Leader-employee congruence of expected contributions in the employee-organization relationship

Employees' expected contributions can be incongruent with those of their leader. We examine the congruence effect of leaders' and employees' expected contributions on job satisfaction. Results of cross-level polynomial regressions on 947 employees and 224 leaders support the congruence effect. When expected contributions are congruent, employees are more satisfied with their job. Our findings suggest that employees enjoy high challenges, as long as these challenges are in harmony with the expected contributions of their leaders. Employees are less satisfied with their jobs both when their expected contributions were higher than their leaders' and when their expected contributions were lower than those of their leaders. Beyond the relevance of having high expected contributions, the findings highlight the crucial role played by the congruence of expected contributions of leaders and employees

What Does Your I-deal Say About Me?:A Social Comparison Examination of Coworker Reactions to Flexibility I-deals

We focus on the implications of flexibility i-deals, that is, individually negotiated employment conditions regarding when, where and/or how to work, for i-dealers’ coworkers. Drawing on social comparison theory, we examine how coworkers’ attributions regarding the basis for flexibility i-deals (i.e., needs or performance) and perceptions of procedural fairness concerning the allocation of flexibility i-deals predict the display of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) via feelings of competence. The results, based on two independent and complementary studies ( n 1 =260; n 2 =211), are consistent with our hypothesized moderated-mediation model. Whereas need attributions are positively related to competence feelings and subsequent OCB, performance attributions are negatively related to these variables. The effects are more pronounced at high than at low levels of procedural fairness. This suggests that fair procedures do not always benefit coworker reactions as they can enlarge the negative impact of performance attributions on feelings of competence and subsequent OCB. Furthermore, we provide evidence for the explanatory mechanisms by revealing that the attribution (needs vs. performance) drives opposing social comparisons (downward vs. upward, respectively) and that procedural fairness can increase coworkers’ felt personal accountability for these comparisons, thereby triggering a matching emotional response. Our results show that flexibility i-deals can have a bright side, but also a dark side, depending upon the basis and fairness of the allocation. As such, they enrich the academic conversation about the effectiveness of flexibility i-deals and guide practitioners

Design and Poverty : A Review of Contexts, Roles of Poor People, and Methods

Design is essential to fulfil unmet or under-served needs of resource-poor societies, supporting their social and human development. A great deal of design research has been undertaken in such low resource settings, and is discussed under different names, such as ‘community development engineering’, ‘humanitarian engineering’, ‘appropriate technology’, ‘design for development’, ‘design at the Base of the Pyramid’, etc. This has created an important need to know what has been examined and learnt so far and to plan for further investigation. To address this, we review a broad range of literature, with close examination of 30 design studies in this field. This reveals a multifaceted picture, showing a great diversity in investigation and reporting of attributes of context (income, rural and urban, design sectors, countries, and gender), the roles of poor people (consumers, producers, and co-designers), characteristics of research methods employed (e.g. descriptive and prescriptive, data collection methods, qualitative and quantitative aspects, and unit of analysis), and design topics. Based on the review results, we offer recommendations for further research, identifying concerns that researchers ought to have about this field and suggesting ways in which research in this field can be undertaken and reported

Moving beyond the link between HRM and economic performance : a study on the individual reactions of HR managers and professionals to sustainable HRM

This study contributes to the growing literature on the intersection between human resource management and corporate sustainability (CS) and, in particular, on sustainable human resource management (interpreted here as HRM practices informed by the CS principles, thus aiming at economic, social, environmental and human sustainability simultaneously). In particular, this paper claims that the members of the HR professional community can increase their job satisfaction and decrease their intention to leave by implementing sustainable HRM. In addition, we test for the mediating role played by the meaning that HR professionals and managers attach to HR work. Indeed, when HR professionals and managers are involved in sustainable HRM perceive their job to become more meaningful as it has a broader scope which goes beyond the solely focus on economic performance, and that leads then to higher job satisfaction and lower turnover intention. The study, which is based on 176 questionnaires collected through a cross-country survey, has been developed in partnership between the authors and a leading European association of HR managers and professionals. Our findings, which in general extend the knowledge on the employees' perception of CS-employee attitudes relationships, represent a data-driven argument for a more active role of HRM in developing Sustainable HRM