Job factors and work outcomes of public sector expatriates

While the literature on private sector expatriates is burgeoning, research on public sector expatriates is scant, despite their increasing numbers. This is unfortunate, as these two groups of expatriates may face different work conditions at their foreign assignment. The target group for this study was the US Department of Defense administrators located at US embassies around the world. Results showed that the time expatriates had spent in their current location had a positive association with both work adjustment and work effectiveness. So did role clarity, which also had a positive association with job satisfaction, making it a more important job factor than role conflict, role overload or role discretion. Although role clarity may have a similar impact on work outcomes of expatriates, both in the private and public sector, the findings regarding role conflict and role overload may constitute a discrepant outcome for the two groups. There may also be a difference between the two categories of expatriates with regard to role discretion. Implications of these findings are discussed in detail.     

工作投入与工作卷入和工作狂的区分

工作投入(work engagement)是组织心理学家在最近引入的一个新概念,新的概念在最初被介绍的时候,总是要避免与已经存在的概念相重复。工作倦怠(burnout)的研究已经有30多年的历史了,是当前人们争相研究的热点,它     

Improving the outcomes of youth with medical limitations: Evidence from the National Job Corps Study

Improving work outcomes for youth with disabilities and reducing their reliance on disability benefits are important policy priorities, but existing interventions have shown limited promise. We provide new evidence to inform this discussion by re-analyzing data from the 1990s National Job Corps Study, a randomized field experiment conducted nationwide in the United States. Job Corps, which provides comprehensive training to economically disadvantaged youth, is the nation's largest youth program outside of the school system. We examine youth who had medical limitations when they enrolled in the experiment, a group that has not previously been studied. During the 4 years after random assignment, participation in Job Corps increased the earnings of youth with medical limitations—substantially more so than for youth without medical limitations—and additionally reduced their receipt of disability cash benefits. Interventions designed specifically for such youth have not typically demonstrated reductions in benefit receipt. Hence, our re-analysis of the field experiment suggests that Job Corps could be a promising model for helping some youth with disabilities gain a foothold in the labor market and achieve greater self-sufficiency.     

工作要求和工作资源对工作投入的影响研究

本文在JD-R理论框架下,探讨工作要求、工作资源与工作投入之间的关系。通过对服装企业研发人员的问卷调查与统计分析,结果显示:服装企业研发人员的工作投入状况整体处于中等偏上水平;工作要求与工作投入呈弱负相关性,工作资源对工作投入具有较强的正相关性,并且工作资源的不同维度对工作投入有显著正向预测作用,显示了工作资源对提高工作投入的特殊作用。     

Job Loss and Entrepreneurship

We examine the impact of job loss on entrepreneurship behaviour. Our identification strategy relies on the use of mass layoffs caused by bankruptcies as indicators of exogenous displacement. Building on Norwegian register data, we find that working in a company which is going to close down due to bankruptcy in the near future raises the subsequent entrepreneur propensity by 155% for men and 180% for women, compared to working in a stable firm. These estimates are much larger than previously reported in the literature. Taking into account that many workers lose their jobs in the comparison group of stable firms also, we suggest that the full effects of displacement are even larger.     

Job satisfaction and quits

We test the wealth maximization theory of quitting behavior on the German Socioeconomic Panel (1985–2003). With the interpretation of job satisfaction as an expression of the experienced preference for the present job against available alternatives, the propensity to stay in the present job is simply related to the residual of a job satisfaction equation. We show that this residual is a better predictor of quits than the overall level of satisfaction. Furthermore, we validate a dynamic extension of the economic theory of quits for which uncertainty in the expectation of future events plays a decisive role.     

Job auctions and hold-ups

We consider a labor market with search frictions in which firms need to invest in capital before they can post a vacancy. This assumption creates a natural scope for hold-up problems, but the innovation of our study is that we allow for competition among the applicants who apply for the same job. In our economy all applicants are paid their actual marginal product. Nonetheless, with random search there exists a hold-up problem, leading to underinvestment in capital. On the contrary, if workers can direct their search towards firms with different capital levels, the equilibrium is efficient. This result contrasts sharply with the predictions of models with ex-post bargaining that never yield an efficient allocation. Moreover, our results extend the efficiency of auction mechanisms to an environment with non-contractible investments.     

Job Assignment and Promotion

The paper surveys theoretical models of job mobility with special attention to promotion and career profiles. The review is ordered according to the assumptions concerning information on workers' relevant characteristics (i.e. perfect vs. imperfect information, private vs. public information) and technology (i.e. single-job models vs. many-job models). JEL classification: D21, J31, L23     

工作设计革命:工作重塑的研究进展及展望

工作重塑完善了传统工作设计理论与操作流程,这一概念认为工作设计不应只是由组织管理者主导,不应只是采取自上而下式的设计模式.员工也应是工作设计的参与者,他们推动工作设计进行自下而上的变革,将自身兴趣、偏好和能力等与工作相结合,发掘工作意义、工作认同和幸福感.作者通过相关文献梳理,总结和评析了工作重塑的原理、驱动因素、影响机制及结果等,探讨了该领域的未来研究方向.研究认为,随着员工知识水平及自我意识觉醒,组织不仅要深入了解员工的工作重塑行为,更要积极推动工作设计革命,引导和支持员工进行工作重塑,以提高其工作积极性、主动性和创造力,提升组织竞争力.     

Gains and losses at core allocations

The search for a coalition which can possibly improve upon a given allocation and the redistribution of endowments within such a coalition are conducted through the use of prices. Prices permit the expression of how much every agent gains or loses in the allocation. With any feasible allocation one can associate a price system such that either the total loss of all losers does not exceed a certain bound independent of the number of agents or the losers can improve. The definition of gains and losses that we use implies that the total gain is also bounded in core allocations. Our theorem is closely related to that of Vind (1965).     

Job mobility and careers in firms

This paper presents a theoretical model that combines employers learning about worker productivity, human capital acquisition, job-assignment and resolution of worker uncertainty regarding disutility of work from a job, to show how widely documented findings on both wage and promotion dynamics and turnover can be captured in a single set-up. Specifically we show how our model can capture results such as; probability of turnover decreases with labor market experience, wage changes during job changes is more in earlier periods, serial correlation in wages and probability of promotion increases in wages, amongst others.     

Job quality in Europe

Promoting job quality and gender equality are objectives of the European Employment Strategy (EES) in spite of a downgrading of the attention given to both in the revised employment guidelines and the relaunch of the Lisbon Process. However, advances on both of these objectives may be important complements to the employment rate targets of the EES, as access to good quality jobs for both sexes is likely to help sustain higher employment rates. While the European Commission has a broad view of the concept of job quality in practice, it relies on a selection of labour market type indicators that say little about the quality of the actual jobs people do. Using data from the 2005 European Working Conditions survey, we analyse job quality along three dimensions: job content, autonomy and working conditions. We conclude that gender and occupational status, along with other job characteristics such as working time and sector, have more influence on an individual's job quality than the country or ‘national model’ they are situated in. Our results also demonstrate the value of developing indicators of job quality that are both gender sensitive and derived at the level of the job rather than the labour market in order to advance EU policy and academic debate on this topic.     

浅谈企业岗位轮换管理

人才流动犹如人体的新陈代谢、血液循环,有助于保持肌体的活力,有助于人才资源的优化配置。只有让人才流动起来,才能激活人才资源的一江春水。如何把人流动起来,把人作为一种活的资源加以利用与开发,真正调动员工工作的积极性与主动性,是现代人力资源管理的核心任务。本文介绍了保证企业“血液”良好循环的一种方式：岗位轮换。     

一句话纪念乔布斯

“在人生的头30年里,你养成习惯;在后30年,习惯塑造你。” “只有那些疯狂到以为自己能够改变世界的人,才能够真正改变世界。” “人们不知道想要什么,直到你把它摆在他们面前。” “如果你不忙着求生,你就在忙着求死。” “活着就要改变世界” ……     

Job satisfaction in teams

This paper analyses and discusses the results of a large sample survey of job satisfaction among clerical employees working in teams. The relative strengths of association between several variables and job satisfaction are assessed and the results support the importance of on-the-job training, participation in decision making and management leadership. Questions are raised about first-line supervisors as team leaders.     

On Work and Authority: Issues in Job Enlargement, Job Enrichment, Worker Participation and Shared Authority

Abstract . Continued debate over the nature of work is adding to an existing vast literature in labor economics, business and personnel administration, industrial sociology and social psychology. Both theory and experience indicate that the authoritarian workplace results in social costs through reduced labor productivity and increased worker dissatisfaction. But progress toward shared authority and worker participation in the administration of the production process promises to be slow. Management generally preserves a legitimized authority, defending it with the misplaced rationale of elitism, i.e., the presumed functional superiority of managers. Unions will not press for shared authority, for to do so would undermine their basic and formal function of organizational restraint of managerial authority. Thus, while management and union logically protect their traditional roles, the worker and society are denied the potential benefits of basic changes in work and authority.