There are multiple topic areas relevant to human sustainability in organizational behavior. These have recently been integrated into Restricted Employee Sustainability Theory (REST). However, REST as currently formulated focuses on individual employees, leaving the theory undersocialized and undercontextualized. Moreover, REST leaves responsibility for human sustainability on individual employees. We extend rest to take a leader-focused perspective. We highlight how leaders can monitor employees who may be in different employee sustainability states, and how these different employees have different needs which should be managed differently. We discuss how leaders can build a culture which values human sustainability. We delineate three different tensions faced by leaders in the context of human sustainability (short term productivity versus long term human sustainability, protecting human capital versus avoiding paternalism, and maintaining lean payrolls versus maintaining a robust capacity for workload spikes). Finally, we close with a discussion of practical implications and future research. In doing so, we discuss how leaders can enhance the human sustainability of their subordinates and their organizations.
In order for the assistance we extend to others to be maximally effective—whether interpersonally or institutionally—we need both givers to extend the help and recipients to utilize the assistance made available to them. Although much organizational behavior research has explored ways to increase prosocial behavior and charitable giving, comparatively little organizational scholarship has explored the recipient’s perspective. We believe that organizational behavior scholars, and social scientists more broadly, need to broaden their focus to examining why recipients in need of help sometimes neglect to utilize help. This paper proposes our Aid Utility Theory as a new way of thinking about and tackling aid utilization neglect, while also synthesizing prior social scientific literature that aims to improve aid utilization. We conclude with future directions for organizational behavior scholars who are interested in researching the perspective of those receiving help and improving global aid effectiveness. (145 words)
Although ambiguity is a pervasive feature of organizations, its influence on organizational decision making is often overlooked. We aim to advance understanding of decision making under ambiguity in organizations by combining insights from organizational research within the Carnegie perspective with psychological research on fundamental human motives. We propose the Carnegie plus Self-Enhancement (CSE) model, integrating the influence of self-enhancement—a fundamental psychological motive—on organizational decision-making under ambiguity. To develop our model, we review existing literature on how self-enhancement influences interpretation of ambiguity in organizational decision making. We then expand on this research by linking self-enhancement to individuals’ social categories (gender and social class), identifying previously unexplored sources of variation in self-enhancement in organizational decision-making. Our analysis elaborates on how belonging to a social category influences decision-makers’ self-enhancement and, consequently, decision-making in ambiguous situations. This approach offers a nuanced decision-making model that considers societal positions, thereby contributing to a more complete understanding of organizational decision-making.