Road safety perspectives among employees of a multinational corporation in urban India: local context for global injury prevention

In rapidly developing economies, like urban India, where road traffic injury rates are among the world's highest, the corporate workplace offers a non-traditional venue for road safety interventions. In partnership with a major multinational corporation (MNC) with a large Indian workforce, this study aimed to elicit local employee perspectives on road safety to inform a global corporate health platform. The safety attitudes and behaviours of 75 employees were collected through self-report survey and focus groups in the MNC offices in Bangalore and Pune. Analysis of these data uncovered incongruity between employee knowledge of safety strategies and their enacted safety behaviours and identified local preference for interventions and policy-level actions. The methods modelled by this study offer a straightforward approach for eliciting employee perspective for local road safety interventions that fit within a global strategy to improve employee health. Study findings suggest that MNCs can employ a range of strategies to improve the road traffic safety of their employees in settings like urban India including: implementing corporate traffic safety policy, making local infrastructure changes to improve road and traffic conditions, advocating for road safety with government partners and providing employees with education and access to safety equipment and safe transportation options.     

Management and Legal Issues Regarding Electronic Surveillance of Employees in the Workplace

Since the attack on the World Trade Center in New York, and on the Pentagon in the United States, concerns over security issues have been at an all-time high in this country. Both state and federal governments continue to discuss legislation on these issues amid much controversy. One key concern of both employers and employees is the extent that employers, espousing a “need to know” mentality, continue to expand their capability and implementation of surveillance of employees in the workplace. With the technology typically growing faster than the speed of legislation, protective or permissive, the management and legal issues involved in electronic monitoring of employee communications in the workplace, are and well should be on the agenda for discussion of every management and legal team in American business today. Companies have a legitimate right to protect their trade secrets from disclosure by disgruntled employees. Similarly, companies also have a duty to protect their good names and reputations from unauthorized employee communications with outside parties, and even other employees, that may damage them. It is also a prime duty of management to ensure, in their direction of their workforces, that the employees execute their responsibilities by working full time on their stated objectives. In this regard, any management that fails to oversee its workforce to ensure that employees are not expending valuable company time, for which they are being compensated, on personal business, including unauthorized communications, is remiss in its responsibilities to its shareholders. The company may see a reduction of the price of its shares in the marketplace if it does not protect the economic interests of its shareholders.     

Corporate Social Responsibility and the Benefits of Employee Trust: A Cross-Disciplinary Perspective

Research on corporate social responsibility (CSR) has tended to focus on external stakeholders and outcomes, revealing little about internal effects that might also help explain CSR-firm performance linkages and the impact that corporate marketing strategies can have on internal stakeholders such as employees. The two studies (N = 1,116 and N = 2,422) presented in this article draw on theory from both corporate marketing and organizational behavior (OB) disciplines to test the general proposition that employee trust partially mediates the relationship between CSR and employee attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. Both studies provide evidence in support of these general relationships. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed in the context of CSR and corporate marketing research.     

Organizational environmental orientation and employee environmental in‐role behaviors: A cross‐level study

Amid the growth of scholarly research on environmental workplace behaviors, two limitations stand out. First, there has been scant research on the cross‐level effects of organizational‐level determinants on individual employee environmental behaviors using a methodologically appropriate multilevel analytic approach. Second, there has been an overwhelming focus on voluntary, as opposed to task‐related, employee environmentally friendly behaviors. In addressing these limitations, this field study (N = 615 U.S.‐based employees nested in 51 organizations) makes a theoretical and empirical contribution to the literature, specifically by linking the dimensions of organizational‐level environmental orientation with individual‐level employee environmental in‐role (i.e., task‐related) behaviors using multilevel analysis. The results indicate that organizational internal environmental orientation is positively related to employee recycling behavior. Managerial status exerts a moderating effect, such that the positive relationship between internal environmental orientation and energy‐saving behavior is stronger among managers than among non‐managers. Furthermore, an organization's external environmental orientation has an unequivocal positive relationship only with employee energy‐saving behavior. The theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.     

The Power of One to Make a Difference: How Informal and Formal CEO Power Affect Environmental Sustainability

This study empirically investigated the impact of ethical leadership on employee burnout, deviant behavior and task performance through two psychological mechanisms: (1) developing higher levels of employee trust in leaders and (2) demonstrating lower levels of surface acting toward their leaders. Our theoretical model was tested using data collected from employees of a pharmaceutical retail chain company. Analyses of multisource time-lagged data from 45 team leaders and 247 employees showed that employees’ trust in leaders and surface acting significantly mediated the relationships between ethical leadership and employee burnout, deviant behavior and task performance. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our findings for understanding how ethical leaders influence employees’ attitudes and behavior.     

When Employees Stop Talking and Start Fighting: The Detrimental Effects of Pseudo Voice in Organizations

Many organizations offer their employees the opportunity to voice their opinions about work-related issues because of the positive consequences associated with offering such an opportunity. However, little attention has been given to the possibility that offering voice may have negative effects as well. We propose that negative consequences are particularly likely to occur when employees perceive the opportunity to voice opinions to be “pseudo voice”—voice opportunity given by managers who do not have the intention to actually consider employee input (i.e., managerial disregard). The effects of this kind of deception were examined by means of a survey among employees (N = 137) and managers (N = 14) of a Dutch healthcare organization. We hypothesized and found that perceived pseudo voice led to reduced voice behavior and, as a result, increased intragroup conflict. These results imply that while offering voice opportunity is mostly seen as an effective management strategy, negative effects are likely to occur when a manager is perceived to try to deceive employees by pretending to be interested in their points of view.     

为何中国员工偏好沉默——威权领导对员工建言的消极影响

采用问卷调查方式收集了66名领导与其286名下属的配对样本,运用层级回归的方法,探讨了威权领导对员工建言的影响及其作用机制。结果表明,威权领导和员工权力距离都对员工建言存在显著的负向预测效应。另外,员工权力距离还会调节威权领导对员工建言的效应,当员工权力距离较高时,威权领导与员工建言间的关系较弱。最后,员工心理授权部分中介威权领导、员工权力距离对员工建言的影响,完全中介威权领导和员工权力距离的交互项对员工建言的影响。这些研究结果有助于理解中国传统领导行为对员工建言的影响以及影响的中介机制和边界条件,具有重要的理论意义和实践意义。     

Aligning employees through “line of sight”

Aligning employees with the firm's larger strategic goals is critical if organizations hope to manage their human capital effectively and ultimately attain strategic success. An important component of attaining and sustaining this alignment is for employees to have a “line of sight” (LOS) with their organization's strategic objectives. In this article, we illustrate how the translation of calculated firm goals into tangible results requires that employees not only understand the organization's strategy, but also accurately appreciate what actions are aligned with realizing that strategy. Using recent empirical evidence, theoretical insights, and tangible examples of exemplary firm practices, we provide thought-leaders with a comprehensive view of LOS by showing how it can be created, how it can be enhanced or stifled, and how it can be effectively managed. Further, we integrate LOS with current thinking on employee alignment to help managers more effectively benefit from understanding human capital potential.     

Linking employee development activity,social exchange and organizational citizenship behavior

The authors examined ‘perceived beneficiary’ of employee development (self, organization) for relationships with employee development activity. Perceived organizational support served as a moderator. The authors conclude that employees may engage in development activities to partly benefit their organization to the extent that a positive exchange relationship exists. Correlational data also show that development behavior is related to organizational citizenship behavior, and this is particularly true for work‐related development activity. This research links employee development with social exchange and organizational citizenship, providing implications for both research and practice.     

The role of customer contact employees as external customers: A conceptual framework for marketing strategy and future research

Existing streams of literature in marketing, management, and organizational behavior are integrated to propose a conceptual framework that highlights the customer contact employee's dual role as employee and external customer of the organization. Several iterative “cycles of success” are proposed whereby job satisfaction, the employee's patronage of the company's products (i.e., goods or services), and job performance (as customer contact employees) are all enhanced, ultimately leading to long-term relationships (with customers and employees) and profits for the organization. The framework highlights the role of internal marketing as a tool for enhancing the competitive advantage gained by strategically considering the customer contact employee's role as external customer.     

Effects of an Employee Volunteering Program on the Work Force: The ABN-AMRO Case

One of the new ways used by companies to demonstrate their social responsibility is to encourage employee volunteering, whereby employees engage in socially beneficial activities on company time, while being paid by the company. The reasoning is that it is good for employee motivation (internal effects) and good for the company reputation (external effects). This article reports an empirical investigation of the internal effects of employee volunteering conducted amongst employees of the Dutch ABN-AMRO bank. The study showed that (a) socio-demographic characteristics from employee volunteers markedly differ from those of non-volunteers and community volunteers and (b) employee volunteering seems to have positive effects on attitudes and behavior towards the organization.     

Enhancing frontline employee support during a product-harm crisis: Evidence and strategic managerial implications for firms

Product-harm crises can negatively affect a firm's corporate image, reputation, and credibility. This research investigates antecedents and factors that can impact the extent to which frontline employees will be supportive of their organization when the firm faces such a crisis. Leveraging social exchange theory and its focus on reciprocal exchanges, we theorize and test processes using regression models, which shed light on how managers can solicit employee support during crises situations by providing the frontline employees with ethical and supportive working conditions. To offer convergent validity across multiple methodologies, we also test the influence of experimental effects of the relative severity of a crisis and whether a firm was quick or slow in its response on frontline employee support. Furthermore, our research demonstrates that the firm's strengths in corporate social responsibility, the employees' organizational citizenship behavior, and employee organizational identification serially mediate the supportive relationship, which provides a unique contribution to the marketing literature. Finally, we provide managerial implications to further enhance frontline employee support.     

变革型领导与员工角色行为:一个多步多重中介模型

以变革型组织为研究对象,本文构建了变革型领导对员工角色行为产生影响的双中介模型,从战略执行过程中如何获得组织所需要的员工角色行为这一实践目的出发,先后引入组织支持感和员工自我效能感作为中介变量,形成一个多步多重中介模型进行实证研究。结果显示,变革型领导对员工角色行为有一定的直接影响;同时组织支持感和变革自我效能感在变革型领导和员工角色行为之间起到了多步多重的中介作用。这表明在变革的组织中,领导者需要突破以往管理思路,不仅通过测试甄选来获得高效执行战略的"完美员工",也需要尝试通过管理手段,管控员工的组织支持感和变革自我效能感,开发出更多能够进行高效执行的员工角色行为来支持组织的变革。     

Achieving favourable customer outcomes through employee deviance

This study advances current knowledge by examining how employee deviance and customer participation during a single employee–customer exchange generate favourable customer responses. This work bridges the employee deviance stream with the service encounter literature and illustrates the importance of equity theory in deviant service exchanges between customers and employees. Moreover, results add to the ongoing debate on service nepotism by canvassing the consequences from the customer’s active participation in deviant exchanges which appears to enhance customer perceptions of the exchange. A 3?×?2 between-subjects experimental design was adopted which manipulates three types of pro-customer deviance along with customer’s participation (or not) to the exchange. The dependent variables capture three types of perceived customer justice (cognitive outcomes) and customer’s affective state (affective outcome). Findings illustrate that customers approve employees’ deviance for their own benefit while also indicate favourable outcomes from deviant exchanges with employees such as higher perceived justice and a more positive affective state. The article concludes with a discussion of the theoretical and managerial implications, limitations and research directions that emerge from this study.     

Will the Collapse of the American Dream Lead to a Decline in Ethical Business Behavior

This study compares employee attitudes to their reports of whether they consider their socio-economic status to be higher, the same, or lower than that of their parents. The premise of the research was based on the apparent deterioration of the expectation that each generation will live in greater economic comfort than their parents, referred to as a vital component of the American dream. Where this pattern of socio-economic progress has been interrupted, it may relate to certain attitudes. These attitudes, in turn, are likely to influence behavior. Here the focus is on whether employees' survey responses indicate they are honest, trustworthy, and tolerant. Differences in these characteristics that relate to self-reported socio- economic progress, may serve to explain the occurrence of certain behaviors among people who otherwise seem highly ethical. This information may also help create organizational awareness of the potential for unethical behavior, when employees have been blocked from their own expectations for betterment.     

A Two-Component Compliance and Ethics Program Model: An Empirical Application to Chilean Corporations

The rise of ethical scandals in the business world urged corporations to allocate time and resources to emphasize the ethical behavior of their managers and employees. The Model of Ethical Behavior in this article has three main assumptions: (1) the institutionalization of a Compliance and Ethics Program Model is done in terms of just two components: one Explicit and the other Implicit, (2) both components have a significant and direct influence over the ethical behavior of employees, which is represented in the model by two variables: Value Consistency and Presence of Ethical Conflicts, and (3) proper ethical behavior is perceived by employees to have a positive impact over the economic results of the firm. Reliable scales are developed to measure all these variables from the data collected by the “Barómetro de Valores y Ética Empresarial^©,” a survey applied in 2009 to 12,321 employees from 54 Chilean corporations. The empirical analysis showed that there are three very distinctive components in the Presence of Ethical Conflicts variable: (1) what the company does that affects the employee, (2) what the company does that affects other people, and (3) what the employee does that affects the company. Finally, the Explicit and Implicit components of a Compliance and Ethics Program are shown to have a significant and positive impact over: (1) Value Consistency in employees’ behavior; (2) the Presence of Ethical Conflicts in organizations; and (3) the perceived importance of ethics as a key factor to improve economic performance.     

The authentic service employee: Service employees' language use for authentic service experiences

This study analyzes how service employees' language use influences the authenticity of a service. The extant service literature on language use remains exclusively focused on the customer's perceptions of first language use in direct communication. Shifting the focus to the service employee, this paper posits that language could exert a wider influence, contributing both to how customers perceive the authenticity of the service and the entire service experience. Analyzing language use in service encounters, the paper addresses this research gap in the literature from the perspective of the service employee. In many service settings, authenticity is an important part in customers' construal of their experience. The study analyzes how service employees in British pubs outside the UK may use English with local customers who frequent these pubs to get a taste of Britain and British culture, contributing to the service literature by introducing a typology to align the service employees' language use with authenticity to strengthen the customer experience. The paper further contributes to service theory by extending the understanding of service sabotage by showing how, why, and in which circumstances service employees may use a language switch to sabotage the customer experience. Finally, the study extends the extant human resources literature on the effects of allowing service employees to be themselves to show that this managerial practice not only benefits the service employees also results in a more authentic customer experience.     

Employee attitudes toward advertising

The attitudes and opinions of a group of bank employees toward a recent advertising campaign run by the bank which stressed employee service were studied via factor analysis. The analysis revealed three clearly defined dimensions underlying the attitude-opinion items: general attitude toward the campaign, relevance of the campaign to the respondent's job, and changes in the respondent's job behavior caused by the campaign. Relationships among factor scores on these three dimensions with job satisfaction, job involvement, degree of customer contact, and degree of contact with other employees were investigated using multiple regressions and canonical correlation analysis. Employee attitudes toward the campaign were significantly related to all four of the job characteristic variables, as was perceived relevance of the campaign to the employee's job. Changes in job behavior were related only to involvement and satisfaction. The relationships found here suggest that in some cases, employee attitudes should be considered in evaluating the effects of advertising campaigns. Close coordination between marketing and general managerial functions is required in situations where advertisements relate to employees as well as customers.     

Retail employee guardianship behaviour: A phenomenological investigation

Supermarkets suffer significant losses as a consequence of shoplifting. Amongst the existing electronic and manual surveillance measures for retail crime management, the role of employees in preventing or controlling retail crime has not been systematically addressed within the extant literature. This paper contributes to addressing this gap by examining how employers’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) involvement influences employee proclivity towards guardianship behaviour in shoplifting prevention. A phenomenological approach is adopted comprising semi-structured interviews of twenty-nine shop-floor employees of two national supermarket chains within a cosmopolitan city of New Zealand. Findings strongly support the suggestion that employee perceptions of employer internal and external CSR may shape their feelings of organisational attachment, resulting in employee guardianship behaviour that manifests in in-store shoplifting prevention. Further, from a societal perspective, this study suggests that a reduction in retail crime contributes towards positive relationships among key stakeholders such as supermarkets, their employees, and society at large based on the social, environmental, and employee welfare practices of supermarkets.     

企业并购情境下群际冲突对员工信任的影响机制研究——一个有中介的调节模型

文章从社会分类视角分析了被并购企业员工对并购企业员工信任的形成机理,并基于问卷调查收集的数据进行实证检验。研究发现：（1）真实性冲突和象征性冲突感知会导致被并购企业员工对并购企业员工较低的内群体偏好;（2）真实性冲突和象征性冲突会通过内群体偏好的中介作用,降低被并购企业员工对并购企业员工的信任;（3）相对于象征性冲突,真实性冲突对被并购企业员工对并购企业员工信任的负面影响更大;（4）被并购企业员工对并购企业认同度越高,真实性冲突感知对被并购企业员工对并购企业员工内群体偏好的负面影响越小,且真实性冲突通过被并购企业员工对并购企业员工内群体的中介作用对并购企业员工信任的负面影响越弱。研究结果对于我国企业提升并购效率,促进被并购企业员工的信任与合作,具有很强的现实启示。