Journal of Organizational Behavior最新文献

We examined whether sexualizing a businesswoman impacts attitudes toward subsequently evaluated, nonsexualized females applying for a corporate managerial position. Research shows that sexualized women are perceived as less warm and competent (i.e., objectified). Integrating this work with research on social cognition, we hypothesized that the negative effect of sexualization “spills over” onto other nonsexualized women, reducing their hireability. Across two experiments, initially sexualized women were perceived as less warm and competent, as were subsequently evaluated nonsexualized female job candidates. In turn, these negative perceptions reduced the applicants' probability of being hired. Sexualization of women also increased intentions to hire a subsequently evaluated male candidate. The results were robust when we controlled for evaluators' gender and age. Our findings demonstrate that female job applicants can experience detrimental effects from sexually based objectification, even when they are not the individuals initially sexualized. We discuss implications for women's careers.

We examine how professional dual-earner couples, with school-age children, who worked from home during the COVID-19 lockdown, adjusted to the changes it brought to their lives. To do so, we conducted a qualitative study of 28 dual-earner households that had at least one school-age child, resided in China, Iran, Malaysia, the United Kingdom, or the United States, and worked from home during their local lockdown period. In each household, we interviewed the parents (56 total), and we asked at least one child to draw their perception of their parents' work-from-home experience and narrate the drawing (31 total). Informed by work–home interface and family stress scholarships, we outline the resources and demands generated by working at home as a family, as well as the strategies families employed to manage their collective work from home. We extend work-from-home scholarship beyond the individual level by accounting for the roles of all collective members in the work-from-home experience. We complement the research that has studied individual- and couple-level work–family strategies by theorizing the supportive, attentive, relational, delegative, and compromising strategies families adopted to generate changes in resource-demand dynamics. In doing so, we introduce family adaptive capability for the context of adjusting to work from home and define it as a collective ability to initiate strategies to meet remote work demands with resources generated from the new work arrangement. At a practical level, the strategies presented in our work can inform employers of dual-earner couples and families experiencing similar dynamics.

Increasing age diversity in the workplace has led to growing research attention to the knowledge transfer between older and younger employees. The existing literature on age-diverse knowledge exchange has mostly focused on knowledge transfer from older to younger employees as a means of knowledge retention. In this study, we change perspectives by aiming to understand how and when older employees' knowledge seeking from younger coworkers is related to their successful aging at work (i.e., the motivation and ability to continue working). Grounded in the self-regulatory process model of successful aging at work, we predict two countervailing pathways: a positive self-enhancing path via perceived learning and a negative self-protective path via embarrassment. In a time-lagged study with 764 older employees, we found that their knowledge seeking from younger coworkers was positively related to motivation to continue working and workability via perceived learning and negatively related to workability via embarrassment. We further examined older employees' positive intergenerational affect as a boundary condition and found a buffering effect on the negative path to workability. This research shows that knowledge transfer from younger to older employees is a net contributor to successful aging at work and embarrassment can be mitigated by positive intergenerational affect.

Organizational members face a motivational dilemma in influencing the social relationships of others: The organization benefits from high connectedness among employees, but personal advantages accrue to those who occupy brokerage positions between disconnected others. In this study, we draw on the organizational paradox perspective to argue that the reconciliation of these contrasting objectives lies in recognizing one's agency to facilitate connectedness (closing) within a social structure and the search for new connections (opening) as mutually supportive. Across two field studies, we examine how individuals' advantageous position in an organizational network emerges from the interplay between a tertius iungens orientation to join others in collaboration and network building to open new brokering opportunities. In Study 1, analyses of a sample of two-wave, cross-lagged panel data show that a tertius iungens orientation contributes to the number of outgoing ties to other actors via network building. Study 2 uses a network survey to add that a tertius iungens orientation is positively associated with incoming ties from others and network brokerage, and again, these relationships are mediated by network building. Overall, our results indicate that by increasing connectedness in their organizational social network, individuals simultaneously activate opening behaviors that facilitate the expansion of their network, thereby revitalizing their structurally advantageous position.