This article investigates the theoretical and empirical relationships between organisational punishment and productivity. We do so by highlighting the contributions of two academic fields to this topic: management and economics. We underscore the many common theoretical and empirical grounds across management and economics. We heighten, in particular, how motivation and learning theories have contributed to the development of both theoretical and empirical research on this topic. This article also argues that this debate could be significantly advanced if insights stemming from industrial relations and labour process theory were also considered, as these disciplines have traditionally focused on macro-issues such as how changes in the economic/institutional contexts may affect the likelihood that organisations will resort to punishment. In order to foster future research on this topic, three research themes were developed: (a) freedom of choice and the role of contract completeness; (b) perception of punishment, monitoring and productivity; and (c) punishment, productivity and exogenous variables.

Do disability legislations that are meant to be beneficial for the employment situation of persons with disabilities have nevertheless unintended negative consequences? To provide key resources such as the right to workplace accommodation, governmental agencies first need to identify eligible persons and label them accordingly. However, this label may, in turn, induce public and self stigma that entails negative consequences for labeled individuals. We address this puzzle using a quasi-experimental study design: sharp regression discontinuity design. Specifically, we examine whether individuals officially labeled as “severely disabled” perceive fewer opportunities for relationship building at work than their counterparts with a similarly severe, yet unlabeled, disability condition. We use data from 845 employees with disabilities, which were drawn from a representative German workforce data set. As expected, labeling leads to perceptions of fewer opportunities for relationship building. We find this effect to be independent from supervisor knowledge of subordinate disability, type of disability, and one’s visibility of disability. These robustness checks strengthen the argument that the labeling effect might be driven primarily by self stigma rather than public stigma. Implications for organizations and public authorities are discussed.

Research on knowledge hiding, the intentional attempt to withhold knowledge that others have requested, strikingly shows its detrimental consequences. But, if it has only negative effects, why do employees hide knowledge in their everyday work at all? With this diary study, we address this question, shedding light on the instrumentality of knowledge hiding. Specifically, placing it within the transactional stress model, we argue that deceptive knowledge hiding (playing dumb and evasive hiding) may function as coping, relating negatively to psychological strain responses to experienced interpersonal conflict. Accordingly, we tested evasive hiding and playing dumb as mediators of the day-specific relationship between conflict and end-of-work exhaustion and negative affect. Based on data of 101 employees who reported on 615 workdays, results of multilevel path analyses showed relationship conflict positively related to evasive hiding and playing dumb. Playing dumb was negatively related to end-of-work psychological strain responses, resulting in inconsistent mediation. Evasive hiding was unrelated to psychological strain. Showing the potential intrapersonal benefits of playing dumb, this article helps to better understand the occurrence of enacted ‘negative’ interpersonal work behaviors, yielding important implications for research and practice.

Previous intersectional research on ethnic minority women has largely focused on inequalities and disadvantages associated with the intersection between their minority gender and ethnic identities. In this study, we challenge the static and dichotomous assumption of the existing intersectionality framework (e.g. privilege versus disadvantage) and adopt Holvino’s intersectional perspective of simultaneity as a theoretical lens through which to demonstrate the importance of understanding intersectionality within various levels of contexts, or contextualising social differences. Interviews with 43 female migrant workers from China, Japan and Korea living in the UK revealed that these women perceived disadvantage in terms of gender/ethnic stereotyping and discriminatory practices at work. At the same time, however, their accounts provided evidence of contextualised privilege, namely ‘relative privilege’ (privilege in comparison to multiple reference groups), ‘assigned privilege’ (privilege assigned by their employers and the host society), and ‘ambiguous privilege’ (privilege as a double-edged sword). Based on these observations, we suggest that the location of East Asian women is not fixed within the interlocking systems of oppression in the host country; rather, this location is dynamic and fluid within interpersonal, organisational and societal contexts in the home and host countries, moving back and forth between disadvantage and (limited) privilege.

Smart cities are a modern reality in an increasingly digitized and fast changing world; and, as multidimensional, multilayered and interconnected career ecosystems they bring a number of challenges for the development of sustainable careers. What are the systemic roots of these challenges, and how can we deal with them to support the emergence of sustainable careers? We draw on a sociotechnical approach, supplemented by a dynamic person–environment fit perspective, to describe two systemic challenges tied to the development of sustainable careers in smart cities, namely: (1) an unbalanced fit, in that the highly digitized context fits best with highly educated and information and communications technology (ICT) literate citizens working in knowledge intensive organizations; and (2) a volatility of fit, associated with the complex and fast-changing smart urban context. Based on the sociotechnical analysis, we put forth three suggestions for addressing these challenges and creating a sustainable career ecosystem focused on: (1) the continuous development of ICT literacy, knowledge, talents and skills; (2) citizen participation and career communities; and (3) network-centric organizing of sustainable careers that could alleviate some of the challenges associated with the parallel development of sustainable careers and smart cities.

How employees communicate their ideas at work shapes how their ideas are received. When employees constructively communicate their ideas, the value of those ideas can be more readily recognized. Conversely, ideas that are not communicated constructively may be overlooked, ignored, or rejected, regardless of their potential value to an organization. This research contributes to the employee voice literature by introducing the concept of constructive voice delivery and examining its relationship with callings. In this endeavor, two field studies explored the influence of callings on constructive voice delivery. The first study examined these relationships from the employee perspective, identified organizational attachment as the mechanism driving the relationship, and highlighted the role psychological safety plays in strengthening the relationship. The second study explored the relationship between callings and constructive voice delivery from managers’ perspectives, revealing a negative relationship between callings and managerial ratings of constructive voice delivery and emphasized psychological safety’s role in strengthening this negative relationship. Furthermore, constructive voice delivery suppressed the positive effect callings have on employee performance. Taken together, the results of both studies demonstrate that constructive voice delivery is an important aspect of speaking up at work.

How do we understand the psychic life of cultural workers under neoliberalism? ‘Hope labour’ is a defining quality of a cultural worker’s experience, practice and identity. Hope labour is unpaid or under-compensated labour undertaken in the present, usually for exposure or experience, with the hope that future work may follow. Hope labour is naturalised by neoliberal discourses but not fully determined by them. Drawing upon empirical research investigating the ‘creative industries’ in the North East of England, we ask how hope labour is made meaningful and worthwhile for cultural workers positioned as entrepreneurial subjects, despite its legitimisation of power asymmetries. We develop Foucauldian studies of governmentality by addressing how cultural work is lived through neoliberal categories, demonstrating the conflicting discourses and relations to self involved in the constitution of entrepreneurial subjectivity. We make a novel contribution to an understanding of hope and precarity by illustrating how cultural workers begin to occupy the site of the entrepreneurial subject amidst conflicting configurations of hope, desire, anxiety and uncertainty.

This article lays the workplace under the microscope to examine how scuffs on floors and battered corners on desks – things we define as ‘scarred objects’ – become material autobiographical archives and are made into memory anchors by workers. We explore how these scarred objects, construed as insignificant by some, become integral to workers’ sense of memory and continuity. These scarred objects become time marks (Walsh, 1992) which provide a sense of embeddedness in an otherwise flexible, transient working world. We draw on material culture and sociological literatures, and the work of Burnett and Holmes (2001), to make sense of scarred objects in terms of their significance to workers as well as their construal of work and relationship to organisation mediated through memory. This article is based on empirical, visual data gathered from a 9-month study involving 43 hairdressers working in hair salons. We offer three contributions: first, we develop a new area of material studies, at a micro-level, that extends our understanding of objects in the workplace; second, we demonstrate how scarred objects anchor workers’ sense of memory; and third, we show the importance of scarred objects in the context of greater flexibility and liquidity in contemporary work.

In this article, we advance research on transparency by developing and validating a measure based on recent theoretical insights about its dimensionality. We find that transparency—defined as the perceived quality of information—is a three-dimensional construct consisting of perceived information disclosure, clarity, and accuracy. Evidence shows items associated with these dimensions can be aggregated into a single transparency construct. We also find that transparency (as an aggregate construct) is distinct from neighboring constructs such as informational justice and capable of predicting perceptions of the source’s trustworthiness (ability, benevolence, and integrity). Finally, we find evidence of measurement invariance between two commonly used referents of analysis, yielding confidence in the application of the proposed measure across research settings. We discuss implications of the new measure for research on transparency, the extension of the new measure to related research traditions, and the practical application of the new measure for managers interested in constructing and appraising transparent messages.

The article presents an introduction to the researches on the flexible work practices and work-family domain This virtual special issue sheds light on flexible work practices to tackle the problems of work-family boundary management The findings of each paper included in this issue explain how non-traditional work arrangements can be managed effectively to create a win-win for both employees and organizations A common and most important shared aspect of these articles is that they build on border and boundary management theories in addressing their research questions We hope that the wide and different array of articles we collated for you will help you and us all to understand and tackle the limitations of COVID-19 better in the context of work-family lives and flexible work arrangements (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)