Recruitment Communication and Psychological Contracts in Start-Ups: : Dark Side Challenges of Selling a Job and Creating Realistic Expectations

Recruitment communication presents a dilemma for organisations. When organisations hire, they often engage in branding themselves as employers (Backhaus & Tikoo, 2004) and rely on positive framing to present vacant positions in order to attract candidates. This leads to the ensuing challenge of living up to these promises for the candidates who are ultimately hired. Overpromising and underdelivering leads to a breach of the initial psychological contract. This balancing dilemma is especially pertinent for new and unknown companies, where concerns about the company’s legitimacy as an employer may cause potential candidates not to apply (Williamson, Cable, & Aldrich, 2002). On the one hand, start-ups need and want to attract the best, and on the other hand, they need to be wary of the impression they are creating of the job and the organisation as a place of work, as they would also like the candidates to stay once they are hired. I draw on interviews with managers and newcomers in Danish start-ups to give empirical examples of this challenge and its results, using the literature on psychological contracts (Rousseau, 1995) as an explanatory framework. I discuss what organisations might do to accomplish this balancing feat from theoretical and practical perspectives

New methods for assessing the impact of traffic safety countermeasures.

This paper investigates new methods for assessing the impact of traffic safety countermeasures on the number of accidents or injuries. The primary aim of this paper is to show in general how statistical methods that take development over time into account may be used when assessing the impact on traffic safety data. A secondary aim is to specifically investigate the effect of a change in the police accident reporting routine in 1997 on the injury classification. A salient characteristic in most monthly traffic safety data is a fluctuating trend and seasonal pattern. Some of the fluctuation can be explained, but in order to have a reliable assessment of the countermeasures the evaluation methods have to capture this fluctuation. So-called State Space models provide a framework, where these characteristics can be investigated and modelled explicitly. The change in the police reporting practice lead in 1998 to a 49% [35%; 60%] decrease in the reported number of head injuries in Copenhagen and in 1997 to a 37 % [27%, 46%] decrease outside Copenhagen. An estimate of the actual traffic safety in 1998 measured in the number of serious injuries could be the reported number corrected by an additional 670 injuries due to this change in the reporting

Expanding the Theoretical Landscape of Organizational Socialization Research: Institutionalism and Beyond

Our essay challenges an understanding of organizational socialization as a process whereby newcomers adapt to objectified organizational entities. To this end, we explore potential theoretical contributions of organizational institutionalism and related discourses on institutional logics, organizational hybridity, and organizational imprints. All of these perspectives support a concept of organizations as ‘moving targets’ in their relationship to dynamic environments. Accordingly, individuals such as newcomers can be positioned as active agents who engage in complex sense-making processes. However, institutionalism also has its shortcomings, as a deeper analysis of a seminal paper on organizational socialization in hybrid organizations reveals. We observe an ongoing commitment to an evolutionary adaptation paradigm, a paternalistic managerial attitude, and the denial of hegemonial market logics in organizations. In conclusion, we propose additional perspectives beyond institutionalism, which can further expand the theoretical landscape of organizational socialization research through independent and critical studies