an increased understanding of the dynamics of women-headed entrepreneurial enterprises around the world.

Work‐role expectations and work family conflict: gender differences in emotional exhaustion

A model integrating work‐role expectations of employees, work‐family conflict, family‐work conflict, and a component of burnout was proposed and empirically tested on 163 employees, who were also part of dual‐earner couples. Gender differences were found in the proposed model. For males, work‐family conflict mediated the relationship between work‐role expectations and emotional exhaustion. Although the same indirect relationship was found for females, a direct relationship also existed between work‐role expectations and emotional exhaustion. Additionally, for females, family‐work conflict was found to be a key contributor to work‐family conflict and emotional exhaustion. Managerial implications and future research directions are discussed.

The Status of Women's Entrepeneurship: Pathways to Future Entrepreneurship Development and Education

This article examines major areas of inquiry related to entrepreneurial capabilities, motivations, and the acquisition of resources to launch and grow women-owned businesses.

Engagement as a Privilege and Disengagement as a Pathology

Employee engagement research to date has proliferated on the conceptualization that engagement is driven by mutable job design characteristics and related socioemotional resources. This essay explores concerns with that conceptualization. For instance, modern engagement research has defined a “work role” with an almost exclusive focus on employees occupying professional roles, largely ignoring broad swaths of population who hold blue- or pink-collar jobs. These concerns are set forth in a discussion of broadening the definition of engagement. We start by describing the key components of the construct of engagement, followed by a discussion of how changes in the modern work role restrict engagement in ways that do not comport with the traditional view. Next, this essay explores three assumptions inherent in engagement’s research stream: possibility, availability, and directionality. Finally, key research directions and questions are presented in an attempt to focus research attention on studying engagement from a more inclusive lens.

Psychological Contract Development, Distributive Justice, and Performance of Independent Contractors The Role of Negotiation Behaviors and the Fulfillment of Resources

In today’s “gig economy,” more and more jobs are offered to independent contractors. Independent contractors have a highly defined, narrow, finite set of obligations to their employing organizations. As such, independent contractors gain the benefit of flexibility, choosing who and when they work, and organizations gain the benefit of nimbleness, expanding, and contracting their workforce at will without taking on the robust obligations they must typically offer to a full-time employee. As this sector of the U.S. economy grows, how our existing theories of employee–employer relationships apply is of interest. The present study sought to explore how one such theory (psychological contract theory) manifests in the independent contractor–organization relationship. Drawing on this theory’s findings with respect to key antecedents of an employment relationship, we explore how particular types of negotiation behavior an organization uses with an independent contractor affect the resources allocated to the independent contractor, vis-à-vis obligations that the independent contractor feels that the focal organization should fulfill (psychological contract). These resources are hypothesized to directly relate to the independent contractor’s sense of distributive justice, as well as the contracting organization’s evaluation of the independent contractor’s performance. Overall, the mixed results suggest that psychological contract theory can be applied to the context of the independent contractor–organization relationship in order to uncover how unique features of the relationship (e.g., highly negotiated terms) affect how obligations are created and reciprocated between the parties. Psychological contract type appears to be a partial linchpin between an organization’s negotiation behaviors on independent contractor performance.