Sara L. Mann

Becoming a leader: the challenge of modesty for women

Purpose – While the number of women in managerial positions has been increasing, the gender composition of top management teams is skewed. There are barriers and obstacles in place that limit the movement of women into leadership roles. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between modesty and access to leadership. Specifically, tendencies toward modesty and lack of self‐promotion are hypothesized to perpetuate the lack of female involvement in top management positions.Design/methodology/approach – The literature on modesty and self‐promotion is reviewed. The findings are discussed in terms of the persistent challenges faced by women with regard to their ability to enter senior levels of management.Findings – The overall message of the paper is that behaviours that are successful for males in the workplace are not successful for females. The good news is that women do not need to adopt male ways of being in order to succeed. A limitation is that the paper is largely “uni‐cultural”, as t...

Setting Goals and Taking Ownership Understanding the Implications of Participatively Set Goals From a Causal Attribution Perspective

The purpose of this theoretical article is to explore the psychological processes underlying employee participation in goal setting. Specifically, it presents a conceptual model that attempts to illustrate the potential pattern of causal self-attributions generated following the performance of participatively set goals. This article addresses two important questions: What are the cognitive consequences for employees who participate in setting their own performance goals? Do employees feel more personally responsible for the outcomes of their job performance if they have participated in the setting of their work goals? Theoretical assertions are summarized in the form of research propositions.

Ratings of counterproductive performance: the effect of source and rater behavior

Purpose – The purpose of this study was to examine inter‐rater agreement on counterproductive performance between self‐ and peer‐ratings, and the factors that moderate this agreement. The factors investigated included self‐reported levels of counterproductive performance and known antecedents of counterproductive performance: conscientiousness and integrity values.Design/methodology/approach – Data were gathered (three to five peer ratings per individual) from 108 undergraduate students.Findings – The paper finds that there was a significantly low correlation between self‐ and peer‐ ratings of counterproductive performance. Ratings given by peers were much higher than ratings given by oneself. Individuals and peers who are similar in the extent to which they engage in counterproductive behaviors were in agreement with respect to ratings of counterproductive performance.Practical implications – This study provided evidence that rater disagreement is a consistent phenomenon across dimensions of performance....

Refocusing Effort Across Job Tasks: Implications for Understanding Temporal Change in Job Performance

This study introduces a component of adaptability, namely, a shift in the relative emphasis among different job tasks, to the measurement of employee job performance. Using a multiyear longitudinal data set on the performance of professional basketball players, the results indicate that (a) refocusing ones efforts among different job tasks exists in this context, (b) refocusing accounts for variation in performance, and (c) refocusing increases the odds of continued employment the following year. These findings have implications for understanding temporal change in job performance.

Weekend-based short workweeks: peripheral work or facilitating ‘work–life balance’?

This research focuses on those working weekends and also having a workweek of 20 hours or less, which we define as having a weekend-based short workweek (WBSW). The purpose of this paper is to examine the characteristics of workers with a WBSW, with emphasis on gender, family status, and work–life balance. To our knowledge, this is the first study examining work schedules having overlapping characteristics of both weekend work and part-time hours. The country of research for this study is Canada. We found that workers with a WBSW are more likely to be female, but less likely to be married or have dependent children. They are also more likely to be younger, less educated, less experienced, and low-waged. Nonetheless, job satisfaction among those with a WBSW is only slightly lower than those without one. Moreover, we found a group of older, married females with high job satisfaction notwithstanding having a WBSW. We presume that some have managed to balance the substantial work, economic, and family obligations that they face, but also wonder whether some have become resigned to their available employment options rather than having found decent work per se.

Research Note: Workplace Child Care and Elder Care Programs and Employee Retention

Using Statistics Canada’s Workplace and Employee Survey (WES) data for 2003 and 2004, this research note addresses an important component of labour market retention by investigating whether the presence of workplace child care and elder care programs influences employees’ decision to quit. The key findings are as follows: (a) workplace elder care support is almost non-existent in Canada; (b) employees are more likely to remain with an organization that offers workplace child care support programs; and (c) those employees who actually use the workplace child care support are even more likely to stay with the organization. We suggest that future research should assess whether the particular support programs themselves ‘cause’ employees to stay, or whether there are other factors (within organizations offering these support programs) that account for the retention.

Feeling (and acting) like a fish out of water

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine how the proportional representation of men and women in a group, along with the gender‐orientation of the groups task, can impact member displays of helping behavior.Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on the gender role socialization approach, the structural approach to gender differences, as well as the social psychology‐based perspective embedded in status characteristics or expectation states theory. Elements taken from each of these models permits assessment of the impact of gender, group gender composition and the gender orientation of the task on helping behavior in a group context.Findings – There is ample evidence to confirm the critical importance of member citizenship behavior in contributing to overall team performance.Practical implications – Given the presence of increasingly demographically diverse teams, it is vital to understand those factors that may enhance or inhibit helping behavior in the group context. This theory paper pr...

An ill-informed choice: empirical evidence of the link between employers’ part-time or temporary employment strategies and workplace performance in Canada

Abstract Many employers seek flexibility through part-time or temporary employment to achieve improved competitiveness and success. Using strategic choice theory, this study is a longitudinal examination of employers’ strategic decisions of reducing labour costs and using part-time or temporary workers on workplace performance. Workplace performance is measured through profitability, productivity and change in net operating revenue. Statistics Canada’s Workplace and Employee Survey longitudinal workplace data are used for the analysis. Results show that reducing labour costs strategy has no effect on profitability, productivity or change in net operating revenue, and using part-time or temporary workers strategy shows decreased profitability and productivity, and that there is no effect on the change in net operating revenue in Canadian workplaces studied. Based on these findings, we recommend that employers, in Canada and elsewhere, not only carefully weigh reducing labour costs and employing part-time or temporary workers strategies for workplace performance, but also reconsider such strategies and instead seek alternative means of improving workplace performance.

Selection Practices in Canadian Firms: An Empirical Investigation

Using 7 years of data from Statistics Canadas Workplace and Employee Survey, this study examined the types of selection tools used with 23,639 employees in 6,693 Canadian firms. While 79% of these employees were given an interview during the selection process, only 10% were given a test on job‐related knowledge and 9% were given a personality test. Using logit analysis, job‐ and organization‐level variables were examined as predictors of the type of selection tools used. The size of the organization, an in‐house human resource department, the presence of a union and occupation were significant predictors of the use of a test on job‐related knowledge in the selection process. The implications and plausible explanations of this theory to practice gap are discussed.